Naval Dentistry

Decided it was time to see a dentist, since it had been, ummm, since I got out of the Navy. Haha, they said my mouth was in remarkable shape, scraped some stains away and sent me home without incident. It almost never works out that way, so I don't recommend delaying your appointments. I, like many people, dread the dentist. When I was seventeen, this old Navy dentist ripped the wisdom teeth out of my skull using just local anesthetic (Novocaine shots in the roof of my mouth). Anyway, I never forgot it.

Work Smart

I think this has to be the coolest Maya learning moment ever. I heard about Craft Director Tools for the first time at CTNX 2009, and I wanted to learn about it, but I got busy. The last few weeks, I've been working on an airplane stunt, and have had the opportunity to work with this plug-in, and it's incredible. This is the fastest way to produce physically correct vehicle animation- it's a combination of attribute settings and real-time input from a gamepad or joystick. It's like playing a video game, only more control, more cameras, everything. I rigged my cessna with the basic setup and flew it around Racetown freehand. Just using the basic controls, you can see real possibility here.

Plane Crazy

I don't do a lot of modeling, so when the budget couldn't pay for an airplane, I had to dig deep into my bag of tricks. This is a Cessna 180. The base mesh without the smooth is 1024 polygons. It's on smooth division 1 for this render. The texture is a headache- it's an mr layered shader with stuff on alpha channels and clamps on bump maps and all kinds of things. It's got a full interior with gauges. I rigged this model to fly in an aerial sequence. Specifically, I'm using Craft Animation Director Tools for Maya to animate this plane. I'm putting the rig on Creative Crash, the textures maybe not. Gotta work for something. It needs some UV/light linking modifications. The hard part is done; we'll see how it flies.