Archive for October, 2004

Well, if I don’t have enough to do, I do make sure I keep myself busy. Guess who forgot to go to sleep tonight and found himself still staring into the cosy glow of my computer screens at 8 a.m this morning. I’m probably one of those mutants that have forsaken the term sleeping.
Anyway, I got rid of my own hacked together blog scripts and replaced it with the robust Blogger engine. Well, my scripts did work quite well as a blog, but they never seemed to get finished, and I went back patching up stuff in them all the time when I discovered problems or bugs. What made the cup tip over was a few days ago when I noticed in my server logs that the MSN Search Robot had indexed a couple of 1000 pages from my site. Huhu. Several 1000 pages? Do I have that? Nah, but the robot had discovered a loop hole in my blog script and indexed about every date from 1997 up until 2025 or something like that. Where all pages reports “this date contains no entries.”. So that pushed me over the edge, and late yesterday evening I decided to start using my Blogger account instead. From the beginning I thought it would be quite a painless transition, but hey, you know how it is, nothing is painless!

The problems came when I was to tailor made the blog output to conform with the rest of the design of my site. So I spent the entire night learning about Strict XHTML coding, XML, RSS and Atom feeds and everything else related to the new web standards. Well, never hurt to know about it, so well, I guess it was well spent time in the end anyway. So sometime in the early morning hours I started to get happy and began transferring all my old data into the blogger database instead. And now it seems like everything finally works just fine.
The Blog is much prettier now, better organized, more functions and possibilities. And if you are using a modern web browser (ie, anything other than Microsoft’s aging Internet Explorer), you can add a live bookmark to this RSS feed presented at this page, to get the bookmark to update automagically when this blog is updated. Pretty nifty don’t you think?
I also programmed an ASP parser tonight for the Atom XML files, to feed the frontpage with blog entries as well, and it seems to work just fine as well. So the site might not visually have changed very much, but the backbone is so much better now. There is still some minor adjustments for me to do, but they are just cosmetically like font colors, positions and sizes. So I’ll finish that tonight.

I’ve pretty much fallen in love with all the functionality that Blogger offers and all customization it allows for. If you’re thinking of starting blogging, I definitely recommend to check it out.

That wraps up this post. Got a pretty productive night after all. And when I was messing with the site I also took the time to update some design flaws here and there in the coding, so now every single page should validate with 0 errors no matter if it’s a strict XHTML coded page or a loose HTML coded page through the World Wide Web Consortiums Validator, as well as their CSS validator. And that I’m pretty pleased with.

Oh and not to forget, tonight’s music choice;
Working Music: Anna Ternheim - Unreleased “Demo” Album
(Her wonderful music and voice helped me through the late hours)

Tags: Web Design

Okay, todays update. I’ve been refining lot’s of details with his body, and now I’m quite happy with it. Just have some things left to do on the head, before I add his clothes into the object and start the painting of skin and extra details onto him. Will get to that tomorrow probably.

Work in Progress Render

Wireframe of current Work in Progress

Working Music: Conan The Destroyer Soundtrack
(Hey, why not! hehe.. This is fantasy!)

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Creature, LightWave, Modeling, Work in Progress

CG Challenge XVI: Grand Space Opera

CG Networks just announced this competition, and of course I couldn’t resist, so I signed up for it.
Could turn out quite interesting. The deadline isn’t until January 15, 2005, so plenty of time. I’ll work with it now and then and post progress images as I make them.

Tags: 3D, CG, Challenge, Community

Okay, a quick update of the progress of the little Goblin character. I’ve got the body proportions and look pretty much as I want them now. Still quite some detailing to add to the body to get it more interesting (and clothing of course) before I start painting him.

This is what his body more or less will look like.

Working Music: Anna Ternheim - Somebody Outside (mmmmm)

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Creature, LightWave, Modeling, Work in Progress

Started on a new project tonight. Actually it turned out to be none of the ones I did have in mind earlier. As usual. ;) But the ones I had in mind is still around, and this one I think will be a pretty quick one.

