TWIT

On Friday the 17th, along with the rest of the Scene Capture team from the Pixel Corps, I took part in shooting the weekly podcast "This Week In Tech", a.k.a. TWIT. It was a lot of fun to dust off some of the old production skills and help with the setup and lighting. If anyone out there is curious, the podcast (episode 42: Dvorak's Lost It) is available for free via the TWIT website, and the iTunes music store as well. At present the version available is the audio-only version, but very soon, the video version will be posted.

Vegas

Last week I went on a short business trip to Vegas. I haven't been to Vegas in about seven years, and I had almost forgotten what a bizarre slice of reality it is. My trip was all business, with the exception of the "play" below - a partial panorama from the roof of the Hard Rock Hotel's parking garage (thumbnail of full pano above, detail below). The funny thing is that the job I was on involved taking pictures all day and a good number of night hours for two days - you would think that I might do something else for fun. Ok, ok, I did spend $1.75 on the slots.

Architectural Revival

As an experiment, I decided to revive some old work that I did in Lightwave (circa 1999) and rebuild / relight it in Maya. The added twist was that I was going to render it in passes and composite it in Shake. The lighting is accomplished via a a single HDR image that I generated, paired with a directional light to boost the sun portion of the HDR. Missing from this image are all of the pictures that I had hanging on the walls in the original model - possibly I will add them back in, along with another light source and a character to bring more interest to the image.