Status update

Reading -> Read:

• The White Dragon, Anne McCaffrey, 445/445

To read -> Reading:

• A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin, 165/969

To acquire -> To read:

• Rendering for Beginners: Image Synthesis using Renderman, Saty Raghavachary, 0/384
• The RenderMan Companion: A Programmer's Guide to Realistic Computer Graphics, Steve Upstill, 0/496

Acquired:

• Grundig S350

 9:31:56 PM  comment []  trackback []

Status update

Read:

• Enchantment (yes, again), Orson Scott Card, 415/415
• The Ruby in the Smoke, Philip Pullman, 230/230
• Perelandra, C.S. Lewis, 190/190
• Learning Java, Patrick Niemeyer & Jonathan Knudsen, ?/881

Reading:

• The White Dragon, Anne McCaffrey, 328/445
• Matchmoving (The Invisible Art of Camera Tracking), Tim Dobbert, ?/252
• Programming Python, Mark Lutz, ?/1524

To read:

• Snakes (A Complete Pet Owner's Manual), R.D. Bartlett and Patricia P. Bartlett, 0/103
• A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin, 0/969

Acquired:

• Mallet of Justice
• Mallet of Liberation

To acquire:

• Rendering for Beginners: Image Synthesis using RenderMan, Saty Raghavachary, 0/384
• The RenderMan Companion: A Programmer's Guide to Realistic Computer Graphics, Steve Upstill, 0/496

 5:49:34 PM  comment []  trackback []

Yes.

Cops cuff anti-drug ninja vigilantes.

Tooled up to deliver 'justified yet merciful force'

Cops in Clifton, New Jersey, earlier this week cuffed two ninja vigilantes dressed in black SWAT-style vests and carrying knives, throwing stars, swords, nunchucks and a bow and arrows, who were apparently on their way to deliver cease-and-desist letters to local drug peddlers, AP reports.

[The Register]

Personally I would probably have deputized them, but I guess the police these days just have no appreciation for awesome.

 6:16:22 PM  comment []  trackback []

Victoria

So I drove about 2,500 miles this week -- from Southern California to Victoria, British Columbia and back.

The first drive was 15 hours long, from Southern California to Oregon, and the second was 5 hours long from Oregon to Port Angeles, Washington. From Port Angeles I took the ferry to cross into Canada and then just followed everything in reverse on the way back.

Driving to Victoria taught me a lot of things and I had time to myself to think. Here are a few of the things I've learned, with the disclaimer that not all of them may make any sense to you:

• Northern California and Oregon might be nicer places to live than Southern California, and are definitely cheaper. Premium gas there costs less than regular gas here. I even saw diesel that cost about as much as regular gas here.
• In Oregon it is illegal to pump your own gas.
• Washington might be a nicer place than either of those two to live, if you don't want to live around many people.
• First impressions count for a lot -- maybe more than they should, and acting different than you usually would in an attempt to please people can actually do the exact opposite.
• Victoria is probably the nicest city I've seen out of all the places I've been. It has a nice mix of a downtown / old suburban look without being too crowded, angular, or dreary. It looks interesting and once you figure out its quirks is more or less easy to find your way around too.
• I don't think I really want to stay in Southern California that much, other than out of convenience.
• I don't claim to always understand people well on an individual level but I probably need to try to look at myself more from other peoples' points of view to figure out if I'm actually achieving what I want to achieve.
• Things are probably not cheaper in Canada now, just more expensive in the U.S., but this makes it easier to buy stuff there if you don't think about it too much.
• Anime and manga are bigger than I'd thought, though growing up with them I'd never really noticed their presence as anything different.
• In Canada the blinking green left turn signal / green light combination means the same thing as a solid left turn signal in the U.S., but otherwise Canadian driving is pretty similar to U.S. driving.
• Speed limits in km/h are confusing when you think of things in mph, but that's okay because nobody follows the speed limits anyways.
• Oregon has strangely low speed limits, and California has an excessive number of bad drivers in BMWs compared to other states.
• I need to be (and I think I am well on my way to becoming, over these past two days or so) a more patient and restrained person if I don't want to be self-defeating.
• Glass blowing is neat.
• I can draw and paint (on the computer) better than I'd thought, but not as well as I'd like. Maybe it's time to take that up as a hobby too.

Here are some of the things I saw:

• A metallic dragon (on the northbound side of the California US-101 freeway?).
• An RV on fire (soup on nerdnet theorizes it was a meth lab).
• An airshow during BC Day.
• A baby duckling and a turtle.
• Valley of the Rogues, and Rogue River.
• Mt. Shasta.
• Lots of fog and rain.
• A small fire on the southbound side of I-5, and a large fire surrounding a freeway going in to San Francisco.

I met someone I was interested in meeting and I'm glad I went up there. It gave me a break I really needed from work and also allowed me a lot of self reflection.

 11:47:58 AM  comment []  trackback []

More chapters on the way

Don't worry, everyone who has been reading the story (maybe two people), more chapters are on their way soon. I've just been slightly unproductive, unhappy with the next chapter and rewriting it, and also somewhat sidetracked by this short film I am working on as seen in the previous entry.

 12:53:25 AM  comment []  trackback []

Charcter animation and machinima

Dragon poses

Games and other real time engines are generally good sources of environments, textures, characters, and all sorts of assets for making a film, and it is no surprise that a large community has sprung up around using these assets in new creations. However through my experiences with World of Warcraft, I have always found that the most limiting thing about machinima was character animation. While it is relatively easy to acquire footage of good looking environments, getting characters to do what you want them to without hacking 2D footage up with a butterknife is downright impossible; and that's just for blunt actions like moving their arm a certain way or turning their head, never mind the nuances of facial expression.

Of course most of this is a solved problem in traditional CGI character animation, so that is really more or less my technique. Why use the wrong tool for the job? Use the real time engines for easy sets, and use traditional CGI for the characters.

The above pictures are from a dragon for a short film I am actually trying to complete and release, this time. The dragon was removed from World of Warcraft and brought into a 3D software package. Note that only the mesh and texture map are easy to remove; the job of creating a skeleton, binding it, rigging it, and animating it are all done independently. You will notice there are various artifacts, mostly resulting from the coarse mesh, but these can be solved by increasing the poly count and cleaning up the texture map a bit. I would also like to create a higher resolution texture for it.

 8:42:27 PM  comment []  trackback []

Super duper ethernet cables

If you buy these ethernet cables I hear your bits go super fast and you can't get packet loss ever.

Also I hear they go really well with KillerNICs which are totally the best ethernet adapter ever known to man. Ever.

 8:20:58 PM  comment []  trackback []