Grass

Yeah, bitches, that's grass that I rendered! Okay, it's nothing to get so excited about, but normally I use Maya PaintFX for this kind of thing - however, the grass featured above uses Maya Fur and looks much better. It was rendered with minimal tweaking, and with default lighting so I'm pleased that it looks as good as it does since the opening shot of a short I want to produce features a fair amount of grass. So as I said before, "Yeah, bitches!"

Hearst Castle in 3D

I took a tour of Hearst Castle and made this stereoscopic photo. Something tells me he never had any trouble paying the bills. Double-click on the photo to get the full effect - and obviously, wear anaglyphic glasses.

Stereoscopic Photo

My computer is currently rendering a stereoscopic image sequence of the starship Enterprise - the latest trend in animated features. I began the batch render around 8AM this morning, and it's only a little past half-finished ONE CAMERA! Tomorrow is Camera 2. Then I also need to render the background twice. So hopefully I'll have something to post by Friday. In the meantime, above is a stereoscopic image I just made. You'll need anaglyphic glasses to see the 3D effect. It's an imperfect experiment, but its true value is what I'm learning from it. I'd like to try this with actual live action video. It's entirely doable - just requires a bit of planning. There are choices to make - but each choice comes with its own set of somewhat unbreakable rules. With parallel cameras (just one of several options) there is a point where objects too close to the foreground become unfusable. I love this shit.