I just finished a big project and there were a few really hard nights as I was trying to push through to meet deadlines. At about 3:am one morning I took this. I had forgotten I had even taken it till I was going through my camera’s photos. Very funny. 
My Grandfather on my Dad’s side just recently passed away. We were planning on going back to Australia this Christmas and it would have been nice for Isabelle to meet him.
Grandad was always a very charming man. He was great at making anyone feel welcome in his home and really tried to take an interest in their lives. On any topic you could talk to him for a long long time and even in his last years he would follow along, give input, ask intelligent questions etc. He really went out of his way to get to know you, your life and those around you. My wife always felt that of all the people she visited in Australia he was the most welcoming to her.
When I was little Grandad once sat with me for hours and made little model airplanes with me. I still have them. At the time I thought they were just the most amazing things. Japanese Zeroes, Spitfires etc. He would tell me stories about what made what airplane good and bad and he’d recount stories of seeing them in the war. I found them recently in a box in the garage and a flood of memories came rushing in of him and I sitting on the porch at his house working on them together. They weren’t much to look at but they were held together by love and friendship even now 30 years later.
Grandad always loved to go on drives. He’d look at houses remembering the people that used to live here or there. Shop owners that he used to know. . . famous people he had met. One time we went into a chemist in Sangate and we met Wendy Turnbull, one of Australia’s best tennis players. “Good on ya lovie!” “Great to meet you!”. He was, once again, charming and charmed at the same time. It was infectious, fun and comforting. An Eggington trait I wish had rubbed off on me a little more.
One thing Grandad would always like to do is have us pick out from his plate collection things we would like to have. At first it was strange. “You keep them Grandad they are yours. . . your not going anywhere!” But after a while I kind of started to understand what he was doing. He really wanted these plates to be in our homes so that he could feel as though a part of him was there with us. So now, proudly in our curio cabinet are a small little collection of his plates and sure enough. . . every time I see them I’m reminded of him. A very kind, charming, loving gentleman that I will miss greatly.
Your all right yourself Grandad. We will see you soon enough.
I love Wings3D for most of my modeling needs but I’m starting to get frustrated with its performance. Sometimes saving a fairly low polygon model. . . 6k polygons. . . can take about 30 seconds. Thats not horrible but you certainly lose your “mojo” staring at a blue progress bar. Silo appears to be much snappier but also lacking in a lot of the features I find vital. I am having very good luck getting it to mimic Wings though. So I’ll keep messing with it. The first thing I tried to do has failed miserably and I had to go back to Wings. But. . . I’ll keep trying.
I’m baffled by people’s desire to invent new words. Especially acronyms. With 3D animation there are so many techniques and varieties of software packages that it is particularly frustrating. Especially when you come across someone who is fully immersed in one particular pipeline or product and has no “experience” outside of it. Gah. Ambient Occlusion becomes AO. Subdividing geometry becomes Sub-Ds. NPR. Thats National Public Radio right? Nope. Thats Non Photorealist Renderer. <sigh> But then out of the blue I get one like. . . “Fan Bones”. Wow. That could be anything. AM. Well everyone knows thats Animation Mentor. But. . . when I read it I instantly read Animation Master.
I know it takes longer to type full words out and describe complex subjects over and over but I wish people would do that more. The translation of information and knowledge between artists suffers greatly from people’s desire to type a little less in my opinion. Also marketing types don’t help. Hypergraph, Hypervoxels, Skelegons, Noisette, etc. etc. The desire to encapsulate complex new concepts and tools into a single word is great and nessisary I guess but. . . I hope we can spend more time defining and educating as we throw them about.
Our 3 year old daughter got a little bug collector kit at a birthday party a little while back. We spent a little while looking for interesting bugs but. . . that soon grew dull. So then the other day I found a really cute little spider and we had fun putting it in there. Its really cute. Its 4 little eyes keep looking at you wherever you go in the room and we have a blast going into the back yard looking for flies and bugs for it to eat. Today I found it a nice little baby grasshopper. So while we had lunch we watched the spider eat the little grasshopper.
Awesome fun.
Oh yea. . . I forgot. We named him “Ocho”.
Its been a while since I have done anything with hair in messiah:studio but I have a potential little job coming up that might need it so I did a test.
