Well I’d like to wish a hapy new year to you all.  I’m sure many of you have had some well needed time off from work and took it easy over teh holidays. Alas I was busy and worked over xmas on a important model for a client.  So apart from the daytime on xmas day itself I worked completely though it.  It might sounds rather scrooge like, but sometimes you have to pull hours and working times that are beyond normal.

So after a couple of weeks of working on ‘non monsters’ I was itching to get back to a big scay monster for some personal time.  But you should know me well enough by now that I can’t go too long without a few monsters lol.  I just started this one tonight from an old base mesh I had lying around.  Its stil very much early days as a work in progress and I’m usure whether to keep these proportions or not at this stage.

I hope you all had a wonderful time over xmas and new yer, but I have to admit I find it god to get back to normal.

I’d like to wish all the readers of DashDotSlash a very merry xmas and hope you all have a fantastic new yer.

Wayne…

Part 6 - Hard Surface texturing  (41mins)

Here is it, the last part of Wave one of the Mudbox 2009: ‘Ftrom The Ground Up’ series that is a 41 min hard surface texturing video tutorial in Mudbox 2009.  Wave 2 should be starting in a day or three.   All hasn’t been sweetness and light in Wayne Towers though…

It’s been a helluva week and looks like someone has taken a very serious exception to the ‘Ground Up’ series and the QuickStart one.   In the last 2 week I’ve had 2 attacks with drive killer taking out over 4 terrabyte of drives (and turning them into paperweights…along with the last year of work) and tonight at 7.27pm GMT my paypal account hacked…. is that going to stop the series?  No chance ;)  I don’t give in to bullies.  So I’ve lost a year worth of models and contacts….but models I can easily make again..and contacts know me well enough to know where to find me.

What I’m most angry about was a model I was never going to share, that was a cartoon character in the Aardman animation style I did for my son.  The beauty of working as fast is that its  no biggy to redo stuff in a night or three.  But that model was special so I’m livid that my son was left disapointed.

If anything it just makes me even more detirmed to keep this running as long as I can… I’m notoriously pig headed and no way will I let something like this stop these videos from being released…   So its safe to say that I’m rattling more than  a few cages with people that would rather that these high resolution free tutorials weren’t out there or made available for free.  I vowed to keep this revolution roling as far as I could and I will, no matter what.  Plus contingency plans were made a while back.

Wayne…
PS in case anyone thinks I’m being an attention seeking loonatic I have proof of the above happening and have passed it on to Dave Cardwell at Autodesk in case anyone accuses me of being some idiot making it all up…I know I’d have trouble beliving it if I read someone posting this….

This started as a doodle that I ended up taking a bit further tonight.  Its a viewport render from Mudbox 2009 and is of a 300, thousand poly sculpt (just because you can use lots of polys, doesn’t nean you must!) Maps: 2k bump, diffuse and specular

Twitter Link

For those of you that use twitter, you can follow me using the link above.  Although god alone knows why you’d actually want to unless your really nodey or curious. lol

I’ve had a few days off as the flue I have has started to site a bit…..plus after recording wave 1 and most of wave 2 I needed a few days break so as to not burn out.

This is a screenshot I thought Id try and experiemnt on..so I took it into combustion (an app I’ve only ever used once before in my life) and did a bit of messing around purely by eye.  It shows that a simple real time render in Mudbox 2009 is truley a thing to scare the crap out of you. :)  I was thinking of taking this to a full render, but after seeing this (even at this unfinished stage) I’m thinking ‘do I actually need to?’  Judging by this I think I might be quite happy with mud screnshots stright into combustion with a little photoshop.

This is sort of a dry run of one of the main projects later in the ‘Mudbox 2009: From The Ground Up’ series. The model will of course be different…

We’ve now… at long last, finally got a logo for DashDotSlash.  Up till now, the logo I’ve used on this site was one that I came up with in a hurry in 5 mins a few years back that was only meant to ‘make do’.  But as ever it sort of hung around far longer than it was suposed to do.  So I asked a good friend of mine John McIntyre to come up with something, what you see at the top of every page is the result.  Its the start of a number of changes to the site’s layout and design I’ll be bringing in as I have time to do them.

Along with some code fixes for some very old CSS bugs I never got around to fixing, there will also be a cut down and more streamlined gallery page.  Its time for yet another overhaul of the site…I’m getting itchy feet again.

Sorry for lack of new models etc, but I’m rushed off my feet with a number of important and hush hush projects at the moment that alas as usual I can’t talk about…at least not just yet.  But soon I will be free to and I’ll be sure to outline what it is I’ve actually been up to the last few weeks.  I promise that it’ll be worth the wait.

Amazon link

754 pages

Release date: mid september

I’ve added a new page to the main part of the site giving some more info on my book ‘Essential ZBrush’.  I‘ll be updating this over the coming few days with some images from the book to give you all an idea how exactly how much

ground this book covers.

There’s some hard core knowledge and learning in this book, so if your looking for a ‘coffee table

book’ this isn’t for you.  But..if you want to REALLY learn ZBrush inside it and out,  then you’ll certainly want to read it and watch the accompanning 3 hour DVD.

A speed sculpt from earlier in the week

I did a quick bust earlier in the week, and while wiating for the oven to warm up and my pizza to do.  No more than 25 mins was spent on it at absolute tops and its not a ’serious piece’ more a doodle.

The latest video blog is also now up on youtube under my username ‘noggity’ as usual for those who follow them.

Part 1

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Part 2

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