May Contain Nuts

Okay, either I exude some kind of little-boy chemical into the air that causes people to be really, really nice to me or the career services director is completely taken with me (that, or she’s far nicer and supportive than anybody in the natural world… which means she’s either a clone, or a robot… or Canadian… )

*ahem*

Anyway, I went to Career Services yesterday like I said I would and was pretty much fawned over for the 20 minutes I was there talking to Jessica (the career services director). She said a lot of really nice things and gave me a few pointers on how to tweak Revision1.com to provide more ready access to my relevant portfolio work in MAX and Photoshop. After that, I spent another 5 hours working on the Levee scene, which is really starting to take shape and only has some final texturing and a couple of little modeling tasks left (realized I didn’t quite build everything I wanted to include, and still have a little bit of tweaking to do on the ground planes and background “set”). I should be able to finish the scene and get it rendering tonight, which will leave the rest of the weekend open to getting the actual demo reel compiled, and send it off before Monday rolls around. That will leave me the rest of the week to get the current milestone done for my web development contract, and hopefully I’ll be able to wrap that up on time… if I go over by a couple of days I should easilly be able to make that up in the next milestone, because this one, contrary to what I thought while I was doing my preliminary planning around which I based my milestone targets, this one is going to be the heavy-hitter on the backend where I get all of the code necessary to drive the website’s front-end tools needs to be written or at least put in place for later fleshing-out. Future milestones will largely just build on this basic framework, so I need to take some time to really plot out how things are going to be broken up.

I’m still working on that “other” entry, and should have it finished by the end of the night as well. I’ll post it tomorrow before my family heads to Paramount’s King’s Island for a day of fun and roller-coaster-driven adrenaline rushes.

So I spent an unprecedented 12 hours at ITT today working on stuff to put into my portfolio. The tail end of the demo reel is already finished because it’s largely a slideshow with a couple of animated clips from older projects at ITT thrown in for good measure. I’ve been putting it together in iMovie on the Mac I currently have on loan to me for the web development gig I’m doing.

Anyway, despite having spent 12 hours at ITT, I only walked out with 10 seconds of completed portfolio content in the form of a Pahket fly-around render (ala the Age fly-throughs in the Myst games) that I had to re-start several too many times for my own liking because I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what I was doing, and so a 3-4 hour render ended up taking the whole 12 hours to complete .

Part of the reason why I only walked out with that one 10-second clip completed is because I was trying not to rush the rest of the buildings in the Levee scene, though I dunno how well I did on that score presently, and there’s still more to be built.

The other part of why I didn’t get much of anything else done is because of Izac’s character model. I have a feeling the biped became corrupted when the application crashed on me last night while I was rigging an animation with him in it, because his neckline started acting all weird-like shortly after that. The problem later expanded to encompass his neck and shoulders, and was starting to worm its way down his upper torso by the time I called it quits. The biped is definitely messed up though… and I’m probably going to have to re-build Izac from scratch to ensure that this doesn’t happen again the next time I try leaning him up against a wall all cool-like. However, such a drastic move does have its advantages… as he is right now, Izac’s rather difficult to animate, he tends to fold in ways normal being shouldn’t when he puts his arms at his sides, and trying to actually put a texture on him is like trying to paint a hyperactive gnat with a toothbrush. I can take this opportunity to revise his mesh so he’s more fox-like, so that his ears don’t continue to collapse into his head when he gets sad or scared, and so that his chest doesn’t look like it’s imploding when he puts his arms at his sides. And I can make him easier to texture, as well as easier to animate… some pieces of his anatomy just don’t work very well, like his hands (thumbs especially), and I’ve been wanting to re-build his limbs for some time now to enable him to have more realistic muscle bulges when he moves. I also want to actually *attach* his collar to him this time instead of building it seperately and then trying to act surprised when I see his neck clipping through it in every other frame.

