Lunch is served

Tinkering away on things in the background.

I'm coming to grips and with much more limited free time than I used to in my substitute teaching days. I miss that job for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one was the ability to leave school at the end of the day and not worry about anything till the next bell rang. I'm certain there'll be things I find equally rewarding in normal teaching. Time to focus on art is not one of them.

Still I'm coping, and getting in work where I can.

The last few nights I've been working on something for my feathered Dinosaurs to munch on.


Enter the partially eaten remains of my Styracosaurus. It's by no means finished, but I think it is off to a promising start.

Quick test with it in the possible environment. I have plans for this scene. Oh I have plans ;)

Posing for Recovery

Rigged and posed the Styracosaurus. Hadn't recieved Albertonychus' feedback on the toe claws (get on that shortly my friend :P), but otherwise I'm actually feeling pretty good about this.

Redirecting Efforts

Spent this afternoon trying to get over my art related funk by plowing through a project.

I ended up settling on the half finished Styracosaurus.

Thoughts or feedback?

The Works

While I may not seem the huge sports fan (and overall I'm not), certain competitions can really reel me in. Among those are the Olympics and the NHL playoffs. This year the Stanley Cup tournament is turning into quite nail biter as my current favourite the Vancouver Cauncks battle their way to close victories.

While watching the game I'm trying to multi task on 3D stuff. I'm having limited success. This is both in terms of my work level, and the product I'm producing.

My biggest frustration is the Parasaurolophus. While I'm happy with is proportions and build (really a carry over of the Corythosaur... though Parasaurolophus surprisingly has a WAY longer neck than other Lambeosaurines when I started looking at references...) the colouration of this beast is driving me up the wall.

In fact trying to get "realistic" looking shaders and colour schemes as a whole is starting to try my patience. While I'm sampling my colour palette from photographs of various natural things I have in my library (man I love being a shutter bug), getting them into agreeable patterns is not happening for me so far. The Corythosaur organically fell into place, where everything else (probably because I'm thinking about it too much) is just not happening.


To shake things up, I swapped over to fixing my Ceratopsians again, starting with Styracosaurus. Using references from Ryan's reclassification of Styraco I'm quite happy with the results.

I have to say I'm quite surprised with how flat Centrosaurine frills are compared to how curled most people tend to draw them. I might have to do a quite AE post about this...

So overall this guy is getting to be in prime shape for Mark 7 conversion (once the puter store gets in my RAM upgrade).

Again look how flat that frill is. I've had a certified Ceratopsian expert (doing his PHD on them) check it, and he agrees with it. So cool.

I think I'm off to a strong start with this Gorgosaurus shader, but it is not finished. There is debate about the brown bands along the back.

Any thoughts on any or all of these.