La Vega. oleo-lienzo. 124 x84 cm.

There’s no need to tell how much I admire my parents and how much I owe to them. I can consider myself lucky to been raised in a family where arts talking where pervasive and my father, humble as a human can be, fail to recognize the great artist he is. Also the wonderful landscapes he paint are all surrounding my home

Before leaving I’ve quickly set up a gallery to show some of his artworks on Oil and Canvas.

If you like also the 3DCoat theme you can download it here

Hope you like it!

Cheers

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 200,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 9 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Wave sphere rendered in Blender Internal

I wish you all a wonderful new 2012 year!!!! and as a goodies for this dying year I would like to announce few improvements and new features I’ve been working on:

Improved Swirl brush

Wave brush

Procedural Noise to modify main LiveClay tools behavior

Now freeze correctly modulate all LC based tool’s actions!

In Internet there’s everything, or almost everything for sure. Each second more bytes of new information adds to its traffic , we barely scratch the surface, even the search engines also scratch the surface, because we are dealing with high numbers and at those order of magnitude our limited nature start to fail. And while the previous statement can lead to the safe idea that the human knowledge is preserved in internet for good and the shake of future generations (catastrophic aside that someday humanity awake without power to run computers ) and while the popular knowledge is that “Internet never forgets” I cannot avoid to tho think that things are not so simple:
Internet DO forget, and more importantly, we DO forget, and the way we interact with that source of knowledge is not very different to the way we interact with our own source of knowledge: our memories. And in that sense, Indexing engines and search engines have the last word and are actually shaping what Internet forgets and what remember.
More or less we all have almost every moment of our life recorded into our brain (well, according to brain plasticity many actually fade over time) but suppose for a moment that our brain don’t delete old memories at all, even in that case, to our conscience, we gradually forget the vast majority of that information because of the way we seek into our memories doesn’t bring that to light, is there, just that almost useless. The same is with internet: despite the fact that some old websites may be running in a single PC without copies and suddenly that PC is broken thus information vanished, converted into heat of a shortcuiting PC, or simply replaced/deleted and no old copy left, and that may actually account for “internet plasticity”, there’s the fact that statistically speaking, almost nobody look into results from Search engine that are 2-3 pages away from the first results, and those results are directly related to the ranking algorithm of the Search engines.
If a search engine use a ranking that gives more weight to the number of visit of a website (well actually they use a complex optimization algorithm involving much more variables), eventually those old web sites may still be around, but are forgotten by people, and while mass in general can take optimal choices, not always is the case and for that reason exist “mas media control” and false information can easily hide true information simply by been on top of the search engines over time, hence welcome the situation of being thirsty in the middle of the sea.
Gradually Internet forgets its own information according to the “conscience” seeking algorithm dictated by search engines filtering and us.

Cheers

In this last month of the year , Pilgway team is happy to offer a special Christmas discount! From December 17 until December 31, 2011 a $100 discount on 3D-Coat Professional, therefore lowering the standard price to $249. Happy holidays!
December is a great month for discounts and gifts
Pilgway team

A church near the Dnieper

This post may seems very late, I should have started from this when I came to Kiev, but actually is better to make it near the end of my visit here, that way I can be more objective
with my impressions and experience to tell.

I’ve grown surrounded by the russian mythology, from the beautiful Vassilia, to the evil Baba-Yaga, cartoons and tales everywhere, Misha bear and many more… I’ve dislike some, I’ve love others but is interesting how your road in life can take unexpected curves and turnovers…that’s why arriving Kiev was a very strange experience where all my childhood’s dreams, deeply buried in my mind, suddenly came to life when I saw a raven for the first time (those evil birds from tales always attached to witches and death) or I saw a swan peacefully swimming in a pool , or the snow for the first time and pine like Christmas trees, and those golden roof on cathedrals … it’s simply beautiful!

Kiev is a wonderful city, a mixture of the ancient Soviet glory (reduced to souvenirs in a very old street) but actually this city is much more than it’s soviet past, it has in his bones more than 1500 years of human history reflected in every corner where the past meets the present. A present where McDonals lives side by side with an old lady selling beautiful Matroshkas and in the horizon the typical churches dome’s draw the landscape. Is a very green city with trees everywhere… well, green except in winter LOL.

People are awesome too, instead of focusing on difference I try to keep what we have in common, and is much more than the cultural differences, language is a barrier I’m trying to overtake, and eventually I will, now I’m not as lost as four months ago, feelings are universal and in that sense is the best language we can use to communicate. I’m very thankful that Andrew’s family has taken me as one more of his sons, for moments I forget that I’m more than 7000 km away from my home and I thanks God for giving me the opportunity to have such a wonderful second family
This trip literally has changed me, I remember the day before leaving my home I was feeling very strange because usually everyone has a life plan, when you can extrapolate and imagine yourself for tomorrow, for the next week, but at that moment I was blocked, I couldn’t imagine what will be next and this trip was a jump into the unknown but many times allowing life surprise you is better than having predefined expectations, just let things happen and during that you will feel more alive than ever

Cheers

As should be, the previous global mesh command has evolve also in a local brush, so user have now more finer detail on where he desire to reduce without loosing important details and features!

I’ve made a simple video showing the differences between traditional Reduce brush and the new Adaptive Decimate brush:

Smart Decimate

Today I have a very beautiful wake up, I saw the snow for the first time in my life!!!!! (movies and pictures does not count ) I’m sure many of you are actually bored of it  but for a newcomer this is something exiting, seen fluffy white things falling from sky in curling like the gray rain drops will never do is awesome!

And don’t blame me, sometimes working in any task I feel deep in my brain a cooking idea onto something related but different at the same time, I’m the “divergent thinking” type
As a result , I was working yesterday in some twisted bug fixing tasks and after solving them faster that I was estimated I said to myself the mother of all divergent questions: -”what if ….?”

So today I’m very pleased to announce the Decimate command for Surface mode. (Adaptive or Smart Decimate)
While 3DC has lot’s of powerful re-sampling tools most of them are for the voxel mode, so the result of a global re-sample is typically marching cubes like so is not an option after you spend so much time sculpting that detailed model with surface tools. There’s also the manual and local use of Reduce brush of course and that is always very encouraged to spend wisely your polygon budget, but ultimately, in big and complex models manually reducing is not optimal, and that’s the reason of the Decimate command, it will smartly reduce low detail areas of the model while will try to keep small full featured zones as detailed as possible, hence, optimizing your polygon count enormously and maintaining the visual appearance.
The potential use of this tool is huge, for example it can be used to pass down the reduced model onto AUTOPO or other pipeline tools so it can be processed faster while using the high res for normal baking, also, in game engines that use mostly triangular models with this new tool can be more efficient simply skipping the AUTOPO step because you will have a ready to export triangular and optimal model

Hope you like it

Original model

After 2 iterations

After 2 iterations

After 2 iterations

After 6 iterations

After 6 iterations

After 6 iterations

After 6 iterations

After 6 iterations

After 6 iterations

Quick shape constructed using RemoveIntersections command

Sometimes you could not avoid a nasty self intersection happens into your model, and worse, you don’t realize that until you are in a pretty advanced state so going undo is not an option and the mess is very deep into the volume of the model… well, for those cases is very suited a remove self intersections command, it can be considered a post-process tool but it can provide the foundation to other tools too. It still have some bugs that I will be solved before making public

Cheers.