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caraigTHEM, as some of you might know, is one of those atomic horror films, a classic of that genre from 1952. It's about giant ants.
Well, my ants aren't giant, but I am starting to feel like they're trying to edge me out of my niche. And the darn things seem so resilient. Well. They're only in a small corner of the apartment and I think they're controlled for the time being. If Any of you call me annd hear me screaming 'THEM! THEM! THEM! THEM!' then you'll know what happened.
I went to school yesterday to do some rendering. Got about 300 frames rendered, I believe, which is a good chunk of the 1300 pseduo-magnum-opus. So far, so good. There are a few frames where the thing did something that made me gape in astonishment, but nothing that can't be fixed, I think. The biggest trick, it seem, is the hair. I used particle soft bodies, which means that each vertex in the polygons that make up her hair is controlled by a particle. Particles in Maya are really neat things. You can give them weight, you can apply gravity and air and magnetic fields, you can set goal weights... and if you don't know 100% of what you're doing, they do something inutterably indescribably. PLus, to make this work right I have to do a particle disk cache... which is not portable, because my particle disk cache is something on the order of 5GB. Yes, Five gigabytes. That is a LOT. Especially when my network disk quota is 1GB. So before each rendering session I have to re-generate the particle disk cache on the local computers I'm using. The things I do in the name of ART! =)
So Monday (which is to say, today) is my recovery day from the 36+ hours I was awake previous. I was feeling pretty awake, actually, and no ill effects other than hitting the rack pretty hard; I got up about an hour ago, after waking up from a dream or nightweird (as opposed to a nightmare) of Pennn (from Penn and Teller) as a George Burns/Morgan Freeman-style God. (I say 'nightweird' because there's no way I could bring myself to call that a 'dream.') In lab we watched minority report -- I must have seen that movie four times now.
Regarding the music above: there's something about a German trance-metal band singing in these deep gravelly voices and throwing in a lot of choral Latin from what sounds like the High Mass. Hey, it worked for Karl Orff when he did the Carmina Burana! Okay, maybe not really like Carl Orff. But it still sounds like it would make a good titles score for a movie. Or at least the credits score. Or maybe some sort of funky incidental. That's often how I listen to music, since I work in a really visual medium: as a kind of soundtrack to visual events, though I do enjoy music on it's own. I still think everyone should have their own soundtrack. Laughtracks optional. =)
(Hmm.... now that I typed that and think about it, could smilies be sort of considered to be the laugh track of the written word? I'm going to do something unusual and make a special journal entry for that! Stay tuned!)
Not much on the schedule today, except laundry and general housekeeping. Though I might pick up a flamethrower if THEM start to get dissatisfied with the area they have and start to seek to expand their territory
Well, my ants aren't giant, but I am starting to feel like they're trying to edge me out of my niche. And the darn things seem so resilient. Well. They're only in a small corner of the apartment and I think they're controlled for the time being. If Any of you call me annd hear me screaming 'THEM! THEM! THEM! THEM!' then you'll know what happened.
I went to school yesterday to do some rendering. Got about 300 frames rendered, I believe, which is a good chunk of the 1300 pseduo-magnum-opus. So far, so good. There are a few frames where the thing did something that made me gape in astonishment, but nothing that can't be fixed, I think. The biggest trick, it seem, is the hair. I used particle soft bodies, which means that each vertex in the polygons that make up her hair is controlled by a particle. Particles in Maya are really neat things. You can give them weight, you can apply gravity and air and magnetic fields, you can set goal weights... and if you don't know 100% of what you're doing, they do something inutterably indescribably. PLus, to make this work right I have to do a particle disk cache... which is not portable, because my particle disk cache is something on the order of 5GB. Yes, Five gigabytes. That is a LOT. Especially when my network disk quota is 1GB. So before each rendering session I have to re-generate the particle disk cache on the local computers I'm using. The things I do in the name of ART! =)
So Monday (which is to say, today) is my recovery day from the 36+ hours I was awake previous. I was feeling pretty awake, actually, and no ill effects other than hitting the rack pretty hard; I got up about an hour ago, after waking up from a dream or nightweird (as opposed to a nightmare) of Pennn (from Penn and Teller) as a George Burns/Morgan Freeman-style God. (I say 'nightweird' because there's no way I could bring myself to call that a 'dream.') In lab we watched minority report -- I must have seen that movie four times now.
Regarding the music above: there's something about a German trance-metal band singing in these deep gravelly voices and throwing in a lot of choral Latin from what sounds like the High Mass. Hey, it worked for Karl Orff when he did the Carmina Burana! Okay, maybe not really like Carl Orff. But it still sounds like it would make a good titles score for a movie. Or at least the credits score. Or maybe some sort of funky incidental. That's often how I listen to music, since I work in a really visual medium: as a kind of soundtrack to visual events, though I do enjoy music on it's own. I still think everyone should have their own soundtrack. Laughtracks optional. =)
(Hmm.... now that I typed that and think about it, could smilies be sort of considered to be the laugh track of the written word? I'm going to do something unusual and make a special journal entry for that! Stay tuned!)
Not much on the schedule today, except laundry and general housekeeping. Though I might pick up a flamethrower if THEM start to get dissatisfied with the area they have and start to seek to expand their territory
