renaissance poisson

i know the *poing* will want to see this, so everyone else has to put up with it. :)

i've been busy learning how to model cloth in maya. here are the first two pieces. the model zirself isn't mine; zie's on loan from alias -- i call zir loreZ. very patient, though the expression probably indicates just what zie thought of standing there all night, having me fiddle with zir clothes. the shirt and the pants are made from scratch. they're draping pretty well for the most part, though the pants need more work; if one watches closely one can see a couple of poke-throughs in the tiny animation (click on 4th thumbnail). they're sadly obvious in the original. :)

i really like the way maya handles cloth; the workflow comes pretty naturally to me -- it's much more akin to tailoring than frex box modelling. one lays out a few curves in a plane to roughly circumscribe the pieces of the garment, then connects those curves into panels (which ends up looking like a boxy sewing pattern), and seams the panels together into a garment. all the really hard work is done by the cloth solver.

first shirt	first pants	loreZ modelling	sashaying outta here

and now to bed. late night, but i learned a lot.

self-portraitist and photographer asya schween. her deviantart gallery. a fascinating interview (not the questions, but oh, the answers!) and more pictures in forum threads at dpreview.

warning: strong content; some of the images are safe only for people who're not easily shocked.

not a political post. :)

i simply must spread this link to coffins made in africa. indigenous people in ghana, carpenters of the ga from around accra make these treasures. the ga believe that your coffin should represent how you earned your living -- since the ga were fishers, there are lots of sea creature coffins. a chief might once have been buried in a lion coffin, but today it's more likely going to be a mercedes one.

they have caught on to becoming famous, so now they're experimenting with making smaller models as chests.

via firecat.

in honour of the paramour's return, i made a collage.

( ~90k picture )

italian blog (in english) art for housewives. awesome. i've syndicated it as art4housewives.

via crystlyte.

maybe i am easily amused today, but this has me in stitches:

The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent; and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy.

The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput.

( cut for ~250k images )

handpainted mice, keyboards, etc from russia.

i heart anyone who can make those soulless pieces of beige plastic into small pieces of art.

via telophase.

post secret, a collection of anonymous postcards, to which one can contribute if so moved. (warning: very graphics-intensive.)

via kaet.