This date is a very painful date to me. Eighteen years ago, on this date, Friday 16, 1990, my friend and fellow artist, Ximena Garcia Baltiansky, dowsed her body in turpentine and lit herself on fire. She died at the age of 23.

On her suicide note she wrote: "God, forgive me for committing suicide at the age of 23, I hope that the turpentine won't kill my soul. I want you to take me with you to the Kingdom of Heaven. I bestow upon you my wish to become a great artist".

Ximena was the daughter of Rolly Baltiansky and Ricardo Garcia, a victim of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. Ximena told me once a story about her father, "I was four years old, he gave me a butterfly, I kept it in a jar, and I was very sad to discover it wouldn't move anymore... it had died."

Ximena, I will always remember you!

Fortunately, my co-workers jumped in and took half the schools off my back. I finished the mural. And I am expected to refine the schools' renderings by Friday and to create a new school starting tomorrow that is due Thursday morning. I am also studying to get certified as a LEED AP. Still, I expect to have some time this weekend to finally get to adding hair to this model and refining the face a bit more. I still want to refine the body without creating a crazy polygon count since I have to create morph targets for different ages, races, and genders. This seems quite challenging in 3ds Max.

I just added a couple of images of the model I created in 3ds Max and exported to ZBrush for detailing. I did not have time to export displacement, diffuse, specular, and normal bump maps, so really, the only thing you get to see is the base mesh that with additional details that break bilateral symmetry. I am really busy with work right now, but I plan to add the maps mentioned above, once things slow down.

I finished the poster and the school renderings. Production work! I am satisfied, but they are nothing to right home about due to the tight deadlines. Still, I think I did my best with the time available.

I am trying to re-topologize my base mesh of this CG Woman before detailing her in Z-Brush. I am in an in-between state that I dislike, but I hope it will work for this experiment.

I have six projects due in less than two weeks. I need to model four schools in 3d. Three from CAD files and the fourth from a Revit file, all to be modeled and rendered in Max. In addition, I am creating a poster for our company that is 94 X 36 in, and I am assisting the interior designers in the creation of a mural.

Last night I got a chance to do some tutorials on 3ds Max Fur and Hair modifier in YouTube. Some tutorials were good but boring, and others were terrible but easy to follow. Now, all I need, is a crash course in hair styling and I think I will be good to go to create the hair for my 3d model.