Sweet Cucumber

I have three wonderful cousins. Dimitri, the oldest one, Silas, the middle one, and Didah.

Didah - son of caucasian mother (my sis, duh!) and Egyptian father - barely 18, is my favorite person in the world. He’s clever, street smart, shy, funny, witty, and one of The Good Peoples.

Apparently he’s also quite attractive to the other gender, witness the beauty of his girlfriends. His first gf was an asian girl, ferchrissake ! (rare in Belgium). He carries forth some of my genes, I guess…

Anyway, Didah signed up for Animation/3D school recently - much to my joy, it’s a nice thing to do, but far from easy. He’s only been there for two months or so, and had to finish his first 3D modeling/rendering assignment: a low-poly Russian truck. Lo-poly is the art of creating 3D models with as less polygons as possible, so to be able to use the models fluently in 3D games (keeping CPU usage down). Doing lo-poly modeling is seriously difficult (and underrated), especially since most modern 3D apps allow you to go into as much detail as [you deem] necessary, and one needs to be quite disciplined to keep the number of polygons (basic 3D building blocks) down, whilst maintaining as much reality as possible.
Personally, I dislike lo-poly modeling, and I’m lucky I almost never had to do it. Back in the days, when I was working as a 3D modeler, we were sitting at our very-high-end SGI mainframes with 20 CPU’s or more, so a few more million polygons for one spaceship didn’t really matter. Lucky me, I guess, and spoiled rotten. Nowadays I still use very high poly counts when modeling, mostly out of laziness habit…

So Didah had to finish his lo-poly truck today for the exams.
It’s far from perfect, but it’s not bad either, given the fact that it’s his first attempt, and the difficulty of the subject. He made clever use of textures to suggest depth and detail (you have to, in lo-poly rendering), and I think the final result is worth a viewing.

I know Didah is not entirely happy with it, but I think it’s very much okay.

Now, as all genius people are, Didah is also a bit of a split personality. Did I mention my genes yet ?

At day he’s the quite and shy young Belgian dude.

At night he turns into this freak of Heavy Speed Death Metal Hard Kore Or Something singer. Apparently - I didn’t witness it yet firsthand, but will correct that soon - his band is quite good also, and they begin to have some moderate successes on stages throughout Belgium and Holland. I can only condone this, and support him by saying “Go for it, Didah dude ! Live life to the fullest !” And stay off the blondes…

The six-headed band - It Breeds No More (good name!) - has a MySpace page too, with firkin’ 556 friends!

Ddh, you make me proud.