More texture work. More zbrush loving. More cowbell. More tiredness.

Using GoZ I dumped old bod here into c4d to do a quick test render of the material i’ve been painting and he’s coming along nicely.

The specular is far too high but then I should probably do a map for that as well. I think a tiny bit more work on the skin then onto the rest of the body.

I’m getting in the mood for the summer ‘super-family-special-holiday-funtime’ by clearing out some of my harddrive and playing with unfinished projects, so here is a little update of frogbear with a touch of colour. This is the start of a base coat for the skin and I have no idea what I am aiming for but its pretty fun to play with brushes paint tools, even if the damn thing keeps crashing… I’m not sure about the green at the moment and may go for a more browny tone but the sickly green does have a nice unearthly feel.

I’ve been using Yoxview as a gallery plugin tool on my site for a few months now and following on from @singlecelldsgn buggering around with wordpress I figured I would follow his lead (blatantly rip off in other words) and try embedding Yoxview into wordpress. This may also help @PBux who looked at yoxview but wasn’t sure what was going on.

The result is: http://www.kirkd.co.uk/blog/index.php/yoxtest/ which is nothing more than a test to show two galleries in one page meaning multiple galleries can be used across one site easily.

There is a plugin but where is the fun in that eh? So will all due respect to @singlecelldsgn for inspiring me I give the following.

The following scripts are placed into the header or the footer:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.kirkd.co.uk/yoxview/yoxview-init.js”></script>

This calls the yoxview plugin and also fires up the js library at googleapis without needing to add that as another line of script. I’ve hardcoded the js for now as I wanted to make sure it worked properly plus its the same one as my main site. This line of code may change in the future.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function(){
$(“#yoxview_picasa”).yoxview({
dataUrl: ‘http://picasaweb.google.com/dr.monkeyface/2DWork?thumbsize=104′
});
});
</script>

Now we pick the gallery to draw the images from. In this case its my 2d folder and the name of the div is going to be the default ‘yoxview_picasa’

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function(){
$(“#yoxview_colour”).yoxview({
dataUrl: ‘http://picasaweb.google.com/dr.monkeyface/ColourTent?thumbsize=104′
});
});
</script>

NEXT! Now I pick a different folder on picasa which is the slightly funky colourdome. I also changed the div it will be placed into and its now ‘yoxview_colour’ pretty logical so far.

In the page I want the gallerys to display I just drop the required div

<div id=”yoxview_picasa”></div>

or

<div id=”yoxview_colour”></div>

What this allows me to do (as previously mentioned) is setup multiple pages all running a different yoxview gallery on each page without having to maintain the thumbnails or worry about plugins.

Job done.

I’ve just spend the last couple of hours tweaking the main HTML of kirkd.co.uk from its old code to some new code. Not massive changes over all but I’m improved the templates and some of the text placement. This was phase one and phase two will be changing some of the content.

Any bugs or glaring errors that either of you spot will be greatly appreciated.

Things to get done:
Get URL rewrite installed on my windows server so I can get shot of that bloody index.php from the url but i need to fork out cash to have that done. >tight wad<
Improve my 404 page
update the links page
do some more tutorials

This is driving me mad. Ever since going in the colour dome the other day, I’ve been plagued with vague memories of a film I saw when I was younger. It was probably one of those late night jobs that Channel4 was showing as part of a sci fi festival and for the life of me I can’t find anything about it online. So here goes…

From what I remember it was probably made between the late 50′s and early 70′s, was American and I can’t think of anyone really famous in it (or I would have googled them). It was set in the future and there was some kind of war on between the West and East, I don’t remember if specific countries got named. The main star was a shortish balding fella with a nasally voice who played some kind of scientist/doctor and was incharge of debriefing a pilot (or some kind of military officer) who had escaped from the other side. The military was trying to find out if he was a traitor or not as (and this is one thing I am really clear about) if captured, all military personnel are conditioned to have their minds wiped when tortured rather than give up any secrets. They couldn’t figure out if he was reprogrammed to be a saboteur or if he had genuinely escaped. About half way in the doctor chap (I’ve seen the actor before in something but don’t know where) gets accused of being a traitor but basically tells the accusers they are being stupid (possibly a bit harsher than that but you get the drift) and the twist was that the pilot guy had agreed to become a spy/traitor/saboteur/renegade/whatever rather than be tortured, lose his mind and essentially stop being who he is. Yup, this was one of those pseudo cold war type films with sci-fi thrown in that dealt with identity and ideas of self so it was along the lines of ‘Who?’ ( and its obviously not ‘Who?’ as I can remember that film/book) and ‘invasion of the body snatchers’

I think it was all filmed in enclosed sets and can’t remember any being set outside, this is why I remembered this as I think the backgrounds to the enclosed sets all had coloured lights on them. I also have a vague memory that the film was based on one of several books set in this future war scenario. I’ve searched the web trying to find anything about it but I’ve failed to find anything except loads of references to dollhouse (mindwiping… pshaaaaw) so thought i would try a reverse lookup as it were.

If you are reading and don’t know the answer, please retweet it out there and help me restore some kind of sanity to my poor old noggin.

Any questions or answers then please post them below and show off your wise memory. Plus I will award the first person who comes up with the correct answer with a copy of ‘the art of 3d comupter animation and effects’ 3rd edition.