Rabbit and Cat

This afternoon, I came across this pair in a nearby park/reserve...

It was surprising to see such a large rabbit just hopping around in the middle of nowhere with that cat close by its side. At the time, it looked like they were quite comfortable in the presence of each other, so I can only guess that they are someone's pets. That said, the cat, despite its fluffy tail, looks a bit evil...

Siggraph Report/Link - Pixar's Sketch/Silhouette Posing Tools

Some of the first reports are already coming out about the hot new stuff being presented at Siggraph this year. Perhaps of most interest to me personally has got to be the stuff discussed in this FxGuide article though, about the Dreamworks facial rigs and the new tools that Pixar has got in their in-house "Presto" software!

In particular, the most exciting parts of this are the sketch-based and silhouette based posing tools in Pixar's Presto. What probably isn't widely known (but which I have dropped hints about here and there) is that these are exactly the tools that I've been working on for Blender over the past few years. (Truth be told, if I didn't have to do anything else, right now, they'd be what I'd be spending most of my time working on). My first attempt at this was 3 years ago back in 2012 with the Pose Sculpting tools (experience gained from that work is now powering the new GPencil Sculpting tools). More recently, I've been looking into some more powerful/useful "line of action" sketching tools (though this is all still relatively early-stage work, so there's not much to see just yet).

Birthday Silvereyes

I've been having a great time over the past few days (snow + great food + fun coding!), despite a few minor hiccups (an early morning start to tutor 2 labs yesterday, and a burst tire the day before). However, what really made my day yesterday was when the lovely silvereyes treated me to a special display of fluff-ball cuteness.

Cosmos Laundromat - Episode 1 Online

Congratulations and thanks to the Gooseberry team for the belated (due to timezones) birthday gift this year :)

Snow!

Woohooo! Tonight we've got snow for the first time in years! :D

Yay! Yay! Yay!  This epic weekend is already off to a freakin' awesome start! :D

Fun with new tablet - Intuos 5 Pro (M)

As of this weekend, I now have a nice tablet (working pen pressure and a sane aspect-ratio mapping at last!) to start playing around with :D

I've been having a bit of fun this evening playing around with it, getting a feel for how the pen responds, and starting to see what those buttons (yay! more physical buttons to play with) can be used for. So far so good! It works really nicely out of the box (well, after I remapped MMB to get fired instead of doubleclick).