only two working days this week due to George and bank holidays. The first didn’t seem to get me that far, so Friday has been a bit frantic.

Or maybe Fridays are always a bit frantic for several reasons:
1) There’s a big deadline on Monday – not this week, but deadlines are often Mondays – I suspect that’s because people think you can finish of over the weekend – which I make a determined decision never to do.

2) I’ve decided to do a whole lot of things in the week, and Friday is my last chance to meet my own targets. – Inevitably I’ve scheduled in too much.

3) I want to get videos or animations complete so they can render over the weekend… that means having everything perfect by Friday afternoon…. Weekends offer the computer a good long go at rendering difficult projects so if I’ve got anything animated or video to do, it’s good not to let the computer sit idle over the weekend – at least if I do a test render, I can see what needs changing.

4) I’ve just plain taken on too much.


It looks like I may have got the job of illustrating the children’s book I thought wouldn’t work out. That’s great news and unable to resist, I’ve started working on the main character. He’s looking great, but needs more work before he’s ready to show off.

The downside here, is as ever the deadline….. looks like it’s the 2nd of june –and for 20 illustrations, that’s a tough one…. Still, we’ll see….

In the meantime, I’ve got to get an illustration for a friend at the natural history museum done for a deadline in the next couple of weeks, and get the ethical investment fund animation rendering…. This last project is the most urgent currently and that’s what I want to start rendering over the weekend. I think it’s looking good now, but the rendering is awfully slow… that’s what’s going to slow this project down as it requires 7 different animated sequences – each of about 10 seconds.

The trouble is, there’s so much reflection and transparency involved that the renders are going to take a while…


The new version of Max is helping though it handles big, detailed scenes much better and it looks like I’m going to need big, detailed scenes for a lot of projects in the future.

Right now, I’m running two copies of Max working on two projects at once – so while one’s rendering I can edit another…I’m also tweaking textures in Photoshop while they’re both rendering, so I’m expecting a crash any time now….