I’m going to be on a plane in 12 hours!
On Saturday, February 21 I’ll be teaching a 3 hour class on Variables and Expressions in Houdini, out of the Side Effects Software Inc. building in Santa Monica. I find it disappointing whenever we get new interns and they are afraid of the “technical stuff,” but it usually doesn’t take much before they understand that expressions are really not that bad. Expressions shouldn’t be frightening, and they aren’t that technical. The truth of the matter is, nine in ten dentists recommend the use of expressions. They’re an essential part of a complete breakfast!
I like video game music.
Lotsa stuff on the go lately! Like… say… a new year! Guess I didn’t really mention it in my last post, you know cause I already looked foolish enough having switched to Vista, but my family decided that they would convene in St. John’s this holiday season. No no, that’s not the foolish part. You see in November I diligently acquired my ticket and was all set to go. Now I guarantee you this story isn’t as confusing in print as it is verbally; but it turns out that what I actually purchased, was a ticket to Saint John. Spot the difference? Well unfortunately this was something that did not catch my attention until it was far too late into the game to solve. Needless to say I ended up not going to St. John’s for the holidays this year but I was lucky enough to get it sorted out before finding myself dashing through the snow in New Brunswick all by my lonesome.
Christmas ended up being fairly nice to me though, and I ended up with an assortment of goodies that I must now fawn over.
Ever since I dressed up as an 80’s rocker for Halloween… I’ve had this sickening obsession with Sebastian Bach. I’d owned the first Skid Row album since the late 90’s and while I liked the songs, it was never more than that. For some reason though, 18 and Life and Youth Gone Wild have been in my head practically every day since Halloween. I thus purchased Bring ‘Em Bach Alive, Slave to the Grind, and Subhuman Race and have listened to them all religiously ever since. Due to the proximity to the gift giving season however, I held off on getting anything else for a while. Luckily it paid off and I was given Angel Down. “You Don’t Understand”, “By Your Side” and “Falling Into You” are all great songs, don’t get me wrong, overall it’s a great album and I’ll continue to listen to it to death… but Mr. Bach… you just don’t sound like you’re trying like you used to. 18 And Life, I’ll Remember You, Youth Gone Wild, Slave to the Grid, Quicksand Jesus, In a Darkened Room, Wasted Time, Breakin’ Down, and Rock’N’ Roll all were incredibly gripping songs. And Axel? Well, to each their own I guess.
New Super Mario Bros. is another gift that I humbly received this Christmas. It’s a fun little game reminiscent of Mario 1,3, and 64. Since it’s on a hand held system, I do find it annoying that you cannot save and quit at any point that you are at the world map, however I can deal with it. All in all it’s fun, and I’m working my way through it when I have an odd moment free. One quirk is that I can’t seem to “get” to the 4th world. Odd… normally in the old Mario games one would try to find the secret routes around the levels… but here I am trying to find the secret route to levels that the natural flow of the game had me bypass. If you own a DS and have yet to check out this gem, do so at your earliest convenience.
Going exceptionally well with the festive spirit, I also received the first season of Dexter! I don’t have a cable connection, so I hadn’t caught any of Dexter yet save for the raving of co-workers who insisted it’s one of the best shows on television. This one was a complete surprise, and was definitely a great gift. If you’re not in the know, Dexter is a show staring a crime solving blood spatter expert who also happens to be a serial killer. Almost like a cross between CSI and Angel… but without any of the fantasy style magic that either of those shows has. Don’t tell me that CSI isn’t about magic, I *work* with computers! At any rate it’s based on (from what I hear) a great book, and they seem to pull off a narrative style quite nicely so that you get a sense of what’s going on inside the main character’s head without him having to explain it to all the characters. It hasn’t taken long to go all the way through the season, and I can say that without a doubt I’ll be picking up season two when I get a chance. But now the question is… do I go for plain ole DVD? Or do I step it up a level and pick it up on…. BLUERAY!!!
