Well, the grapevine grows fast and far so I might as well make an official announcement… I’ve illustrated and published a book written by my sister, Catherine Velazquez!
It’s called Dirty Birdie and our kids love it, so we thought we’d share it with the rest of the world. I illustrated the book with Procreate on iPad.
Click here to see the book on Lulu:
Here are small resolution images of the illustrations in the book:
Here’s a simple but very useful little script, this one is good for game devs working within strict poly-count restrictions.
If you unzip the ViewportStats file into your startup scripts folder, you will always have a display of the triangle count for objects you have selected (that’s right, works with multiple objects selected):
I made this one to replace (or work with, if you prefer) Max’s viewport stats option. The built in function is annoying because whether it’s displayed or not is saved per file, so I found myself constantly going into viewport options and toggling on/off the options I want to see/not see.
One thing I did with this was have it display “nothing selected” when nothing is selected:
I did this because I deployed this script across all the artists’ machines and I wanted them to get used to looking in that area of the viewport for this information. If you’d rather not see anything when nothing is selected, just replace the line:
else return "Nothing selected"
with
else return ""
Enjoy!
Here’s a Riot Cop I recently made for an undisclosed game for an undisclosed company. This guy may not even make it into the game due to shifting style ideas, but it’s supposed to be baked down to “mobile-ready” which means about 500 triangles and a 200² texture, which is why I didn’t bother adding more detail. This was also the first time I used ZBrush in ~8-10 years. Yeah… I said years!
I just recently started learning ZBrush (I’ve resisted for far too long) and through that stumbled onto a link to Groboto. I’ve always hated booleans because they’re not only unpredictable and unreliable, but they’ve always just plain SUCKED. Even if you successfully booleaned a bunch of objects, you’d have such a mess to clean up along the seams that it’s just never been worth the effort.
Now, looking at the videos of Groboto, makes me wet to try it. Not only is it creating such pretty and clean meshes, but it’s handling tons of booleans of complexly intersection objects, and it’s doing it all in real-time.
Impressive.
Way back in the day I wrote a script for MAX to replace their relatively crappy autoback feature. It was pretty buggy and not very mobile (having lots of variables hard-coded specifically for use within Volition’s intranet).
Well, since I’ve been using MAX again I’ve re-learned how unreliable its auto-save is and decided to completely re-write my script. It’s now 90% less crappy/buggy and much more mobile, and also has more features that you’ll find super-sweet. You should be able to use it without issue on any machine, just make sure to unzip the script and the image into the scripts/startup folder.
Here’s how this script can save your life (if you define “your life” as “hours of work”):
By the way, this script falls under the “QuoteWare” license. Please read and abide by QuoteWare’s simple and fair requirement here.
Thanks, and enjoy your new insurance against max’s inevitable crash-fails! 
Download GeOAutosave Here Unzip the contents into your scripts/startup directory.
QuoteWare is an idea I stumbled across when browsing Martin Breidt’s site for some of his useful scripts. Here’s his description:
Over the years, I sometimes learned through the grapevine that some of my scripts were/are used extensively on large commercial projects or in professional production environments. This is great, and I am very happy to see my tools being used, but I’d like to hear about that first hand and I’d like to quote these projects to prove that my tools are “production tested”.
Therefore, I have decided to change the license of my tools to something I call “Quote ware”:
If you use one of my scripts in a production environment with a group of more than two people, or have used it in the past under such conditions, then you are obliged to tell me about it and allow me to list that project title and your company name as a reference on this website.
I have updated the header in all my scripts accordingly.
All my tools have remained free and opensource, so this really is a very small thing to ask in exchange for using them. I hope you all agree. Thanks, and looking forward to hearing from your project!
QuoteWare is something that I will be using for any scripts/tools that I might make available in the future, and the first script to use it will be an auto-save script I wrote for 3dsMAX (coming soon).
Here are a couple images of one of the characters I made for Star Legends. This is a base “nude” character with no customization options. Customizations include all sorts of armor and helmets, as well as hair and faces and skin-tones.
My little Oscar came up with the name and I just had to come up with something for it to look like.