At least the brief nightmare on DPWR has taken care of itself… yesterday we lost almost 4 months of stuff from the database, and I get a response from my host saying the SQL server crash took out the machine with the most recent backups on it as well, so they weren’t going to promise anything as far as getting my stuff back up. So, I went to school rather annoyed this morning around 10:00 am (after I got everything sorted out with DPWR), and later logged on to check on how things were going I saw that the site was down again. So, I changed the database login back to what it was before the crash knocked out my first database username, and was pleasantly surprised to see that everything was back to normal again. Whee! So, moral of the story: make regular backups.

Have a lot to do with the web dev gig this coming week… can’t go into details, but it’s gonna be a rougher ride from here on out than it has been, so hopefully the rest of my life can calm down long enough for me to crank this job out on time and bug-free. I’m pretty certain that IPB is going to be upgraded to version 2.1 before I’m done though, which means I’ll probably be splitting my time working on getting DPWR updated and getting the skin (which, although very nice, is slightly inconsistent in its design and needs some general revising) updated, as well as installing the latest (still to be released) version of Invision Gallery.

To quote Blazing Saddles, “Work work work, work work work, work work work.”

Well, quite a lot has happened since my last update… Let’s go through it, shall we?

Ash got in on the first, and all was rejoicing and happiness, whee! Mom and I went to pick her up at the airport and we brought her home to a fine home-cooked meal of Gold Star Chili (it’s a Cincinnati thing, nevermind), after which we talked in the living room for a while before going to bed.

Wednesday we started day-tripping to the sights and sites around town. We went to the Cathedral in Covington (links will be added later… maybe…), then to Eden Park, Krohn Conservatory, and finally Union Terminal, one of the damn coolest pieces of art deco architecture ever built. Ever. Thing’s freaking enormous too.

Thursday we had brunch with my grandma, then we went home and I finished up my final project and we headed off to school to demonstrate it. Hutchins (my teacher) was speechless. He gets really annoyed when I do this kind of crap, and he made that rather well known. Not to say he was mad or disappointed… more like he just couldn’t find anything to critique me on besides a strange floating pink box that ended up in the renders of the observation deck (I think Marcel accidentally unhid it when he was helping me with the final images and animations… for which I am very very grateful… Marcel is awesome, I must send him thank-you somethings). So that was a huge success… thank god. Bloody thing nearly drive me insane, especially the hotspot programming bit. Oy.

Anyway, Friday was a rather short day because it was graduation, so we didn’t really get much else done. Graduation was at 7, and I was rather confused and worried when I flipped through the graduation program and couldn’t find my name… Hutchins came over and teased me about it (bad idea teasing someone who just spent the last three weeks panicing over a project by coming up and telling him the floating pink box failed him…). What actually happened was that for some reason they forgot to list me under the Multimedia department, though I was, in fact, listed under the Highest Honors graduates (kept my 4.0 all the way to the end, woo-hoo!). There was a small seet inserted into the back of the program with a “corrected list” of Multimedia graduates… all three of us. Anyway, got through the ceremony with diploma (will scan it later) and highest honors trophy in-hand (had to give back my honors cords and National Technical Honors Society stole because ITT is cheap ) and Ash, mom, dad, Tim, and I went down to the riverfront (a 3 minute walk, tops) to have dinner at TGI Fridays. After that we went to Blockbuster to rent some movies. Unfortunately, Blockbuster is no longer a movies-only kind of store, which has destroyed their selection, much to my annoyance. However, we did find two things to rent, so we came home and watched one (Kaena: The Prophecy… an older but very well-done CG film, which to my fascination had one of the Revelation team members in its character animation department: Pascal Blanche [I'm too tired to do accenting on the E, but it's there]) before trekking up to bed.

Saturday was the family graduation party, so again, not much tripping was done. Got a fair amount of moolah, and afterwards we went to Best Buy to get a copy of L.A. Story (which for some reason we never bought despite mom’s adoration of the movie). We were going to rent it, but as I mentioned above, Blockbuster’s selection sucks now, so it’s now a permanent spot in my movie library. We also bought some printer ink for my Epson because I’m totally out of everything, but I still need to get 2 more cartridges. Been buying them in stages to spread out the cost… ink is NOT cheap, and it’s even less so when you own a 6-cartridge photo printer .