This could be a very fun project. Hope I get to do it.
I have been having some real frustrations with Windows as of late. Twice now in the past few months Vista system disks have refused to boot on two different machines. Pretty normal for me. . . I usually end up having to re-build my main workstations every 6 months or so. Not because I want too. . . but because they eventually just die. 
So I had another go at Linux. I went through quite a few distro’s but none of them seemed to like the laptop I was using. Its a HP Pavilion dv2000 (dv2214us to be precise) So it has 1 gig of ram, a dual core Turion processor running at 1.6ghz and your stanard collection of ports, built in web cam, DVD burner etc. Probably a lot to ask of Linux but. . . its what I have. Well the Ubuntu live CD wouldn’t even load. Same with PCLinux and Mandriva. They just wouldn’t load up. I read it had something to do with Xorg and the nVidia “go” GPU in this computer. BUT I finally got Puppylinux to work and had a blast. That is a very fun, clean distro that really shows off what can be done with limited memory and disk space. Unfortunately I never got my wi-fi up and running and it was only ever able to see a single core on my dual core CPU so I went hunting for more.
I came across Linuxmint 6 x64. Burnt the CD from the iso and surprise surprise . . . it booted! Not only that but it looked so clean and professional doing it! A very pleasant surprise. But. . . once again no wi-fi was detected. BUT in the lower right hand corner it hinted that there may be a solution. A little icon of a PCI card that when clicked on mentioned something about how there were non-free drivers for my hardware. I could see right there on the list my exact wi-fi drivers and some suggested Nvidia drivers. Well that was a welcome change!
So I installed Mintlinux on my hard drive that is sharing Windows Vista Home. Fairly strait forward process. . . easy instructions and questions that made sense, was fairly fast and once again very professional looking. Puppy Linux tended to take a more personal wordy approach to explaining things but Mint kept things simple and in a language that was just technical enough for me to not feel insulted but not riddled with obscure acronyms to leave me scratching my head wondering what was going on. Very well done.
So after it was finished and I re-booted I had a nice “GRUB” loader interface allowing me to pick which operating system to run and just so I felt safe I picked my Vista install. Worked without a hitch. So I re-started again and picked Mint 6 X64. Logged in, and dove right for the PCI card icon I saw on the live CD. I picked the “Tested by the Mintlinux developers” drivers and threw in the Nvidia ones and then re-booted. Unplugging my ethernet cable I then went into my “Network tools” which. . . was confusing because it just had a bunch of graphical versions of “Ping” “Whois” etc. . . not what I was looking for. . . Network Configuration! There we go. . . Wireless, add a new connection and. . . boom. Wifi on my broadom wi-fi card! I didn’t think that was possible in Linux. . . but there it was.
Elated I started playing around. Whats this “Do” thing. . . very. . . confusing. Notes? hmm. Right click . . . Un-install. . . wow! It actually un-installed the application I didn’t want instead of just deleting the shortcut and forcing me to hunt down another interface needed to un-install programs! Awesome! I ended up throwing a lot of stuff out. I. . . kind of wish there was a version of Mintlinux that was stripped of all apps. Just a file browser and enough drivers to get you up and running and then let you go from there. I dont’ like having all this “Stuff” to wade through. Feels like when you buy a computer from Computers-R-Us and it has all this trial stuff on there that you will never use. But as I said, Mintlinux made un-installing apps super easy and quick.
So far I have tried the 3D desktop stuff which I was very impressed with considering how chunky my video card is. The Compiz configuring interface was very easy to figure out accept for the “special” button. I guess they couldn’t just go out and say “Windows” button. But I figured it out soon enough. The “Special-tab” is a really cool Alt-Tab replacement. “Special-Tab” to cycle one way and “Special-Shift-Tab” to go the other. Good stuff.
In no time I was able to get Firefox with Foxmarks configured with all my bookmarks from Windows. I got Skype installed through the package manager. That was actually harder to set up than it was on PuppyLinux. In Puppy it just worked without me having to change any settings at all but in Mint I had to try from a list of different Sound In, Sound Out options that didn’t make much sense at all. I did stumble across a combination that worked but. . . why so many?
Pidgin worked great without any problems. I was really starting to enjoy this.
