Chasing cars

My first calc1 teacher spoke very poor english, but one of the things I remember he said very clearly was, "This class will be like riding in a car; if you are up with the car, in it, it will not be difficult to stay with it, if you fall out you will be running trying to catch up." I suspect it lost a bit of it's poignancy in the translation from mandarin, but the message comes through: this is going to be fast, you'd best keep up. I failed that calc class. Apparently not only did I fall out of the car, but as I was running I was hit by a bus, but I digress. I'm beginning to lag behind the video releases, that is to say video is currently coming available faster than I can watch it. I know I have an edge on them, in that there's only 75+ hours total, and I have at least 2 more weeks (I'm trying to finish everything in the original 4 weeks, just for a challenge... I'm a masocist or something, I don't know), but I still feel behind when there is a new rar on the ftp server before I've had a chance to watch ANY of the previous release.

On the other hand, I just passed assignment2, putting me over the 50% mark (6 of 11) as far as number of assignments goes. Oh well, the more I type the less time I have to run, and this car is doin' anything but slowing down.

Quote of the day:

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards coud produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true." --Robert Wilensky

Too tired to think

After last night's little stunt (plus having to go to both of my jobs today) I'm unusually tired for it only being 00:15BST, so I put in an hour and finished that spaceship model. I'm putting off the rest for tomorrow (maybe even tomorrow morning!) so that I have some hope of rentention.

Here's what I have so far:



Quote of the day:

"We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police." --Jeff Marder

11th inning stretch (as in stand up and)

Just finished assignment11, very easy, it was just a more complicated version of number 10 with a twist at the end. Once these are all graded I'll have all of the node assignments out of the way, and I'll set to modeling. This has been a very productive (albiet long) night. I wish there was a picture or something I could post for all you loyal fans, but I guess I'll have to leave you with a rain check. Now, I have some actual work (as in what I get paid to do) to do, so I'll yak at y'all later.

Quote of the day:

"I'll take 'Anal bum-cover' for seven thousand" --Sean Connery in Celebrity Jeopardy

assignment10

Man it was easy, 10 minutes tops. This makes me think I can finish the next assignment by dawn and be done with it, leaving me just assignment2 for the weekend. Here goes nothing.

Quote of the day:

"A lie told often enough becomes truth." -Lenin

assi9

So I just completed assi(gnment)9, finally... it only took 8 times longer than the estimated time. It was actually a really good experience, both in solving a simple problem with unfamiliar tools, and in teamwork. Schyzomaniac (all of hims) and I teamed up to whip the problem using Skype and VNC for communication, all based on each of us complaining in the classroom at the same time.

I'd love to post a pic, but it's 4:30AM and I have work tomorrow, so I better get cracking if I want to finish the next optional assignment.

Quote of the day:

“Remember the Alamo! Shoot ‘em! To show you how radical I am, I want carjackers dead. I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want child molesters dead. I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. No early release. I want ‘em dead. Get a gun and when they attack you, shoot ‘em.” - Ted Nugent

Moving ahead and falling behind.

Both of the assignments I turned in (1 & 8) passed, also people seemed to like my ball, which is always a good thing. Equally fortunately, since I passed those two assignments I now have more assignments to finish by the end of the 5 weeks than I had (I had needed to do 8, now I need to do 9), because there's more node based assignments! Nodes remind me very much of programming in assembly; very few commands, but if you can use them creatively they're very fast and flexible.

I put some work into the second node based assignment, and indeed I set a new record for fewest nodes required to fulfill most of the requirements, I made a color selector with override in two nodes (neither of which are conditions), unfortunately a side effect of my design is that I can't incorperate the remaining funcionality in the remaining 4 nodes. I have to scrap it and start over... either that or punt and go work on modeling for project 2. Here's my progress on that (keep in mind, the requirements for this assingment leave no room for creativity):



Quote of the day:

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" --GWB

I'm unique, like everyone else.

Well I've finished and turned in project 8 of the MFC (which, I had been under the impression, would have three projects). Once again I made it far more complicated than it ever needed to be, but that seems to be the way I do things that I'm new at. I'd post a screenshot, but the only visual parts of it are the solution and a colored sphere, one would destroy the assignment for those who've not yet tried it, and the other is kinda lame.