Aaaanyhoo, the rest of Saturday was spent working on a project which I am now contracted to do for an exhorbitant amount of money, much to my delight, amazement, and relative terror. Can’t post anything more about it, but it’ll be keeping me busy for the next couple of months.

Sunday mom took Ash and me out and about downtown Cincinnati to see more sights. We got to go to the top of Carrew Tower (tallest building in Cincy) and look around on the observation deck. After that we roamed the streets and ended up at Sawyer Point Park, then we roamed some more and ended up back at the car with a significant number of photographs. Since it was after 5 we figured (correctly) that the Art Museum (which we’d tried to get to Wednesday but ended up at Union Terminal instead) was closed, so we went home, had dinner, hung out around the house, watched Last Samurai, and went to sleep.

Monday we tried going to the art museum again, only to discover to our dismay that the art museum is closed on Mondays. Apparently such information was news to everyone in the family. So, with that plan again foiled, we decided to literally walk around the art museum, then took off to see the University of Cincinnati, which has, much to my surprise and amazement, made huge progress since I was last there. They might actually finish their MainStreet Construction project on-time (maybe not on-budget, but possibly on-time… a real rarity in this city). It started raining while we were there, and the ride back home was rather unceremoniously interrupted by me spilling my bottle of coke all over the truck because my hands and the bottle were both slick from the rain. I never claimed to be coordinated. The rest of Monday and all day today were spent in a fairly mopey sort of way, wishing Ash didn’t have to go back to Portland without me, which really only got worse after I dropped her off at the airport. And to top the day off, I had to close booth.

Which brings me to my penultimate paragraph… Apparently while I was gone, the “MP3 players keep Booth employees from going psycho and killing people” policy was over-ruled by the “floor people don’t think it’s fair that Booth employees get to wear mp3 players while they’re working” policy, which means no more Benton at work on Thursdays to keep me from being in a really pissed off mood. This only served to piss me off, and then I didn’t have my music to calm me down again (and I was already in a crummy mood before I got to work), so it took Pat getting out a hack saw, a dremel, and a steel rod to cheer me up again (we were working on one of Pat’s super-insanity projects which involves steel rods, film rollers, and new film syncing paths). Tiffany going and getting me snackies certainly helped too. Generally speaking, though, it was a quiet night, which is good, because I don’t think I would have been able to handle Ash leaving, losing my MP3 player because the floor is full of whiney bastards, AND having to do an NCN changeout plus 3 weekly cleanings all in one night. As it stands I only had to do 1 weekly projector cleaning and there was no NCN changeout. My sole comfort in knwoing that I still have to work at AMC until I get a permanent full-time job is that this contract job will bring in almost as much in 3 months as I make in a year at AMC< so I'll be in the money for a while... can finally get to fund some professional purchases, like a Photoshop upgrade, a Power Mac, a 23" cinema display... the works. w00. And what doesn't go into professional stuff will go towards the truck and my student loans.

Last paragraph, and then I’ll shut up. I may also be getting a third job working with my former classmates and hutchins to do some math tutorials for ITT to help decrease their apparently massive failure rate since the math classes went online-only. So hopefully that’ll pan out as well.

I swear there’s something in the universe out there trying to tell me to stop trying so hard… either that or I have this inate ability to turn anything I spend more than an hour on into pure gold… I assembled a portfolio for (of all things) Portfolio (actually called “Professional Procedures”) class tonight in the 2.5 hours prior to the start of class, and that included going to Walgreens and buying the materials for the binder and tabs. At the moment, with all the other stuff I have crowding my brain, I was just shooting for something that would be decent enough to skate by with maybe a low “A”. What ended up happening was this:

I spent 2.5 hours assembling a portfolio (buying the binder, divider tabs, typing all of the text (or copying it from existing documents) for class. I got to class late because I wanted to at least turn in something complete, rather than completely half-assed. Ms. Casarez (the instructor) not only thought I did a good job on the assignment, she said, and I quote from the grading rubric that was attached when I got it back, “the best I have seen!” She also asked me if she could use it as an example later on in the class, so I said fine. I was not, however, aware that it was the first time she’d *ever* shown off a student’s work as an example in any of the classes she’d ever taught. She also volunteered herself to be included on my list of references.

