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.

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!

I’m in Vegas this week attending this year’s session of Autodesk University.

I hope to be posting off and on throughout the week with updates from the event!

Cheers,

J.

Finally. After more than a year and a half after the PC release, Pixologic finally announced the September 29th availability of ZBrush 3.1.2 for Mac OS X. I would find it very interesting to read a case study of the goings-on at Pixologic regarding the development.

It’s Mac Intel only which is inconsequential to me, but my condolences to the Power PC crowd out there who were hanging on.

I bought my ‘Upgrade’ in April (they’ve been taking pre-orders since the PC version was announced way back when) and have been anxiously awaiting it’s arrival. In the meantime, there have been a few very notable and somewhat entertaining threads over at the ZBrush Central forums regarding this debacle. As mentioned before – I would be really curious as to what the whole story is. Amongst the Mac ZBrush hold-outs it seems to be widely regarded as a PR train wreck. You can enjoy the more than 2300 posts (as of this writing) here.

Here’s my first zBrush thing. I did this in Boot Camp just after having bought the Mac version which came with a complimentary PC license because the Mac version didn’t work on the Mac naturally. Since a lot of the sculpting features depend on texture maps and all my software is Mac licensed (i.e. Photoshop), switching back and forth between PC and Mac OS X was too cumbersome to be practical – hence my excitement for the native Mac version to come out. Cheers and happy ZBrushing!