Instead I'll give you a screenshot of my tallented ball project which is currently rendering. Once it's done I'll render it again, then add sound, then encode it and turn it in. Seem like too many steps? Perhaps the screenshot will give you a clue... they don't call it a 3d program for nothing.



I made the stereogram movie by first doing the tallented ball assignment as described in the class, then instead of adding one camera and pointing it via a perspective window, I added two targeted cameras then used the hypergraph to pipe the location of one target into the location of the other. Once I had two "eyes" that always looked at the same thing I relocated them to be near each other, only differing by a unit on the plane perpendicular to the line from between them to their shared focus. Then it's just a matter of double rending everything and putting the render from the right "eye" on the left side and vice versa.

Quote of the day:

"Yes, as reason has been a major part of biblical religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake." --Jon Stewart

Nonpoint said it best, "what a day"

I got a parking ticket today when I went to the bank because I didn't have a parking permit. The parking permit costs $175 and the ticket was for $25. That means that unless you go to the bank more than 7 times per semester and are the single most unlucky person on earth, it is more cost effective to violate the law, but it still goes on my record. If that doesn't strike you as being a fundamental flaw in the system re-read it until it does.

In terms of Maya, on the other hand, it was actually a good day, I got a huge % of project 1 done. I have all but one of the models made, all the textures done, the storyboard done (digitally, not dead-tree), the rigging done, and I have a good start on the animation. I've had my fair share of problems, but all were solved with a combination of buzznet and rewatching VTMs. Overall the class is looking up. Here's a quick render for you guys of what I got done today.



I already posted about one of the problems I had, another was in the construction of the mic stand. Because I'm going to be animating my mic stand to retract into the stage I wanted to parent the mic to the stand. Unfortunately that caused the mic to deform every time I rotated it. Thanks to some spot on help from Paul Holm and patience from Draqen I got it all sorted out, but I'll refrain from posting my solution until I get one back from Buzzak, this is the type of question that should be asked publicly (otherwise many people will wonder the same thing).

Quote of the day:

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" - Benjamin Franklin

Here they come!

So there seems to be method to Zak's madness (a real shocker right :-P ). For reasons beyond my skillset's ability to understand, the curtains that I deviated from the lesson on now seem to be texturing wrong in a perspective viewport and I don't know why. I animated them with an SDK so that as one opens (without a rod, just a scaleZ transform) the other will open too, when I textured them here's what happened (note: all of the curtains are the same material, and it's working for the top one).



Followup: When I tried to test render this it got worse, condensing each end of the curtains to a single point on stage right, and the one on stage left had two CVs (the lower corners) march back a ways towards the black wall. I don't know why any of this happened, but rather than figure it out I just nuked the curtains and started over. This time I made the plane, textured it, deformed it, and animated it, in that order (when the problem happened I had made the plane, deformed it, animated it, then textured it, I don't think it matters, but I don't know). So far its working much better, and I'm carrying on, I'll post a pic when I finish.

Quote of the day:

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." --E. B. White

My eyes hate me

I have done it, I've sat through an average of 5 hours of content per day for three days. I feel pretty good about everything, but we'll see how it goes when I start trying to make it work. I suppose it's good that I've finished watching everything, because tomorrow it's scheduled that they give us 5 more hours to watch.

I did have one question, in the VTM where Zak makes the curtains move he binds the width of the nurbs plane to the length of a polygon cube, then groups them so he can control both curtains with one resize of a cube, but my question is, why? Why not just bind the width of one to the width of the other and then just scale one of them?

Once the class starts (in the next day or two) I'll ask and post the answer.

Quote of the day:

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss

One Up and other wonderfull mushrooms

I've just finished watching the Section I - Introduction VTMs, and have learned several things about the Maya UI that were completely overlooked in the book I read, as well as the VTMs included with the UT2k4 Bonus DVD. Important things, like dockable viewports. I'd love to write more, but that takes time, and with my schedule I need all the time I can get.

Quote of the day:

"Never trust a man who can count to 1023 on his fingers." Unknown, found on thinkgeek.com's "what users are saying" page.