Not so much a present as something I purchased using money that was acquired through generosity… so… really a present. I am now the proud owner of a Playstation 3. Since it was picked up on boxing day, I got Little Big Planet for free. I’ve also in the meantime purchased Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. I mean… come on, how could you *not* get a game with that long of a title? You couldn’t not get a game with that long of a title. That’s how. My heart is also racing at the thought of getting the downloadable Castlevania, Megaman 9, and even Mortak Kombat II. Though in all honesty games that I truely want to get are Assassin’s Creed, Metal Gear Solid 4, Battlefield: Bad Company, and Mirror’s Edge. Of course, how will I be able to resist all of the version of Final Fantasy XIII when they come out? Speaking of things that I want: Dragon Quest V will be available dangerously soon.
Don’t worry. I don’t always babble on and on about things I have. Next time can be about cg.
I hate Vista, and I hate Adobe, and I hate Dell, and I hate NVidia. Note I may not actually *hate* any of these things. But they thoroughly frustrate me.
So the Antec power supply that I had bought to fix my Video card problems did not help me because the motherboard that came with my Dell Precision 490 requires both a 20 and a 24pin power connector. Lame as crap. So I returned the Antec power supply (still waiting for the moolah to come back my way even after all this time) and ended up buying myself a Thermaltake Power Express which is a PSU specifically for video cards which sits in an empty DVD drive slot. This is a product that I had no idea existed, but actually did the trick quite nicely. It says that it’s supposed to take the 24 pin.. but for some reason my computer wouldn’t work when I tried that… I tried the 20 pin however and it works like a charm.
So the video card now works, however, the Nvidia Geforce GTX 280’s heat up rather harshly. For some reason the Dell Precision 490 is set to have the fans really low, and thus when I start running Folding @ Home, the hard drives start heating up to 50C in no time at all. To get around this, I’ve had to remove the side of my computer case. Dell relinquishes control of the fans and lets me set them as fast as I want with the side removed and so I am able to keep everything at a reasonable temperature, but it now sounds like I have a freight train under my desk. I’m glad I have headphones.
Or do I?
For some reason I turned on my computer this morning only to discover that there was no sound. No windows start-up sound, no YouTube, no iTunes, no Windows Media Player, no Guild Wars, no test sounds for my sound card. Everything appeared to look fine… I could hear myself through my microphone, and the drivers all appeared to be functioning and up-to-date. But no sound. Five hours later, after uninstalling and installing and rebooting and wanting to stab myself in the eyes, I came across a forum with the tip that solved the problem. Simply go to control panel, Double-Click on the Sound Icon, single-click the sound card to highlight them, Click on Properties (bottom right corner). Magically after opening this menu, everything worked! Not impressed.
Speaking of not impressed, Photoshop CS4 sucks. Like really really bad. Seriously. If you consider switching to it… reconsider. It will kill every dream you ever had. The brushes lag, the zooming animation is horrible, the ipodesque panning is horrible, you can’t resize your various tool shelves, the 64bit version is crippled and will crash when you try to use text, gpu accelleartion is gimped in XPx64 and on Macs, and the 32 bit version doesn’t appear to allow you to use more than 3 gb of ram.
Stick with CS3.
Just wanted to let people know that I’ve done another short tutorial on a feature in Houdini’s Image Viewer (MPlay). Advanced users probably already know about it, but it’s a handy little feature that a lot of new people seem to be unaware of. It can be found here.
Sorry I don’t know your language, but I see you visiting! I always find it interesting when I see a spike in my traffic from a particular site, and it seems like cafe.naver.com has a link to my site in regards to the Renderman article I linked to last time. I’m not 100% sure about the google translation of this site, so I just want to clarify that it was someone else who wrote the article, but I’m glad that I was able to help other people find out about it! In other Houdini related news, you may be interested to know that your time to win a copy of Houdini Master is NOW! I’m currently working on making another tutorial series for Houdini, however there is no E.T.A. on when that shall arrive. I just had a chance to check out the new Digital Tutors training on Mantra however, and can safely say that it’s worth checking out if you’re interested in getting into rendering.
