Drawing On Experience

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Babylon 5, books, CGI, Iron Man, Lightwave3D, OTAKON, Star Trek

One of my hobbies that turned into a vocation is CGI, or computer animation. In case you’re unfamiliar with the terms, think Pixar.

My first animation project was the opening animation for OTAKON 2001, “Mecha Run For It“. Though this 6-minute animation proved I had the chops to hack it, I simply didn’t have the bucks necessary to fund my own animation studio. And since wonderful ideas like Kickstarter did not yet exist, that dream quietly settled on the back burner.

Now that I am an (hopefully up-and-coming) author, I use this skill to enhance my publishing efforts. Although it isn’t animation, I use the same skills to create all my cover art and most illustrations to go with my stories.

How you might ask?
I employ LightWave3D, a CGI modeling and animation software package used in several sci-fi franchises (Babylon 5, Star Trek, Iron Man, to name a few).

Consider that animation is merely a series of photographs shown in rapid succession to fool the human eye’s persistence of vision. What better, than to my use animation to create my still-life illustrations?

I create the 3D models, pose the model actors, set the camera and lighting, exactly as if I were crafting an animation scene. The result is a photo-realistic image. If I need to convert the photo into pencil, charcoal, ink or paint styles, I have several converters at my fingertips in Lightwave3D itself, and other tools like Photoshop, to skin that particular cat.

You can see all my covers, illustrations and animation projects at anigrafx.com, but just to whet your appetite, here is an illustration used in “If I Can’t Sleep, You Can’t Sleep.”
And here’s the illustration submitted with my short story “If These Walls Could Talk,” slated for Firebringer Press‘s upcoming anthology “Meanwhile in the Middle of Eternity“.

Bet you can’t wait to see what I’m cooking up for my next novel, “My Friend Jackson“!

Thanks to DT Krippene for suggesting this blog topic.

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Dirt, Dogs, and Digs

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Autumn, books, cleaning

Autumn is almost upon us, and the signs are everywhere.
Leaves falling.
Ripe nuts and fruit dropping from almost every tree in the neighborhood.
Add to that the usual lawn detritus of grass clippings and fiendishly concealed animal droppings, and it all quickly builds into a noxious pile of organic matter that finds its way into my home.

I cringe every time I step on one of those marble-sized bombs, consisting of a bumper crop of crab-apples, Japanese dogwood berries, pygmy pears, and who-knows-what-else.

During this benighted time of year, I am forced to clean my walkway, my dog, and mudroom on the average 3 times a day — the walkway before I walk my dog, my shoes, the dog’s paws, and linoleum afterwards. And we still somehow manage to track in grass, leaves, mangled corpses of squished fruit, and whatever crud their juices sponge up onto my shoes.

I am by no means a demigod of domesticity, despite the fact that throughout my formative years, I was allergic to everything – dust, mold, mildew, animal dander, and more. My poor Mom had to clean-clean-clean when she wasn’t exhausted from holding down two jobs. Fortunately, my dog was one of those breeds that doesn’t shed, otherwise I think she would have bleached the pooch.

I thank God I have outgrown my allergies and asthma, otherwise I would be forced to continue that unfortunate tradition. These days, I break out the vacuum cleaner once a fortnight (or less), resorting to bucket and mop when I must — far less often than my Mom ever did…
But these Fall invaders of muck and mire have me cleaning far more often than I care to think about.

This season, with nature relentlessly dumping its dirt upon us, reminds me of a pithy bit of humorous wisdom a co-worker imparted, during a tour of a Silicon Valley clean room, where super-clean “bunny-suits” and air-purifiers abounded.

“There is no such thing as ‘perfectly clean.’
There is only the level of dirt you’re willing to tolerate.”

OK — I admit it. I can’t think of even the most tenuous segway (segue) from the subject of cleanliness to the topic of my books. So here’s this blog entry’s blatant bit of self-promotion…
Buy my books!