havreberg.com

New design. New engine. Same nonsense.

The site is running on WordPress now. This wasn’t quite the goal I had in mind when I started tinkering recently, but I am kind of happy it’s where I ended up… I was running a very old version of a blog software called Textpattern that I didn’t use (for a year and a half) and didn’t want to deal with updating. So hopefully using WordPress will streamline some things. Except connecting to a little network of humans on blogger.

I added a bunch of categories for blog posts, although I’m not sure how useful they are at the moment. Seeing as I started this blog in college, and historically used it mostly to talk about art, my life, and things I’m working on, there is a lot of overlap and dubious value for the categories of “life,” “art,” “college,” and “work in progress.” But the exercise of creating categories and categorizing posts made me think about two things. The first is that I need to post a lot more work, a lot more frequently. Which was kind of the point of the site in the first place, and of the recent upgrade/conversion, and I could have told you a long time ago. In fact, I think I did.

The second thing was, I got to thinking about other facets of my life. Things that may be neglected, or at least that aren’t shared openly on the internet. At first I was thinking of interests/goals like running/exercise or trying new foods. Small things that will make me healthier and happier. But there are big things too. Family. Friends. Ideas. Dreams. I feel a little bit disconnected. Maybe I’ll end up touching on some of this stuff as well. I needs me some more categories.

Okay. It’s been over a year and a half since my last post. I apologize. BUT if you cared enough to visit this site during that time, then you are probably a person I’ve talked to since then. I certainly hope so. If not…. well, you’ve probably long since given up on me and aren’t going to bother coming back now. I am a terrible person.

Lots of things have happened. I doubt I’ll write about any of them, with one exception. I just moved to San Francisco to work at ILM. Kacey and I took a road trip to get here. You can read some details, ramblings, and fabrications about it on our blog thing, and see a bunch of pictures grouped by location on flickr. We still have some posts to make for the last few days of the trip, and we are dating them according to when the events happened. So in addition to possibly being slightly confusing in the text, I don’t know what impact that will have on aggregator/feed type things. And we are going to continue posting on there as we do stuff around San Francisco, and future trips.

Oh also… I tried to change this site a little bit, about two months ago. At some point I fixed the old gallery for about two days, then something happened with execution time limits and I haven’t dealt with it since. Considering my schedule is about to get rocked like a hurricane (I start night shift in about 17 hours), hopefully my impending nocturnality or insomnia will allow me the time to migrate the content to somewhere/something whose upkeep will not be in my hands. The same may happen with this text stuff you are reading.

See you soon?

So I just started what should be my last semester. Things seem kind of squared away for graduation. I just need to pass a math class I’m taking, which shouldn’t be hard, but will require more attention than I’d care to give it. The original idea was that this class would prepare me for computer graphics, but I took that class last semester and I don’t imagine I will receive greater insight this semester. It’s just kind of this box I need to check before I’m done. Of far greater interest is my independent study, in which I will be making some 3D models that will ideally catch someone’s eye when I’m done. I’ve started work on a skeleton to complement the self portrait I did last summer, which will also serve as the basis for humanoid models I will create in the near future. Right now I’m doing research into what kinds of models to make and what skills to polish, and trying to develop an overall focus. I will be putting some images online as I go along.

This is it.

Oh yeah and perhaps a bit of a recap is in order, in case anyone actually pays attention or cares after 4 months of inactivity. I got a decent grade for my summer efforts. The computer graphics class turned out well. I didn’t work as much as I would have liked on the creative project, but it took a bit of an unexpected turn and is even more appealing now. It is just hard finding time to work on it.

And lastly, the gallery is currently broken. I will fix it… soon.

My head hurts. There is a pressure congestion thing happening. Hopefully this is the last day of it.

White water rafting was cool. The water wasn’t all that white, and it wasn’t all that rough or intense, but it was fun and I had a good time jumping between rafts and throwing people overboard. Unfortunately it may have contributed to the current illness I am experiencing.

The brush size thing was resolved. I burned what I thought would be the definitive CD of my work from the summer to show for a grade, but that went in a slightly unexpected direction. So I am putting a bit more time into it this evening and hopefully all will turn out well. Or at least reasonably well. It will probably be another thing in the “at least it is over; too bad I’m not happy with it” category. That will probably be on my tombstone.

Carry on.

So that’s over. The finals I mean. It went pretty horribly, but architecture ended up better than I hoped, so that’s good. I’m not going to bother getting into details. Because no one reads this anyways, and I don’t need to record for posterity my anxiety about my grades, which will be resolved in four days.

So I’ve been working on a self portrait model. The idea is to make a 3d version of the self portrait I did for painting last spring. But I am also kind of wanting to make a completely realistic texture and everything. I only have until the end of August to work on this 3D stuff to resolve the incomplete from spring. I’m not sure what direction it will take. The goal was to finish the head this weekend, and I’m kind of close… it needs ear detail and some tweaks around the nose and mouth. And I want to add more eye detail like tear ducts. Maybe that amounts to one efficient night’s work. And I am supposed to spend this week making the body for the self portrait. I will probably end up just going straight to the distorted body instead of first making a realistic body as I had planned. Perhaps in the interest of time. Because I am a tweakaholic and if I’m going for realism, this self portrait is the only thing I’ll finish (if I finish it) this summer. Then it’s on to two more models I can hopefully finish each of the next two weeks.

I kind of want to do some cartoony stuff… Bring some characters to life. But at the same time I want to make cool detailed monsters. I suppose I am nowhere close to either goal. I am just very pressed for time…. I need to make a nice bunch of work before next spring so I can get an internship to get my foot in the door. Spring is a thousand years away, but I have just seen what a semester’s worth of non-3d classes can do for 3d productivity. Which is to annihilate it.

So I suppose you can see one of the most recent pictures of the self portrait . The texture is just a modified planar projection for testing purposes, which is why the hair in the back of the head is slightly nonexistent. I have been struggling a bit with perspective/orthographic issues and made some (slow) progress when I finally decided to take some physical measurements. I suppose people develop an eye for this sort of thing over time, but just starting out it’s kind of crazy to think of making a likeness from a few images when I can barely get a resemblance staring at myself in the mirror for hours. Hopefully this doesn’t mean I’m simply not cut out for this stuff, but rather that I just need practice. And hopefully I’ll have the time to practice and improve in the coming months. I’d like to maybe do portraits of some friends or family members, or maybe some interesting-looking celebrities. And caricatures. And the list goes on… because I want to do anatomy-based rigging and cartoony facial animation and general animation exercises… To some extent, the sky is the limit. But to another, February is. Because that’s probably when I need to have something to show if anyone is going to take a chance on me.

It has become apparent recently that I sort of wasted the last 4 years of my life. Hopefully this trend can be reversed.