Catskill Hiking Trip


This past weekend saw a welcome escape from work, stress, and cell phone service with a trip to the Catskills with my girlfriend and two other friends. It really is a gorgeous area up there and anyone who hasn't been there should at least just take a drive through.

We left Friday and returned Sunday evening, so it wasn't a long time, but well worth it. I feel much more relaxed at work today than previously. It's amazing what a few days away from everything will do!

Saturday we spent hiking Hunter mountain along part of the toughest part of Devil's Path. This picture below is a sample of a typical section of trail.


It was pretty tough, but all four of us made it through without any major incidents. The view from the summit was unfortunately a bit cloudy/stormy, but was still quite a site.

The following day we took it easy and did a quick mile hike to Kaaterskill Falls which was spectacular as well. This is the highest waterfall in the state and offers the unique ability to walk directly underneath the top section of falls.


With all this activity there was no Blendering this weekend, but I'll see if I can't remedy that tonight!

3:25 PM | Labels: | 0 Comments  

HAIR!!

Captain Blender received a little hair last night!


He is going with the messy hair look right now, but surprisingly it's so easy to change! The Intro to Character Animation book takes you through mapping the hair particles to a bezier curve, which I tried, but came out horribly. After fooling around a bit I went through a quick 2.46 hair tutorial and viola.


I never used the particle system in the older versions of Blender, but apparently most of these features are new to 2.46. You can basically style his hair as if you were a hair dresser by combing, cutting, and much more. I went with the messy hair look because that's what I typically wear:


The next step is working on the armature for him. I'll probably get to some tonight, but I'm away for the next 4 or 5 days to NC for business/pleasure, so won't get to too much. Will update soon!

9:43 AM | Labels: | 0 Comments  

GIMP Watermark Script

I'm just getting back into the swing of things after a few week business trip to the UK. Captain Blender is coming along nicely and I should be adding the materials, textures, and hair in the next few days. I cheated a little bit with the modelling and skipped ahead by grabbing the files off of the DVD accompanying the book, but I don't feel too bad about it. I did originally get the book to do some animation and all I've done so far is model! I'm excited about the next rigging part though. I should also be able to do some work with the new 2.46 Blender version with his hair. We'll see how everything turns out, but will update soon!


In the meantime, in checking gimpology.com, which I do rather regularly, I ran across a nice GIMP script by Wesley Tanaka, which adds a nice little watermark to an image. It's fairly easy to understand what is going on in the script if you download a copy and open it up in a text editor. The great thing about this is that instead of just adding text in a new layer, you can specify a file to load into the image in a new layer. I modified it a bit to add the new layer in overlay mode and took out the opacity settings, along with a couple of other things, but it's basically the same thing that you can get on his site.
For a little example, here is a quick snapshot of stonehenge that I took while I was over in the UK. It was pouring down rain that day (and almost everyday over there!), so the pic isn't the greatest, but notice the little "TBB" in the bottom right corner.

11:33 AM | Labels: | 0 Comments  

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