Just a quick update on all things happening here – or not happening as the case may be.

It’s 2009 was a crazy summer at the Maruska household with an extensive house remodeling project taking up most of my time; which was inspired by the highly anticipated arrival of our daughter, Madeline; which in-turn has led to a pretty crazy autumn and winter as Jenn and I try our hand at parenthood. (It’s all good, BTW – we’ve been blessed with a well behaved co-operative little one – thank you)

This being the first week in a long while that I’ve gotten any quantity of sleep, I thought it a good time just to say hi and maybe spark anyone’s RSS feeds out there that may still be listening.

I plan on getting some new content posted at some point and re-kindle my relationship with Alias Design.

And speaking of design, it’s been a good year for that too with plenty of awards to be had by Teague – which is fodder for another post, another time.

Hey all! Alias Design has posted my latest demo on their site where I share a rendering/presentation method I just recently used on a project at Teague. It’s just a quickie, but it’s been a crazy summer over here at the Maruska household (We’ve been remodeling our upstairs; which is 3 bedrooms a bathroom, plus the stairwell and the hallway. We’ve spent the majority of the summer living in a 20′ x 12′ room in our basement and sleeping on our dining room floor).

For those who have been wondering, I’ve been using Alias on my Mac for sometime now. I’ve been meaning to do some sort of comprehensive review, but I’ve been holding-off until Snow Leopard came out. My Mac Pro at home has a Quadro FX4500 graphics card in it and unfortunately, the graphics drivers (for that particular card only) prior to Snow Leopard weren’t playing nice with Alias. It’s all better now – yay! And with that, I feel like I can do justice to Alias and the remarkable work they’ve done on the 2010 release for Mac. Thanks guys…

Cheers,

J.

Yay! The final part of my Details series is up on the Alias Design website.  Of particular note was that this part in the series was done in the Mac OS X version of Alias! I am pleased as punch to be working natively in Alias on my Mac and have few reasons to keep my Boot Camp partition around now. I look forward to all the projects that lay ahead for this software and it really is a game changer for my process. I plan on having a more in-depth ‘review’ soon!

Look for more tutorials from me in the future, but in the meantime enjoy!

J.

Autodesk recently updated Sketchbook Pro for 2010 (almost whole year early!). I was on the beta team for this one and it was a pleasure working with these guys. They have done an outstanding job refining an already great program. The addition of straight edges and ellipse guides makes the tool a whole lot more useful to me in many ways. It’s maintained it’s simplicity, but gained much of the attraction that sketching in Alias has had for years. Definitely give it a try!

This was a sketch I did during the beta cycle on a particularly rainy Sunday here in Seattle. Enjoy!

As mentioned in an earlier post, I have a fascination with Lego and Star Wars and when the two met, out popped another hobby. For the past few months I’ve been noodling away on a studio scale prop replica of the Millennium Falcon. It dawned on me that I should really document some of the process – especially since my product design background lends itself to an entirely different approach to typical fine scale modeling.

So as not to distract from the content of this blog, I started another one. I’ve been frantically populating it with stuff as to try and make-up for lost time so forgive me if the posts thus far don’t seem very organic.

Enjoy,

J.