Deadline Day

After being back at work for a few days it occurred to me that term starts soon and I have a deadline to meet with the 3D character I'm working on. It'snothing but deadlines at the moment. I'm ramping up my freelance work to hopefully hasten the day when I can go totally freelance again, which I'm shooting for this Christmas or thereabouts. So anyway this 3D work...

Dean Cook, an old mate of mine from way back, and we're talking before I moved to the West country over 14 years ago here, who I used to do a lot of writing web and graphics work for got in touch a while back and asked me if I could make a 3D character for a client of his. He'd actually been looking for me and finally tracked me down, but I cover my tracks on the Internet so as to minimise the dreaded SPAM,so it was a bit of detective work. Not having been using my 3D program Lightwave 3D for the longest time I was afraid it had been so long I wouldn't know how to use it. So I did an all nighter and got the thing pretty much done.

But it wasn't finished and I was conscious that time was marching on so I took today off and worked all day from 8am till now to get it done and it looks pretty good. I can't show you any of it because it's commercial work and the client hasn't even seen it yet.

Actually not using the program for a long time and coming back to it was a really good thing as it turned out. I watched a tutorial video (from my friends Desktop Images) and relearned it from scratch. I learned a good few cool new habits, and forgot all my totally entrenched ways of working with the old version of the program.

I also reacquainted myself with some good old friends in the process, as I asked a few questions on the Lightwave forum, and some people were like "Phil glad to see you welcome back" which touched me, really. One of them, Ben Vost, an old chum from back in the Amiga days, is now actually working for NewTek in Paris, so I hooked up with him and we might be doing some work. Cross fingers.

Anyway check out the picture (click on it to go to the original page) and laugh as Lee Harvey Oswald jams along with Jack Ruby...

Laters

urrr... argh... !!!

Man I feel crappy today. The virus that's been going around is playing havoc with me. First week I felt all throaty and headachey, then last week I had no energy, now this week I feel fine apart from the fact I ache in all my joints like my bones are grinding together. (long sigh)

Went to work today but felt kinda weird. Woke up way too late and took Mia into work because both of us ignored the alarm. Fortunately the kids had an early night so got up and were ready for school.

And yeah, the title of this entry is an impression of the Mutant Enemy logo from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I feel like I'm walking around like a stiff zombie or something.

Took a call via Skype with McNulty about our secret animation projects. Got some stuff really worked out. I'm using Skype more and more as an office phone. Obviously it's the same number wherever I am, at home or at "work" at the school. Good for the future when I go freelance again, which I have to say is much on my mind after the year I've had. We'll see.

Oh and check this out NewSight 3D displays. Really interesting 3D TV sets. At the moment apparently they just rent them out for £4,000 a pop, but I'm reliably informed that such technology is coming soon to a front room near you...

Spent some time this evening making Hattie's Web Site for her podcast a blog so she can do her own show notes instead of me having to hack raw HTML after publishing each show. All I need to do now is teach her how to work Podcast Maker and she can publish them too.

Anyway feeling crappy so time for bed.

Nighty night.

Late Night - No Reason

Dang. We stayed up really late last night for no good reason as far as I could see. Ted and Mia were playing "Juiced" and "Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition" on the Playstation 2. I was on the Internet applying for writing jobs, calling a few night owl friends like Brent, and playing with some new bits of software I got. Hattie was trying to get to sleep without much success. Literally I think we were up till 4.30am. I still have no clue why.

I think partly it was because Mia was waiting for me to finish noodling about with my computer, and I was waiting for her to stop playing games so we could go to bed.

So what was I noodling about with? I got a demo copy of a really cool piece of software called Maxwell Render, which is THE top notch realistic renderer for 3D software. You can get close to full reality with this thing, I kid you not. Go see their web site by clicking on the name back there in the last sentence and you'll see what I mean. Check out this picture by Mike Verta, and click on it to see it full size. You would not know this was CG. It looks like a photo. Amazing.

Oh and I was also using a piece of software called Crossover that allows users of Intel based Macs to run PC software. Yeah, you just run the software on the Mac side and the Crossover program emulates everything the software is doing and makes it work on the Mac. Genius. Okay so if you were running really heavy duty PC programs which "hit the metal" as we say, or use the hardware directly, you might consider using Boot Camp (a way of booting the Mac into Windows mode) which is going to be way more stable every time. But as a quick fix for any little Windows software gadgets, you know... KOFF-keygens-KAHAK! Sorry, I have a cough. Anyway, little programs will be fine. Running MAYA 7? Nyah, not so sure that would work.

Oh yeah and I also put up episode 6 of Hattie's podcast, which of course you know you can find on iTunes in the podcast directory by typing "hattie south", or by going to the Advanced menu, chooseing Subscribe to Podcast and typing in: "http://babypodcast.ideasdigital.com/babypodcast001.xml". That should fix you right up.

I discovered something really cool too. If you update your podcast regularly, you might have to wait a few days before iTunes updates it for you, but what you CAN do is type this into a browser:

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/
pingPodcast?feedURL=http://(INSERT YOUR FEED ADDRESS HERE)

and that pings the Apple iTunes server to seek out your feed and change anything you altered in the iTunes directory. Okay so I only did it yesterday so it might not work, but we'll see.

And I had the most EVIL time upgrading to iTunes 7. If you are an iTunes user I suggest you hang back for bit before the upgrade from 6 to 7. I had the worst trouble getting it to work and I am a total iTunes/podcast NUT right now. The way I got around the fact it crashed all the time was like so:

• make sure I had the latest Quicktime installed, which I didn't
• delete everything apart from my tunes in the itunes directory within the music folder on the Mac
• re-import all the tunes after iTunes sorted itself out

It was torture and burned a lot of my time on Saturday after two days with no iTunes.

Okay cats and kittens. Be good.

Click Here for cool Maxwell Render Demo