I've been playing around with Zbrush a lot lately. It's not a 3D modeling program; it's really a surface-sculpting program. It's great for making normal maps or displacement maps for 3D models. But, sometimes, it's fun just to do a sculpt straight in Zbrush. I find it much more intuitive than most 3D modeling programs. This started as a plain ( Read more... )

Those of you in the DC/MD/VA area, we've got a tour alert:

Jonathan Coulton, Contributing Troubador of Popular Science magazine, and creator of such fine tunes as "Code Monkey," "Skullcrusher Mountain," "RE: Your Brains," and "Spooky Doll" will be playing at the Ram's Head on Sept 29.

It's always gratifying when a designer who is demoing one of your in-house design tools refers to one of the features as "the coolest thing I've ever seen." It's even more gratifying when the entire company goes "Woooo," when they see it. Really, it wasn't that cool. They just aren't used to people putting nice usability features into internal ( Read more... )

I stumbled on something rather odd, today:

http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/siggraph/eoh_projects/eoh2002.html

Why is the display on hard drive defragmentation programs so utterly mesmerizing?

( Read more... )

If you would like me to read your ads ( Read more... )

You can find the goods, here: http://www.aclfest.com/lineup.aspx (pardon the Flash)

There's a little something for everyone, here. snidegrrl may note that Crowded House is on the lineup. After the stellar appearance of the Flaming Lips last year, poor curious_jp once again has to suffer through ( Read more... )

So, the good news is, my bass teacher is rolling with his band, and will be doing an east coast tour! The bad news is, the nearest he's playing to the DC/Balto folks is... Cumberland, MD. I told him if he ever gets any DC/Balto area shows, I'll be happy to rally the troops for him, but Cumberland... is a bit far. In any event, in case you happen ( Read more... )

They say that famous people die in threes... but I sure wasn't expecting Don Ho to share Kurt Vonnegut's escape pod.