Logo

I'm in the process of taking all the fancy tricks I've learned over the last year for Maya, and practicing them in Max. I also have some Mudbox tutorial time/experiments scheduled for the next couple days. Here's a basic mesh I cranked out in about 1/2 hour playing around with Sub-Division Poly modeling (Sub-D) in Max:

Tomorrow sometime I plan to drop it into Mudbox and add some realistic wear and tear. Reveal the substructure and whatnot.

I'd actually planned to do all this tonight, but I ran into a showstopper error with my Wacom Tablet. (Turns out it's nearly impossibly to use Mudbox effectively with a mouse.)

The problem was this:
My tablet kept defaulting back to mouse mode from pen mode.

I was using the beta drivers, so I rolled them back to the latest official release. Now I had a new problem:
The tablet registered everything correctly, but would not move the cursor around the screen at all.

Turns out this is a fairly common error between Vista and the Wacom drivers, and the solution is thus:

Go to Start--->control panel---->system(in classic view)---->device manager--->click on "human interface devices"--->then click on "Wacom virtual HID driver" and right click on that and disable it. Your computer will ask you to restart. After reboot, you are golden.

So, on the one hand I wasted several hours with technical difficulties, but on the other, I feel like I learned a lot about a great variety of topics.

I'm really trying to get back into the swing of daily blogging. It's funny how easy it is to pick up bad habits, and how hard it is to forge good ones... There's a lesson on social entropy, chaos theory, and the grand nature of the universe in there somewhere. But now I'm going to sleep, rather than bang my head against reality, demanding it deliver truth unto me in bite-size easily digestible chunks.