Water falling from the Sky?

My mom an dad moved here to Phoenix in 1968, bringin us kids with 'em.
We came from the Great Northwest ..where 'tree' was a word to describe somethin that the first branch began about a hundred feet up.
Anything else was a 'bush' ..undergrowth .. minor stuff.

Ecologists useda say if the temperature was 10 degrees hotter the area around Portland Oregon would be a rain forest, .. Congo style .. I mean .. it rained a LOT.

There aint no 'trees' in Arizona.

Heck I even spent a year in Southeast Asia and know what a real monsoon is like,
..not this Phoenix weatherman wannabe bullshit they spout about a 'monsoon' ..
..personally I think every 'weatherman' in Arizona is an overpaid boob
..I mean, it's Hot ..or Hotter,
..with periods of Warm ..get a real job ya frikkin bums.

When I was stationed in North Carolina you could watch the wall of water
march down the street ..one side of the street would be sunny and dry,
..other side would be just bein blasted like someone tipped over a bucket.

Kathy and I would sit out on the porch an watch the lightnin show and the rain.

So ya .. I have seen the rain.
I know a bit about that whole water fallin from the sky bit.

Yesterday ..it rained in Phoenix.
First with a bit of peanut size hail, enough to leave a fine white frosting on the lawn
and make the neighbors go 'ooo - ahhh' ..they're from Mexico and I don't beleive they've ever seen hail.

I drove my son home because the water was so deep it was hittin the floor of the truck,
..and the truck has a bit of ground clearance, not one o' them lowered mickey-mouse wannabe trucks.

Really cooled off the day ..it was nice out.
About an hour later ..it frik-kin UNLOADED.
I mean it RAINED.
Water drops the size of baseballs so thick you couldn't see across the street.

Then the HAIL started.

It sounded like gunfire.

I got up and went out the front door ..
..it grew in intensity until even yelling I could not hear what Kathy was tryin to say
.. I had never seen Hail the size of golf-balls.
This was between golf ball and baseball sized..it was just BLASTING the leaves off all the trees,
..small branches rained down, it completely mulched the lawn
(hey ..no lawn mowing required for awhile..cool :)

It did a FINE job dimpling the hood and roof of the truck.
Surprised the heck out of me the windows stayed intact.

Ended up with a 'drift' of hail against the fence about a foot deep,
..a nice frosting of ice balls about 3-4 inches deep ..cars goin by (slowly)
sounded like they were drivin on bubble-wrap ..crunchy poppin sounds, loud.

The hail beat the *CRAP* out of everything ..just an awesome show.

Ima have to chat with the insurance guys when their phone isn't busy ..LOL.

-Frank

Looking for Work, or how to stay frustrated.

Yanno ..I useda think an artist was all I needed to be.
All the rest ..software, brushes, canvas, posterboard
.. those are all tools an artist uses.
Frustrating to read job apps that require a degree and/or knowledge of a tool
.. it seems artists need not apply.

You must be 18, have 20 years of experience, a degree, know and be expert in every software tool on the planet, and oh by the way, do you speak Swahili or any of a dozen other languages? .. and get me a cup of coffee.

When I interviewed artists for hiring, I wanted to see what they had done.
I wasn't interested in the tools they used .. they had to be able to create a vision of an idea .. you know .. that whole 'art' thing.

Anyone with the passion to create can learn a tool to do so.

I want to thank Mr. Cameron for saying it was the artists at their workstations that made Avatar come alive .. it's nice to hear someone acknowledge the passion.
I had an ignorant art director tell me years ago 'well, it's CG, it's always right'
..and another 'there are no hero's here'

Every single member of a team that brings a vision to life from an idea is a hero, .. from the guy who makes sure the web is up, the guy on the phones with customers, Lead Artists, Lead Programmers, even the CEO.

I got 'under the hood' of 3d Studio in the DOS days, along with Photoshop.
It was convergent tech at it's best ..I had been doing oil-canvas, acrylic-posterboard, ink sketches ..built models growing up of just about everything,
..mostly planes and cars tho.

3d Studio/Photoshop was magic. I could build models, paint 'em, animate, blow up, smash, or setup scenes a camera never would catch. I could create worlds and everything in them. And did. For years.

Am I an environment artist? An animator? A UI guy? -shakes head in disgust-
..the fact is I do what I need to do to create the vision .. I am an artist.

I have spent months doing UI screens, more months just animating/rigging characters,
..the years added up as I created 3d shapes for world environments, even laying out entire worlds, ..painting texture maps, exploring cool/different tools ..always learning.

But .. do I know Flash? LOL, no.
Guess a set of images rendered into any format that Max supports or deBabelizer can convert to isn't good enough?
I would bet I could learn enough in a couple weeks about Flash to be considered an 'advanced user' if not 'expert' .. it's just a tool.

Do I know Maya? -sigh- ..another tool.
I did an eval of Maya long ago when the suit-dweebs were all agog about it ..it cost more than Max so it must be way better right?
Well. A summer spent in my spare time, mostly after everyone had gone home.
Polygon is still a polygon.
Takes an artist to create art, the tool is not what does it.
At the end of my eval I recommended against it
.. 3dmax allowed us to do all we needed to for real time game environments, screen shots, UI's, etc.

IMHO, Maya is a great tool. More geared to high poly modeling, some nice features, better have a decent workstation with networked rendering farm.
A Pentium 90 wouldn't cut it.. while Max was happy on a P-90 ..more or less.
(altho it did take awhile to render some of our screen shots back in the day :)

But do I know Maya? .. -sigh- I'd have to say no.
Could I use it .. learn it .. be proficient with it?
You bet.

I am an artist.
It is just a tool.
One of many.

-Frank P. 'Gray Eagle' Williamson
-lead artist on Air Warrior, Kesmai, 1995-2000
-3d artist on NASCAR 2002/2003, Papyrus, 2000-2001
-lead artist on Falcon V.0, G2 Interactive, 2001
..and lately 3d artist on SnoCross for the iPhone, 2XL Games, 2009-2010