Finally got time to post some more

Yay! The quarter ended! These are from a few weeks ago. But I promise more recent stuff is coming soon.

Bohemian Bullshit

"You gotta learn to bullshit; Talk like a bohemian." he said.

The more I read, the more I am convinced I have no talent whatsoever with words, sentences and narratives. So I cannot, try as I might, make this any more interesting as it already is. Let me just give you some background.

The 'wise guy' who proclaimed the above is in my Survey of western art 2 class. We finally got our grades today. I always just thought to myself in that class, "I don't see it", "I don't get it" or sometimes even I don't agree. I constantly tried to analyze everything we read, watched and heard. Which would lead to me being overwhelmed by just how complex it all is. So much more involved than just memorizing dates and names like we did in survey 1. Thus, my final grade came as a complete surprise to me.

Walking out of the classroom, I casually asked him how he did in the class, and then remarked with a "good job!" when he started:

"Well, I was getting a C in this class, and I was scared I might go down to a D."
"oh..."
"But you know, you just gotta know how to bullshit. Learn to talk like a bohemian." he said while making grand gesture with his arm...
"uh... sure..."
I had, at that point, stopped paying attention.

Ever since 10th grade board exams, we have been told stuff like "Just make it look like you wrote a lot, nobody reads those essays anyways." or "Just throw big words in there". There were also tales of those who wrote plots of movies in their math papers and still passed. (I personally cannot verify that last one was true.) However, I considered that very unfair and never ever attempted such a thing. That is why finding a place where teachers actually take the time to read and remark on your college level papers with all their incoherence and grammatical errors was a reason for much joy.

I don't think I would have scored 100% on this class by bullshitting on the papers. I think it was my critical thinking and judging and analyzing that got me this mark. I am extremely happy about this.

I wish I could have been a little bit of a jerk that one time and told it to him to his face. Oh well, that's what I get for being a nice guy.

long overdue

More gestures from class

These are done on 24x36 newsprint pads.

Character design from life drawing

The right mouse button

I have been enjoying my maya project more than I thought I would. The credit for that goes to my friend Ali who helped me out tremendously over the last two weeks to teach me some really amazing techniques and to walk me through the process. He offered to come sit with me at Montgomery late at night and show me his way of doing things. I was thoroughly impressed by his speed and thus proclaimed him the God of Maya. His secret? knowing all the keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures and combination of both.

I was surprised that I couldn't find many resources on the internet that listed these hidden shortcuts in Maya. So I thought I would take it upon myself to write about it, to help out other newbies and intermediate users of Maya. Now I use 2010 but these should work in atleast a couple versions going back.(*unverified)

Almost everyone knows holding down the right mouse button over an object in maya will give you the mini menu to go to object mode, planes, vertices, edges(for polygons) and so on and so forth. But what really makes this shine is that Maya is trained to understand gestures. For polygons, pressing the right mouse button and dragging the mouse upwards and releasing will immediately go to edge mode. Cuts down the time it takes to press right mouse button, wait for menu, then mouse over edge and release. Memorize that down is face, left is vertices.

Now lets take the RMB a step further. Shift+RMB will give you a context sensitive mini menu that will give you access to various modeling tools with much less effort than the spacebar hotbox or the toolbox or shelf. Again, these are gesture enabled. So shift+RMB+down gesture will give you extrude edge or face.

There is another context sensitive mini menu that pops up with ctrl+RMB. hold down control and right mouse button gives you options like converting selection to faces, edges or vertices for polygons. Try this out to discover all that this has to offer.

Finally, lets again go back to something that is probably the first thing everyone learns when they are taught Maya. The hotbox, which I mentioned earlier is accessed by pressing and holding the spacebar. But what most people do not know is that there are more right mouse button options available when the hotbox is on screen. Press RMB on the "maya" (center of the hotbox) and you get options to go to the different views available. Perspective, top, front, side. Again gesture enabled like you'd probably expect by now. So go ahead, amaze everyone with these new tricks up your sleeve.

QEP event gestures