My brain hurts. See, it’s things like this that just break my concept of how things are supposed to work in the world… there were people in that class who no doubt spent a lot more than 2.5 hours on their portfolios, but for some reason mine was the one that apparently blew her away. I dunno, I guess this is a good thing when taking into account that she used to work in HR and she said that between the portfolio design and my resume cover letter, she not only felt like she wanted to meet me, but that she needed to hire me. Guess it’s really just a matter of visually standing out enough from the crowd to get noticed (I was the only person to use the binder style I picked up at Walgreens), and then being on equal footing with the guy who stuffed everything in a boring old black folio binder they’ve had for a few years. I personally see nothing exceptional about much of anything in my portfolio, and the print quality on the Sample Works pages is abysmal because my printer is running out of ink. However, my inability to notice the fact that I apparently do stunning work even on very short time scales might just be because I’m so used to my writing style and that making visually pleasing-looking designs for things has become so second nature to me that what I think of as a half-decent stab at a portfolio outline is in fact a stand-out entry in an application process.

I’ve got a ways to go before I consider this portfolio complete. First of all, I need larger, better quality images for my Sample Works with more detailed descriptions of the scenes. Secondly, I need to create and include a demo reel on DVD and VHS formats (odd as it may sound, most places still want your stuff on VHS). Finally, I need to make sure my references section is updated and complete, and that my closing statement is more than two sentences long (doesn’t need to be another full-page letter like the cover letter ended up being, but more than “thank you. Please call” would be nice ).

In other news, I’m contemplating turning all of my lights in Pahket to shadow mapped lights rather than ray-traced lights because this stuff is just taking way too damn long to render. We’ll see how Brian’s render farm tackles things first, though. Ultimately, I need to be compositing final images and animation into Flash by Friday, and audio needs to be acquired and edited to fit by Monday, so I’ll be busy as hell over the weekend.

And then Oscy shows up Tuesday. Gods, I’d better not be a jibbering idiot by then… I somehow get the feeling Hutchins won’t fail me even if the project isn’t 100% complete because he knows I’ve been busting my ass on it since day 1, but there’s still that lingering fear that I won’t make it down the aisle on the 4th that’s keeping me from sleeping well, if I sleep at all. That, and I’m getting restless waiting for Osc to get here.

And then I need to find a new job capable of paying for the massive amount of student loan debt I’ve accumulated while going to school. And here I thought things would get easier when I got older… hah!

Random blurbage… didn’t do much at work tonight, and will doubtless have little to do tomorrow as well, since I am unexpectedly and unfathomably not closing on Sunday for what feels like the first time in a year (I know it’s been substantially less, but every week feels like a month at AMC, especially when the low-budget crap movies all come out at once in late winter and again in early fall… really, why do we need a sequel to The Mask?).

Pahket is progressing very nicely… I’ve everything on the construction end completed except for a few more textures to apply and a couple more cameras to rig, and then it’s render time *shudder*. God willing, this won’t take more than 10 days to render, especially since Marcel has agreed to assist me in my quest for graduation. Marcel is a nice man, I should send him chocolates or something . I can start compositing completed materials on Tuesday when school opens up again after President’s Day, so I can probably set my computer up to render all day Monday (can’t render tomorrow, mom’s apparently decided that tomorrow is plaster-sanding day in my room, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to have plaster dust clogging up my computer fans).

I should note once again my distaste for fast food employees. I decided that since I had a coupon for a buy one get one free dealy at McDonald’s for their chicken selects things, I’d get some for dinner tonight. I asked for a chicken select value meal and mentioned that I had a buy one get one free coupon I wanted to use. So I was charged for and received 3 chicken selects, one of which I got free because of the coupon. Unfortunately, that wasn’t how I’d planned on that going. But, given how well the 3-piece seemed to fill me up tonight, I think the two remaining boxes in the fridge downstairs should last me through a couple meals (probably before work and during break if I’m really hungry, which oddly enough I usually am), making it somewhat, but not entirely cost effective. Or maybe I’m just expecting too much of the graveyard shift, I dunno.

