Cannonblast.com

Just began updating the theme to something i’m creating… going to take a while and I’m far too tired to finish tonight.

If you, like me, are having problems with transparency in shaders rendering correctly in Maya2008, I have the solution for you.

Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences > Settings > Rendering > Mentalray Preferences > Use Maya-style alpha detection on file textures

What this does (From the Maya Manual):

If a file texture is mapped to the transparency attribute of a shader, and there is no alpha channel in the texture, then, if you render with mental ray, your final rendered image will contain no transparency. This behavior is unlike that of the Maya Software Renderer, which, when there is no alpha present, calculates the luminance in lieu of transparency. If you are using the mental ray for Maya renderer, and you would like to use luminance as your alpha channel, enable this option.

Dear (Presumably) 13 y.o. with too much time on his hands,

Video games and porn exist for a reason.

Sincerely,

Me

I’m going to be frank on this one.  Star Wars - Good Story - Good (well not horrible) Dialogue + New Annoying Character = Fail Cake dripping with Weak Sauce.

I had hopes for this movie, but frankly it fell well short of what I had hoped it would be.  If it were possible to remove the “witty” dialogue, the movie would have been a far better film.  Seriously…this movie failed on so many levels it was sad.

My biggest gripe is that this film simply felt like a story designed for a 30 minute TV slot which was then stretched out to 90 minutes.  I’m fairly certain it can work as a series, where the 22 minute time constraint keeps the storytelling concise, but this was just utter madness.  Were I not treated to a free showing (with the Director giving an interview before hand) at Siggraph, I would have felt as though I had wasted money.

On a side note, it’s pretty and the animation is amazing…just no story.

JetBlue Features was a really fun project to work on. I was the lead animator on the instructional video (above) as well as assisting on some of the 3d on the videos after the jump.

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