I am playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on the pc. This is just practice for when I get my copy of CoD:MW2 for christmas. Anyways. In the beginning of the game, you have to go through a training course which based on your final time, suggests a game setting for you. They say in the game the record from one of the NPCs is 19 seconds. I played it for about 10 minutes and got extremely close, 19.5 seconds, then 19.25 seconds.

I had a short talk with eidred about it and he says:

Frozen: i cant get less than 19.25 seconds on the training thing
Eidred: it's not possible
Eidred: lol
Frozen: says you
Eidred: no it isn't actually possible
Frozen: i got 19.5
Eidred: they did that just to make that SAS guy sound cool

But i tried again. and sure enough, i beat it. and not just by a fraction mind you! but a whole second!

Frozen: 18.25!
Eidred: oh wow
Eidred: lol
Frozen: son of a bitch
Frozen: i got it.
Eidred: you seriously are determined i take it
Frozen: "that was better. not great, but better."

Screenie for mah proofs.

I am proud.

I finished my 3D lighting and texturing project, waited till the last minute to do it and used every minute I had to the moment I left the house to drive to class. I began seriously working on it this past Saturday (11.28). I had 4 weeks to complete it, and I started the first week I got it, but I didn’t put enough effort in at that time to get any considerable amount of work done. I thought the process through too many times and let that get the best of me, thinking that it will go quick because “all i have to do is texture and light!” easy. But no! Once I actually made an attempt to do it, the work did not stop. I would finish unmapping one piece, feel all proud, zoom out.. and realize I still have to do 30 more pieces.

Unmapping a 3D model (or making a UV map) is basically making a single picture which shows all sides of the object so you can paint it. (Like a coloring book.) Once you color it, the mapping is already registered to that particular object and when you reapply it, it wraps back around the model and your coloring is displayed in the exact spots, making it look like a believable object and not just a gray blob.

So! This post is about my 3D lighting and texturing final. Have a look.

Day and night final renders.

I want to become a better artist on paper, so I am going to be going through tutorials and practice with the goal of being able to do realistic representation pieces.
Here is an eye I did based off the tutorial posted here.

I am also changing my theme up, and I will be posting more frequent starting today.

Hello internet. I have been gone, I am aware of this. I have had a busy week with work, school, and doing things socially. This weekend I got about 10 hours of sleep from Friday night till Monday morning here. That is just fun, isn’t it? I am feeling pretty good too if I do say so myself. Anyways! I am going to be busy again this week and probably the week after as I work on some final projects for classes. I have to learn a guitar piece to perform and be graded on (Spanish Study) and about 4 pieces for a class concert we are doing. Those need to be learned in less than 2 weeks. I also have a paper due Wednesday and a final exam the following week. Gotta read 7 chapters for that, it will be fun. I have 2 government quizzes and an exam in the coming week or so as well, I’m not worried about that class. I have to finish a presentation for a product I have been designing for my Interaction Design course all year next Thursday, I think that will go smooth as well.. and finally…. I have to put in about 30 man hours of work into my final lighting and texturing project. I am supposed to by this week have most of the texturing done, and i am still only unwrapping it. Here is a picture.

Wish me luck.

I figured I would take this time to update you all with my classwork from my lighting and texturing course. The previous week i had to create realistic lighting for an outdoor scene for both day and night. The scene was already modeled for me and had textures. All I had to do was place the lights. Not too hard…

Here are the pictures from both the day and night that I did.

And for this weeks assignment that is due tomorrow (I actually finished it before the day has started!) I had to take my night and day scene and render them into a 1 second animated zoom clip. Which is one of the simplest forms of animation I have done, i had to make the water move and zoom into the scene. Not hard. The only pain is I have to render the scene frame by frame (Thank you for being automatic!) and it takes a while. My computer is (not surprisingly) extremely faster than the school computers. What would take those 1 hour to render 30 frames, takes me only about 15 minutes. Granted.. tonight I made a lot of mistakes and had to render the day scene out 5 times before I got it right (I had some weird settings on that was making it grainy) but! The speed of my computer has allowed me to perform those renders and be able to make changes before the due date has come around. If it took as long as it did at school, I would have to settle for something mediocre!

