The Weather is Grrrreat!

By the way, it's really nice outside right now. The sun is shining, and the temperature is above 80 F. Apparently, summer is finally on it's way...after a miserably cold and rainy Victoria Day weekend.

Quit Smoking!

Haha, this guy loves his cigars... until something mysterious appears on his forehead. Righto! As this drawing shows, I'm still working on my character sketches. This particular pose was inspired by a character sketch I saw from Disney's upcoming CG movie, Meet the Robinsons.

On The Subject of Spaceships

This is with a special-effects glow.


Here's an early render of the ship's rocket pack...

I Still Want To Make A Science Fiction Film

Yep, here's another version of my space scene. This is done in Maya (of course!). I keep redoing this basic scene (where a spaceship flies into view, and then into the distance). Eventually, I hope all these fragments will be put together into a movie of sorts. This is the most recent clip - it has a few newly designed spacestations and the new spaceship.

Virtual Lego Man

I built a quick model of my younger brother's lego robot. In the animation the bot unfolds and rises from a stationary position, then runs across the floor (kicking a few lego bricks in the process). I animated the first brick being kicked and used Maya's built-in dynamics to have the other bricks react with the first.

Reduced Render Times!!!!

OK...I was able to get a new Maya license on my new computer. I ran a test render from an identical frame on both my computers(new and old). The frame that took 143secs to render on my old system was done in 47secs on my new system. WOW! One-third of the time...I like this!

First Look

Well, there are the first photos...it's a pain to upload stuff right now, simply because the internet is so slow...I mean slow...really slow. Almost at a stop.

Oh well, the computer is fast anyway! Yeehah! I overclocked the processor, the AMD X2 4800+, up from it's stock speed of 2.4Ghz to 2.6Ghz. I actually got it up to 2.7Ghz, but I backed it down to give it a little temperature headroom. The nVidia 7800GTX videocard is also overclocked - 500Mhz core/1260Mhz memory versus the original 450Mhz core/1200 Mhz memory speeds.

A close up of the interior. You can see the LED activity indicators on the RAM...:) The CPU cooling fan and heatsink (Arctic Cooling 64 Pro) take up a lot of space. Actually, it barely fit over the first RAM stick - I had to cut out the bottom piece of the fan guard. The rear case fan is illuminated by blue LED lights

*Update: Sorry this looks a little too dark...I was trying to pick up the LEDs. Anyway, I'll get a better pic later on.*

Here's a photo of my new computer. This is the Thermaltake Tsunami case, with dual 120mm fans and a single 90mm fan on the side panel.