I also added Frodo to the list of blogs in the sidebar, for those of you interested in reading the musings of a roller-blading dragon .

Finally, on the employment front, Oscy’s parents may have unearthed something for me in the web field that I can do long-distance on the side. Still in the early stages of things, but hopefully I’ll get a go-ahead on this one, unlike the last two “new job, w00!” false starts I’ve had. Also need to get a portfolio put together for class and after I graduate I’ll try to get a demo reel put together in a few weeks. Planning on using tax return plus any monies from graduation presents to fund a Mac mini I can use for video editing and such (Photoshop will be ported to the mini eventually, after hammering out a software upgrade/platform switch deal with Adobe involving blood, ritual sacrifice, payment of firstborn, and something about a hair curse…)

Oh, and one last thing before I go… does anyone who reads this blog have any idea whether I can use a PS/2 to USB adapter to plug my PS/2 mouse/keyboard into a Mac and expect it to work?

So, I finally managed to get something to render on my computer for easy uploading, yay! This is a view inside the lab, looking at one of the small lab tables. The elevator is on the right, with the spiral stairs sweeping up around it, and the dark patch on the left is the frame for another window. No video post effects were added to the scene for this render, so the lamps and elevator buttons don’t glow. Anyway, this is mainly an environment and lighting test; real final shots will probably be rigged for completion tomorrow (pending the installation of the observatory roof…).

Pahket update: render times may bring me down to the last minute on this one if the computer at school doesn’t render much faster than my desktop here, which literally chokes on the exterior mesh now because of the high polycount. Efforts to create an update image for your viewing pleasure have met with stout resistance from the computer, demanding 4 hours to finish just over a half of a single, final, full-sized image.

Took another trip to the Apple store today and got to play with a Mac mini… those things’re cool. And with as small and light as they are, I’ve no doubt someone will eventually make good on their eternal promise to throw their computer out the window the next time it does . It’d be a lot easier than tossing a tower (you’re liable to pull your back out doing that), and a LOT less expensive than chucking a G5 iMac or a PowerBook (or any other laptop computer for that matter) . I had to force myself to leave before I did something I knew I’d regret, like trying to buy a computer with no money… I had to warn the store employees not to sell me anything.

I can honestly say that tonight was a night at work where absolutely NOTHING happened. I got to monitor a trainee for almost 5 hours to make sure he didn’t botch anything up, and then I turned everything off and went home over the following 3 hours. Thrilling, I tell ya. On the bright side, though, I did get to see the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trailer. That movie looks stellar, really. Can’t wait for May… but first, must get project done and graduate and get Ash out here in March… and find a job… then I’ll worry about May.

And now, it’s sleepy time, or nearly so. So I’ll bring this to a close without explaining what the title has to do with this entry whatsoever, bwahaha!

So graduation is literally right around the corner now… coming down to the wire and Pahket’s not anywhere close to being fully completed, but I’m still pretty sure it’ll get done in time. Might take a bit of cramming toward the end and some prayers to the deities that control how nicely Flash behaves, but I think I’ll make it. I did some math at work and figured I have roughly 100 stills and 14 animations left to render. The animations should total about a minute to a minute and a half, which is 30 frames per second times ninety seconds, or an additional 2700 frames tops, for a total of 2800 total frames left to render. Now, you might think that’s an insane amount of frames left to complete in the time I have remaining, but when you take into account that the computer I’m using at school can crank out a still frame in about 6 minutes on average (as opposed to the 25 minutes it takes on my desktop), that equates to 11 days of render time. If I use both that computer and mine, that cuts the time down even more, and I still have about 18 days before presentations are due, so I think I’ll make it. The way I’ve been rendering things so far, I can compile what I’ve already got into Flash while I’m waiting for the next batch of stills and animations to finish. Whee.

I’ve given up on the hospital, because nobody has ever called me back about the job and I don’t want it badly enough to go pester the hell out of the HR people day after day. A potential web development job which sparked the completion of the Revision 1 Studios website also seems to have fallen through since neither myself nor the teacher who pointed me at the job have heard back from the guy since the job opening was posted. Le sigh.