Here are the links to the YouTube. 1 second long, nothing special, you will get a taste though.

Day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-GYnKsQ6L8
Night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS6KFgXjzBY

I got an email from the main 3D modeling/animation instructor at my college inviting me to an instructor-invite-only course next spring. The class will be doing texturing, lighting, and rendering of an animated short lasting anywhere from 30-60 seconds. It is a collaborative project with another class overseas in Germany doing the modeling and animation part. So.. class is going to be 8:30am, lasting till 11:15am so we can communicate with them. Thats gonna make for an early Thursday for me as I live a good 30 minutes away, meaning I gotta leave house at 7:30 to be on time with traffic and such.

I am contacting you because you have either done great work in my 3327
class or the section which Crystal instructs. I would like to offer
each of you an invitation to join the animation studio course this
coming spring to gain invaluable experience in animation production.
This class will not be open to the public and I am hand picking
everyone based on their past work.

The email was sent to only 12 students (thats including myself) and only 4 of the 12 are from my class (Crystals). My class has a good 30-32 students, and im sure his has something similar, so out of say 65 students, I was picked.

That is awesome.

I have been eating at my local Panda Express for years. I started the day it opened, and I make at least a monthly trip for some good eats. The grand opening was pretty memorable to me, with a person chilling in a panda costume waving at cars driving by, my family and I decided to stop there for lunch. I even remember what i got! White rice, their famous Orange chicken, and a side of Beef and broccoli. I went home full as can be, and still hungry for more even though my stomach couldn’t fit it. A few hours later, i decided to grab it for dinner as well. Thats right. Grand opening, i get lunch AND dinner.

It is right down the street from where I live, and I loved their orange chicken so much I started going in every time I had the time for it. Dinner breaks at work, I would be there. Weekends for lunch, I would be there! Summer time, nearly every day. I was obsessed! Sadly. They changed chefs, and that irresistible orange chicken changed flavors slightly and I was no longer hooked. I still love it and all, but its just not as good as it was. Oh well!

So I am pretty simple when i go there. All i want is their orange chicken, and some white rice to go along with it. Cool thing is once you get your receipt, their is a survey you can take to improve your local Panda Express and get a free entree the next time you come in when you buy another 2-entree plate. Unlimited times you can do that, I save my receipts and do it every time.

I don’t go nearly as often as I used to, generally the only times now are whenever Eidred and I decide to hang out. Which just so happens to usually be around lunch time. Here is an old picture I took a few months back from my phone of mine and Eidred’s plates. We both get the same thing, and this is just the 2-entree plate. Pretty damn massive for the price we pay, which is just under $7. To walk away full and satisfied, its worth it. No way can you get the same feeling from some other fast food place like McDonalds. Those type of “fast-food” services just make you feel sick when you eat too much.

I am pretty excited, I just learned how to ride a motorcycle last night. What originally was plans to go rock climbing again, ended up not happening as I got shot down at the door being told I am only allowed to return as a guest every 60 days. Sucks! I went back to my friends place, who happens to own a motorcycle, and we took the free time as an opportunity to go down to an open parking lot/runway type area and practice.

We started with of course the basics. How to turn it on and off, where the breaks are, explained the clutch (I have never driven a manual before… but now that I have in motorcycle form I might just be able to in car form too. *ahem* Dev) and how to accelerate. I started with simple drifting, which is just slowly releasing the clutch and walking the bike forward. Then I lifted my feet up to drive forward with a little bit more power and get rid of the “training wheels.” Practiced turning, practiced changing gears, and just general driving it around. Played around on it for about 40 minutes before there wasn’t too much left to be taught.