I started to install some of the more obscure things that I use every day. KDX from HAXIAL through wine. Wow. Worked seemlessly. The Bat e-mail client. . . unfortunately wasn’t as smooth. The interface kept getting garbled up. I probably should eventually move over to Thunderbird anyway. . . So then I tried the SUPER hard stuff.
3D rendering with messiah:studio.
Thats when I hit my first real snag. I could quite easily find and work with the files on my network server’s share but I could not for the life of me find WHERE it mounted it. I couldn’t configure wine to map a drive letter to my server without knowing the path. After a good long while I found out that the default file browser doesn’t mount network server shares anywhere at all! To do that you have to configure samba.
Yikes. This is the part of Linux I hate. After a few hours of poking around I finally found a crude little samba configuring tool that let me mount a network share. Then I eventually got that mount point mapped to a windows network drive and. . . THEN. . . finally. . . I got to try and render something with messiah:studio and. . . no love. It was asking too much I guess.
So! Overall? Very very awesome. It never once crashed, I got to play with lots and lots of really well written applications that all installed within a few cliks, and I never once felt the system chug or slow down in any way like I do with Vista. Everything felt Lighter, cleaner and more intuitive to set up. At one point as things were running so well I thought I might have downloaded the 32bit version by mistake. I mean. . . wasn’t flash in Linux supposed to be bad? Why was I able to see YouTube clips, play flash games while chatting on IRC, Skype, etc. My main XP64 workstation feels more slugish than this operating system and that thing has 6 gigs of ram vs this computers 1! I am very very impressed and wouldn’t hesitate at all to make this my main workstation if only I could get the pmG developers to port messiah:studio over to Linux. Or at least help me figure out the errors in wine. . . hmm.
This is about the 8th time I have re-built this same machine. I have gone through 4 motherboards, heaps of power supplies, hard drives, video cards etc. etc. Each time I swear I’m going to do it perfectly. . . with only the highest quality components, all recommended settings, drivers, requirements for everything. . . and without fail something will die.
This time it was my entire system disk. I think. I don’t really know for sure. Who ever does? Its not like there is a big red arrow pointing to the problem when things start to go bad. . . All I know is that on bootup it started getting stuck and re-boots itself. . . and then one time the bios said that that that disk is bad and that I should replace it. OK! Now. . . I will have to spend another entire day re-installing, re-licensing, re-configuring. . .
I am getting so tiered of it. I have some computers that last for 10+ years without me ever having to touch them. Sometimes I open them up just to blast out the thick layers of dust that have built up. But then others require constant attention and they can often be the exact same components! I have piles and piles of parts now from trying to get the stubborn ones to work. I can’t even park one of our cars in our garage now it has gotten so bad.
I think the problem is. . . that I expect too much. If a computer has 6 SATA ports. . . I use all 6. 64bit support? On it! Automatic updates? Right on! Got two gigabit Ethernet ports that can be bridged for extra speed? Do it! On-board RAID? Done. Course that takes forever to set up. . . and when its all done. . . is so stupidly unstable that eventually something breaks and I have to start all over.
I’m torturing myself aren’t I?
<sigh>
Blogs can be very helpful for self evaluation. . .
But you know. . . I NEED this stuff. I’ll often have 50 gigs worth of assets for just a quick little 30 second commercial. That all has to be backed up somewhere. My 3D animation apps need to see that full 64bit memory space. I’m constantly waiting for files to move around on my network etc etc.
I just need to figure out a better system that doesn’t take so much time, effort and energy when things go bad. :-/
A good friend of mine is doing some animation tests in messiah and I couldn’t help myself.
The only thing actually moving in my scene is the null that the shader is pointed too and then a little squash and stretch scale on y. The rest is all done in the shader. Taron and Fori rock.
Wasn’t last night’s Fringe amazing!?! They do such a good job of balancing humor, suspense, drama etc. This episode pretty much answered so many questions. . . but in such a way that it left you BEGGING for more.
A war with another dimension!?! Solders with special abilities!?! And who the heck wrote that book!?! Walter knows. He always knows. But with him being half nuts. . . Oh man. So much fun.
I’m still very loayal to Lost, Battlestar Galactica, 24 etc. But Fringe has really shot right up to being one of the shows I can’t WAIT to see every week. Awesome awesome stuff.