It’s been a while since my last post… my evenings have been eaten up quite heavily due to my decision to switch to Vista.
It all started when I decided that I should check out Adobe CS4. I was pretty excited actually, because when I bought my machine a couple of years ago, I got a 64bit quad core machine with a Quadro FX video card, and 6 gb of ram. When I found out that CS4 seemed to be designed for a 64bit environment with highend video cards in mind I wet my pants. Mentally. Anywhoo, I tried the trial of CS4, only to discover that the new GPU features weren’t designed with Windows x64 in mind. For shame, Adobe. So I took a chance and upgraded to Vista. I’ll spare you the spiel about how many fucking versions of this OS there are. I feel almost as confused as when I think about which Linux distribution I should consider.
So after spending some cash on Microsoft, I discovered that the Bios on my computer was a couple of years old, and disagreed with having Vista on it… it took me a couple of days to figure this out, but when I upgraded from version 2 to version 8, suddenly Vista seemed to be much more co-operative except for the fact that my expensive Quadro video card was not working properly. I discovered that while NVidia has drivers for the Quadro FX 4400 (my card), it actually isn’t on their Vista compatibility list and so doesn’t actually work. There appear to be a number of people on the net complaining that their Quadro 4400’s aren’t working in Vista… no response from NVidia on the matter. Though to be fair, there also appear to be reports of some people running 2 of them at the same time… Fun. So I decided “what the heck… printer manufacturers, scanner manufactureres, Adobe, Macintosh… they all have their hate on for XP… let’s just stick with Vista and try to move forward”.
So I bought a new video card, the NVidia Geforce GTX 280 that comes overclocked by BFG. For those considering the GTX280, keep in mind that this thing is the size of a short bus. I had to remove the blue safety clips from my Dell case so that I could close everything back up after installing this puppy. Though technically it’s not installed at the moment. I’m still using my original Quadro NVS 285 that came with the computer since I discovered that the GeForce card requires more power cables than what came with the Power Supply Unit in my Dell Precision 490. So now I’m awaiting my new Antec power supply which I’m hoping will solve all my problems.
I also had like a gallon of blood taken the other day when I went in for a physical. Afterward I went over to EBGames and picked up Guild Wars. I guess I do silly things when I have computers that barely work and am barely able to stay conscious. Keep in mind when looking at the screengrab to your left, that I’m using one of the weakest video cards available on the market and so must turn the graphics quality down while playing at the moment. That said, I’m sure the graphics won’t blow me away when I do have my good card working. I’ve been playing it a little though, and it’s fun so far. I’ve never gotten into MMORPG’s because I don’t believe in being taxed each month to be allowed to play the game that you purchased. Guild Wars doesn’t suffer from this problem. I say kudos to that. On a side note, EBGames is no more.
I noticed in my web traffic that I had some visitors coming from what appears to be a fantastic document on Renderman and Mantra shaders in Houdini over at render.ru. I unfortunately don’t understand the russian language at all, but Google Translate has let me read a bit of it. I’d definitely recommend you take a look at this if you want to get into shader building. I’d send you an email of congratulations, wiTcHer, but the website doesn’t appear to want to let me login (I probably messed something up while trying to register). The Houdini community could really stand to have this available in English!
Back in the days of yore, when I was a college student, I got some pointers from Aaron White on how to color animation. By the time we began working on our group films in third year, I realized that very few of the other students knew how to color their classical animation and so decided to whip up a document that would help the other people in the program get through the process. I don’t believe that Aaron had access to Flipbook when he originally demonstrated how one could color animation using actions and batch processes in Photoshop, but I figured out that Flipbook is actually quite well suited for coloring animation (which makes sense since it was designed with classical animation in mind) and so this tutorial covers a workflow that uses both Photoshop and Flipbook. This tutorial probably won’t be too useful for those who normally visit this site, however after learning that Sheridan still has my tutorial in circulation I decided that it was worth adding to my tutorial section here.
I’m obsessed at the moment.