I plan on asking Hutchins if I can sneak back into the lab after I graduate and put together a demo reel, since I don’t really have the ability to compile one here at home. I’m going to take a lot of the stuff I’ve done in the past, spruce it up a bit more, and put it together in a video showcase of my work. I plan on having as many of the modeling projects as I can collect from Hutchins, plus I think I can recycle most of the biped animation from my Animation II final project with Izac acting all Return of the King-ish . I’ve re-built him considerably since then, so it’d be nice to use the updated version of him in the scene rather than the clunky-but-still-fantastic-for-a-first-try mesh that’s currently being used. Hooray for my decision to torture myself into learning how to use Biped… I think that one’s going to pay off nicely. I will have to re-work the feet in the animation, though, ’cause the original mesh didn’t have seperate bones for the toes and the new one does. Whee. Still, re-working the feet is a lot better than rebuilding the whole thing. And re-doing the lip-sync will be cake. That’ll take all of about 15 hours total (by contrast, animating the body took a LOT longer than that originally).

What else? Oh, of course, obvious stuff! I’ve got an oscy coming to visit for my graduation, yay!!! And I basically am taking 5 consecutive days off of work for the end of the quarter between graduation stuff and going to pick up oscy, double-yay!!!!

I’ve been trying, in between sleeping (that’s become a problem of late for me, as some folks may have noticed…), working, going to school, and working on my project, to get my room cleaned up, because it really really needs it. I’ve made significant progress, and I think I’ll have it in a somewhat livable state by the time March 1st rolls around and Ash arrives. Huzzah! Whether all of the furniture will be moved back in is entirely questionable, but whatever.

In other other news, I am, much to Ash’s faux-horror, looking into getting a Mac. I’ve tossed around the idea of getting a Mac mini, and I might, just to get a hang of the OS and the apps. Eventually, though, what I’d like to get is a G5, ’cause I intend to do a lot of multimedia stuff on it, and that kind of power is a definite boon to productivity. At that point the mini will probably go to my brother or something. The other thing I’m after is a Cinema Display, because I’ve determined that staring at a CRT monitor for long hours is becoming seriously detrimental to my eyesight, and my CRT is beginning to fall apart. I had to drop it down a notch in esolution back to 1024×768. Now, this is a 19″ monitor, I shouldn’t need to be running it at such an obscenely small (from a graphic designer’s standpoint) resolution. I should be able to keep it at at least 1280×960, if not 1280×1024 or higher, but nooooo… So, I’m eyeing a cinema display, both for immediate use and for later application on whatever Mac I end up getting (which means Tim will be getting the 19″ POS that is currently sulking on my desk at that point). I’m almost tempted to just pitch in the extra cash and get an iMac, I dunno. It’d be kinda nifty having the whole computer in one piece rather than screaming at me in not-so-silent fury on the floor and taking up the vast majority of my screen space… plus the iMacs have G5 processors in them, while the Mac minis only have a G4. I dunno. Anybody with a Mac who wants to give me some pointers is more than welcome to (I’ve already been advised and had intended before being advised in the first place to upgrade whatever Mac I get to at least 512 MB of RAM).

Seeing as how it’s after 5 in the morning I suppose I’ll go ahead and wrap this up… probably have considerably more to say in the near future though.

Last Week’s Pahket Project Status Report: I’m going to die…

This Week’s Pahket Project Status Report: I might just get lucky.

Random image update:

Okay, first off, I just have to share this bit of David Simpson hillarity… he’s apparently found the voice of Millie in Sarah Vowell, the person who voiced Violet in The Incredibles. He says more about it in his LiveJournal entry… please do listen to the clip he linked to, especially if you read O&M… it’s so completely Millie.

Now that that’s out of the way, a minor status update on the Pahket project… I have an island, and the beginnings of an ocean… sky, forest, and terrain are final (terrain texture needs some work though, I might get that taken care of, might not). Water needs a cubic assload of work still, I’ve yet to even begin to complete the orchard on the southern tip of the island, and the Library and its connecting passageways, rooms, elevators, labs, telescopes, etc. have yet to be built. There’s a render of what I’ve got so far in the 3D Art section of HBI, linked below for your viewing pleasure.