A Trip To Florida

So Today I've been having a mixture of feelings ranging from sadness to happiness to anxiety. These emotions stem from the fact that I am leaving to visit my grandparents in Florida on Saturday. I'm very excited to see them and see Florida again but I am also terribly sad to be leaving my girlfriend, Val. People always think that it's funny whenever I say that I'm sad to be leaving her, even for a couple of hours. The thing that people don't understand is that we were always in love with eachother throughout our middle and highschool days. We kept having missed connections and, although we were really in love, never had the opportunity to get together. We saw eachother during our worst and told each other everything and were very close before we even got together. So, essentially I feel as if I am leaving a huge piece of myself behind when I leave her.
As far as my grandparents are concerned I haven't seen them in years and I used to spend every summer at their condo in Florida. I've always loved going onto the beach and building sand castles.... and then, of course, crushing them. My grandparents are the sweetest people I've ever met and I really can't wait to see them again. They are both becoming quite old and I fear that this could be one of the last times that I see them and that I will regret it if I don't go. It will be nice to see and hear the waves crash on the beach, collect shells, and just relax with them.

I'll be sure to put some videos and pictures up of my trip when I get back.

A proffesional CGI job..... kinda

I have a friend of mine who works for UNM and has been making videos on youtube that are sort of like little news stories. He wanted a new intro in 3d because he thought his was a little lacking. I've been putting it off but I finally did the first one today in my free time.

AVATAR!!!!.... The Last Airbender

Ok so many people have heard of Avatar, obviously. It's now the highest grossing film of all time, making well over 2 billion dollars. The previous record holder was James Cameron's last hit, Titanic, which made quite a bit of money as well. Anyways, this isn't what I'm talking about. The Avatar I'm talking about is the hit Nickelodeon TV show about a child "airbender" who must save the world. That's a little bit of a simplistic description but the story is incredibly complex and way too hard to describe. The TV show itself was incredibly popular and for the series finale the show had 5.6 million viewers, which is quite a bit for a cable tv show. Anyways, to get back on track, this show is going to be made into a huge movie with special effects done by Industrial Lights and Magic. These are the people that did just about every huge movie's special effects..... ever. If you look them up you'll see what I mean. Well, seeing as I'm a HUGE Avatar: The Last Airbender fan, this is pretty big news. Here's a link to the previews if you want to check it out.

http://www.thelastairbendermovie.com/

My First Video :D

I created a walk cycle for my eyeball guy. So I thought I'd post it on here just for people to see.

This is just a simple walk cycle, which means that you can animate a small portion of the clip and cycle it over and over forever. For anyone out there who wants to make sure that this happens, the start frame and end frame of your animation need to be exactly the same. That's pretty much the way to do it. Since I have this guy all rigged up like a puppet I can animate him any way I want now. I'll make another little animation. Something fun that's actually a video.

Yeah. Not so much...

So I'm just gonna post on life I guess. I've COMPLETELY lost interest in making a blog on just CGI so yeah. Life is going well. I've been doing computer animation in my free time and waiting for my love to come home from work. I'm going to move to Hungary in the summer for an English teaching program. I've been learning Hungarian and that's been pretty interesting. I guess it's one of the hardest languages to learn for English speakers. How exciting!!! Val, my girlfriend, has been working at a flower shop which is a little horrible. I miss her a lot during the day. It sounds kind of ridiculous to other people but it's pretty hard when we used to be together for most of the day. Life seems kind of in a slump right now. I have almost all of the money I need to get to Hungary and have just been sitting around trying to find ways to keep myself occupied.
I did have a doctor's appointment today and that went really well. No health problems, except cholestoral, which is weird since I'm not overweight at all. My doctor said it's probably because I'm not very physically active.

This is not such a great blog....

Alright. I'm probably the only one ever reading this but hopefully that will change when I actually start posting stuff. I've been doing a lot of CGI lately and for anyone reading this and you want to get a free version of Maya you can go to the student community on the Maya website and sign up and get a 6 month student version of the program. students.autodesk.com

I downloaded a program called mudbox as well which allows you to model your creations in a much more detailed manner! After learning Maya it's incredibly similar and very easy to use.

This is something I made using a combo of both programs