I'm not convinced my colour map is working.  Will have to see when I do other random renders while fixing up the weight maps and seeing if I can work out cloth dynamics on the clothes.  And I think I need to darken my hair a little bit.  After that all I really need to do is see if I can work out how to get my freckle constellation on my face and I'm calling me done.

Did I mention I bit it and froze the model? Vastly better control on the shape and textures and things but gods working directly with the mesh is a pain in the system.

Animation coming eventually.  I really shouldn't keep going with the "rig test" but I really want to :S

Since I first got together with Josh, I have heard stories of the farm which has been in his family for generations (or at least, his grandparents ran it, and it's now owned and operated by his uncles and their family).  It has a name but is just referred to "The Farm".

For the last seven years, Josh has told me he will take me to "The Farm".  For various reasons, we never quite got there.

Recently, I found out that the place isn't a collective hallucination.

There is a house in those trees.  It's a bit of a dark splodge in the photo.  On the other side of the tree to the right of the white thing.

The farm is a decent size, and got some pretty scenery.  I couldn't piece a decent writeup together (and the farm visit was a couple of weeks ago now), so have a bunch of photos.

3d-bek wonders what in the hell is going on and what we're getting ourselves into :)

I'm quite pleased with how my rig is turning out.  Little niggly fine tuning things on the arms, but I (finally, because I iz slow) worked out that I should turn off the heading and pitch channels on the shoulder and use the collarbone to control those, and point the elbow with the shoulder's bank channel.

Sasquatch is awesome.  The hand is angled a bit strangley but the hair is automagically avoiding the fingers :D

Low level antialiasing, no cloth dynamics yet, still working on textures and hair.

Here was supposed to be yet another whingepost about how I'm doing everything wrong and there is now nothing that I "can" drop.  So I'm going to see if I can somehow write myself into doing "it" right.

The computer room is a f***ing mess

There is more crap than there should be on the desk.  Most of it is paper that needs to be filed or recycled, and I have just been too damn lazy to process them into the appropriate location.

It needs to be cleaned up, if just so I can find the stuff that usually lives on my desk (phone, wallet, Lightwave dongle) easier and the cables are slightly less likely to get tangled.

Last night's bizarro dream is probably going to prompt interpretations of changing points of view or something to that effect.  It was my first thought when I finally managed to peel my eyes open this morning.

I was in what appears to be my room at Crazy Dog House (big room, always same layout, sometimes differently decorated, though the bed appears built in or extremely heavy as it doesn't appear to move or change), I found some old contacts (which I have never owned never mind seen before) in crazy colours.  I got it into my head to try them on.

I just haven't been writing about it.

Last week, Tao drew a picture of Venom from Spiderman with black whiteboard marker on paper, including sounding out the name and checking with Josh after writing it out.

This week just gone has been crazy.

I hang around on LinkedIN.  With Google+ in its invite-only "field trial" stage and people writing blog posts raving about it, LI's Questions have been inundated (or maybe people just aren't reading before posting, how unusual) with "Is Google+ a Facebook killer?" style questions.

Same question all over teh interwebz by anyone who cares to write a blog post about it.

Other similar ones that pop up are "Is [this shiny new Blackberry|Android thing] an iPhone killer"?

It's kind of a stupid viewpoint to take.  Unless of course you're a marketer and you're desperately trying to make people believe that THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE and your thing is it.

No.

The vege garden was a freaking mess.  I noticed it when we arrived at the house.  We hadn't needed the excessive driveway down the side so had converted it into a slightly wider than driveway half acre long vege strip.  And there were weeds and elephant ear ferns growing all through it.

I informed Josh that I was going to get rid of the weeds.  I intended my gloves into existance (I didn't go get them, they just appeared in my hands and I put them on) and got to work.  A few weeds later the patch was not only clear, it was also thriving with many veges not far off harvest.

[as I was relating this dream to Josh, he said if that worked in real life he would have me out in the vege patch weeding right now]

What I love best about my current job is the inclination of the supervisor to tend towards wanting to "get shit done".  As with all large projects (and it is a decent sized Drupal project we're working on), you want to plan it as best you can to try to minimise stuff-ups and associated explosions down the track.

What you don't want is to get caught in this endless planning loop trying to cover every possible thing that could go wrong and never start.  At some point you just have to suck it up, expect there to be unforeseen difficulties and get on with it.

I feel that there's a lot of rhetoric arguments over "smoke and mirror" problems, which detract from the problems that are causing the "smoke and mirror" problems.  Once these underlying problems have been dealt with, they should magically fix pretty most if not all the "smoke and mirror" problems.  My "solutions" probably still have logic flaws and are extremely basic with no implementation plans or costings because I'm speaking very top level generically and it's going to vary from area to area.

A few days ago my friend Shae wrote about Alanis Morisette's "Hand in my Pocket" really resonating with her recently, and posed the question of what song particularly resonates with "you" lately.

I've had the chorus of U2's "Trip Through Your Wires" ("You...I'm waiting for you...you...you set my desire, I trip through your wires") running through my head while I work on 3d-bek, and I won't stop believin' (Journey: Don't Stop Believin') that I'll get this bloody animation done.  They are both fairly 3d-centric though.

Some may laugh but the song that's been fairly apt for almost all situations at the moment is the only Savage Garden song I like.

Affirmation