Actually, this will be a piece called Loneliness. But that’s the second stage of this project. It can be a bit hard to imagine where I’m going with this one from this current shot.. but stay tuned and things will reveal themselves along the road. I’ll model, texture and finish this main character first. And then get into part two and model his surroundings and pose him with the appropriate extras and expressions for the piece I have in mind. Okay, let’s see if I have been able to guess the time I need for this one correctly and make this a quick one… or if it drags out.

First WIP of the Goblin Project

The first wire of our coming “hero”. I do have quite some fine tuning left, but I’m starting to get the overall shape into place.

Working Music: Marcel Donné - Sidologie

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Creature, LightWave, Modeling, Work in Progress

Alright, so what’s up? Well, the Julie character I’ve been working on is more or less done. It’s online anyway, even though the last image is missing. But it’ll come online soon.

I’ve started using both a print service and a mesh service, DeviantART and TurboSquid, and updated the site to take advantage of these new features. Not very much online yet, but the content in each store will grow constantly from this point forward.

I also added a relation feature to the Blog script, so work in progress images belonging to the same project easily can be tied together, with a WIP link from the final image. Might be of interest to some to be able to go back and check how the images I create progress forward.

New projects - Well, I’m torn between a couple of things right now, so I haven’t decided which one to give the highest priority yet. I’m wrapping up the last post production on Julie to make sure I get nice prints. But when that’s finished I’ll have made my decision. The next blog entry in a few days will probably be the first Work in Progress of my next project, so my decision will be made until then.

I noticed in my ISP’s logs that I have had almost 8.000 visitors on the site since I opened it up just a little bit more than a month and some weeks ago. Well, I’m happy for that but it gives me such pressure now to start filling up the portfolio and project pages with more interesting stuff. I’ll work on it, promise!

Tags: Plans, Web Design

Some of my recent work and many of my coming projects will be available as prints on glossy paper from DeviantArt in different sizes with or without a frame when ordering. I configured my account last night at DeviantArt so it’s functioning. Now I just have to fix a little bit with my files so they are activated for printing as well. I’ll go through the Deviant’s DPI and ICC guides and hopefully get the hang of it. I do wanna have my prints look the best.

Check out my DeviantArt hangout

I’m updating my website so it will link better directly into the appropriate DeviantArt sections.

Web Dev Working Music: Pulp - Different Class

Tags: Art, CG

Okay, this is the last Work in Progress I’m going to post of Julie. I’ve finished all poses I wanna do with her for different pictures. But went back to the mesh and sculpted in some final changes to her face. So next update will be the final series of a couple of images of her in different emotional poses. Stay tuned. Will update the website with those shortly.

Julie - Final Wires

Julie - Rendered Head shot

Working Music: The Ramones!!

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Female, LightWave, Modeling, Pin-up, Work in Progress

Well, the second Julie post in one day. Not bad… Julie got herself tattooed today. In Johan’s Tattoo Parlor. Well, actually she got a couple of them, but well, let’s just show off one, the rest will be apparent when the final series is available.

Julie - After a visit to my tattoo parlor

Working Music: Still Joakim Thåström

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Female, LightWave, Pin-up, Texturing, Work in Progress

Alright, today I’ll finish her! ;) Not much left to do now, and most important of all, I’ve come up with what I think is some intriguing ideas for some other image series, so I must end this one now before my inspiration for the other ones are gone.

Okay, since I last posted an update, I’ve done some work to her face. Worked with her hair, adjusted and sculpted around quite a bit with her eyes, nose, chin and mouth areas. Still some tweaks left, but it shouldn’t take that long, so I’m hoping to do the final shots in reasonable time.

Julie WIP -Side

Julie WIP - Front

Julie WIP - Back

Working Music:
Joakim Thåström - Det är ni som är de konstiga och jag som är normal
(Wonderful Swedish music!)

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Female, LightWave, Modeling, Pin-up, Work in Progress