pasithea

I've been operating in a low production but high efficiency mode lately. Yay!

I bought a student license of Maya for MacOSX and it's on its way to me inna mail along with a lotta freebies and goodies to go with it. (Maya backpack, tee-shirt, and an additional book on using Maya, which happens to be the one that will be used to teach my class this fall) So that's very exciting.

I also talked to the people at Maxon about student pricing. It would run me about $300 for cinema 4D plus another $400 for Shave and Haircut (which is a 3rd party product distrubuted by them and does not have a student price) Ooof. What's worse is I'm actually thinking about it. The sales person was really nice. No hard sell or anything. She put some free demos in the mail for me.

Its also pretty tempting because I plan to have my computer at FC and available for use for FCTV and probably also for the animation panel since I have a frame grabber, all the Adobe stuff and Maya and a tablet and a gig of ram and a huge harddrive, it's a perfect machine to use for the presentation. Especially if I can save up for a LCD display by then. (Yay overtime pay!)

To the best of my research, it looks like new versions of Illustrator and Photoshop will be out in mid October so I'm going to wait until then to purchase my updated dynamic media collection for Mac. Looking forward to that one tho. Native OSX mode is lots faster than OS9 mode.

Last bit of money crazed geekery, I'd like to say I TOTALLY LOVE my new Wacom tablet. It's so much more response than my old one or the graphires. It really keeps up with the way I work. The old one was good but there were times it couldn't keep up with the speed of my strokes (I draw really fast) Also, the old one was too big for me. This one is just the perfect size so it fits really well. So worth it! I've been working like mad in Illustrator, Flash, and Photoshop with it. I especially like its sensativity to tilt in the pen. My computer strokes are coming out much more like my actual strokes now.

Besides the mad purchasing craze, I've been on a kick of varied study which is kinda nice.

Every day at lunch I'm studying classic anatomy with a 6B pencil and Burne Hoggarth's books. Every evening before bed I read a chapter or two of Illustrator books. The later (In addition to probing Peganthyrus and Spark for information) has been giving me a LOT of new data and generating a lot of new ideas. I have been using like maybe 10% of Illustrator's full potential.
I'm still experimenting with blend objects and gradient meshes but some time soon I hope to apply what I've learned and actually make something with it.

Not tonight though. Tonight I'm working on a felt puppet for the YARF! commercial. Hee. Ya'know? Who says being hyperactive is bad? If you just learn to timeslice properly its a benefit, not a handicap.