Modeling and Texturing Pixar's Wall-E in Maya

A freelance animation project I am working on calls for a cameo from Pixar's Wall-E robot from the 2008 Pixar film. Here is the basic model, textured and rendered. Please read more about this project, including modeling, texturing, and rendering Wall-E in Maya.

If You Gotta Go, Go With A Smile

A Message From The Forest

Along the Rocky Mountains, from Canada into Colorado, lodgepole trees are dying by the thousands. Entire forests are being attacked by beetles and the trees, in a weakened state by a decades long drought, are unable to defend themselves by natural methods. More dead trees produce more beetle larvae, and warmer, drier winters don't produce cold snaps sufficient to kill off the beetles. It takes two to three summers for the tree to die, after which the forest is simply biding time until a fire destroys historical structures, cabins and homes, and trees alike. This, unfortunately, is Your Fault.

Somehow, You thought that it would be a good idea to invest in ATVs and snowmobiles, and You taught your children how to start a two stroke engine before they could walk. By insisting that the only means to explore the world is via a powered, personal vehicle, You have created a misinterpretation of outdoor recreation: motor boat bait fishing rather than backwater fly fishing, unlicensed offroading rather than hiking and exploring, and Your original sin, parking Your motor home and associated motor scooters, generators, and trucks in a once empty meadow campground like so many beetle grubs in the forest. You have warmed, and consumed, Your planet.

This particular species of beetle (Mountain Pine Beetle) only attacks lodgepole pines, and their deaths make other trees in the forest nervous - like shopping in a marketplace in Sadr City. Here, then, is a worried message from a couple Aspen trees. Try and expand upon their message, and consider that there are other ways of igniting and burning a forest than by simply lighting a match.

Snow Canyon Petro-Dune

A petrified sand dune sounds and smells almost nothing like being near the ocean.  Sure, tens of millions of years ago, this area was prime seaside real estate, but now the area is just Prime Real Estate (tm).  People die in Snow Canyon State Park all the time--not from exposure and dehydration, but from being too fat.  It is a very beautiful area though, as long as you are in good shape.

Mountain Meadow Meanderings

I have not yet decided if the redness of the dress makes this more a massacre than a meander.

Ann (1920's Edition)

A good method of wasting time is retouching photos. You can accomplish something, and yet when you are done, you really haven't "done" anything. In fact, you have taken something real and made it less real. This is not fighting entropy, my friends (spoken a la John McCain). Here, then, is Ann. She does fight entropy, even if her photo does not. She is seen here wearing a paper hat, which does not provide much protection against rain.

Ain't she a looker?

Young Hunter with Dogs and Coyote

Hopefully more photos like this will follow.  I inherited/took over management of 2500-3000 negative, prints, and positives depicting life in the Teton Valley of Idaho.  Most of the photos focus on Driggs and Victor, Idaho during the turn of the 20th century through the 1950's, although some of the photos are taken from around Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and up towards the Yellowstone National Park area.  Some are identified, many are routine family portraits, but most show a lifestyle (hunting, trains, Native Americans, farming, cowboys) that is quickly disappearing.

This photo shows a young man, in pseudo-Boy Scout garb, just back from hunting with his hounds and one lucky sheep dog.  He has bagged a coyote or a wolf, and the boy strikes a majestic pose, assured in the knowledge that he has help reduce the Teton Valley's biodiversity.