At first I was kinda iffy about the whole clutch, accelerating, and braking thing. (Yes, I know. That’s like the whole function of a bike) but it is pretty simple once you make a few attempts. Its tricky because you have to do it all roughly the same time and its all in different spots on the bike. Tricky for a first timer at least. I dropped the bike once when I was trying to stop, they are a lot heavier than they look so if you don’t put your feet down when you should… you just kinda start leaning and whoops! Your no longer sitting on a bike, your standing next to it.

At the end of the training though, I felt pretty comfortable riding it around. I won’t be ready for actually driving it outside of a parking lot for a while of course, I would have to take the class and put in a lot of practice, but getting that solid ground of understanding the basics is really nice. It is a lot of fun. It is also going to be a few years before I buy one. I am waiting until I graduate from college and pay off my current car so I won’t have to worry about fees overloading my wallet.

Here is a picture of the bike I rode.

Yea I know. I took a week off, I meant to make a post this past Wednesday showing you the cool lighting I did for my 3D room, but I left the files on the school computers and this weeks project is just an adaptation of last weeks assignment, I figured I would just wait and show you the finished finished product.

Saturday I went rock climbing for the first time. I was really excited to finally get to go because I had to time it well with one of my friends since I am under a guest pass so it was about 2 weeks into the planning of it before we actually had time. It is a lot of fun, really works the upper body. I climbed on and off for about an hour and a half, only reason we left was because they were closing.  I am not very good at jumping distance between the rocks, and I lost my grip (or didn’t even make it) on the rocks and fell several times. It is a cool feeling. You think going in, “man.. those are high up there, I don’t do well with heights, this isn’t going to work.” But as soon as you start climbing, height isn’t even an issue. Your mind is seriously stuck just on the next rock, and how your going to go about getting there. Doesn’t even feel like your getting high up either, your just climbing. Fun!

That night I also had huge motivation strike me with what I wanted to do with this blog. I am going to make it more technology related with product reviews, tips and tricks, tutorials, and also finally get into that vloging scene. I did buy a portable HD camera (Kodak ZI8) specifically for doing that… So you might notice a few changes here and there with the design of the site, the pages, the functionality. It is going to be good.

I am going to post more regularly again, I found that if I let myself not post for one or two days, I just wont post at all. So I will at least have a new post every 2 days, but I might have several posts in a day. You never know.

Today is Monday, *sigh* and that means my weekend is over. But.. my weekend is generally the time I do the most work? I have Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays off from work so I can focus on my college classes, and that is a pretty nice little vacation from work I look forward to every Monday evening.

This past weekend, as I mentioned in my previous post, was pretty packed with things I had to do. The main one of course being the wedding. I got ready and arrived right around 5pm, even though it didn’t start until 6pm (I wanted to be early.) Not many people were there, I never met anyone involved before, and I felt really out of place. The wedding started on-time and the actual ceremony lasted about 30 minutes. I shot a continuous shot the entire time and I regret not bringing a tripod for this particular segment. I was a little shakey, maybe some image stabalizing editing will do the trick though.

After the ceremony, it was time for the reception. It was at the same place so I just walked around. The music was really loud and I wasn’t able to really hear people and I knew the people I would interview wouldn’t be heard on the tape, so I decided not to get individual guests speaking into the camera as I was originally planning. I got all the good parts, the first dances, the speeches, the slide show, the cutting of the cake, the entertainer, people dancing, traditional wedding things. I basically had the camera on and recording the entire night. I used 4 tapes, getting about 3 hours worth of footage. (Man, that is a lot!) So I got a lot to work with for editing it into a DVD for the family.

As the night continued, I got more comfortable being around the people and getting closer during the important parts, so I am feeling pretty confident that I will be able to have a good product once I am done with everything. The only issues I have that I am worrying about was the lighting. Whenever dancing or center events that didn’t require any speaking, they had the lights really dim. I am not sure if I will be able to mess with the digital exposure to make this more visible or not, but I got enough footage maybe it won’t matter. (Hopefully.)

All in all, I enjoyed doing it. I know where I messed up, I know where I can improve, and I think the next time I do something similar, I will be more prepared and it will go a lot smoother. I would do it again.