Monthly Archives: Mar 2006

It’s a zebra officer

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10°C

Zebra :: crossings are a place that cars stop at so that people can cross life-threatenting roads. The cars stop when they can see a person standing waiting to get across. Most of them do it in response to a law that insists. Some don’t and I’ve ranted about this practice in the past, but today was quite astonishing. The car was all stripey, but not black & white like a zebra- more that police car way. The police driver wasn’t in a hurry to either get anywhere, nor in a hurry to stop.
 
Astonishing.

Unison

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12°C, sun then rain
Strike: that closed many schools, not ours though. It looks like a dispite that has valid points on both sides if reporting is to be believed. On the strikers hand- they are angry that in effect the promise that they will bea able to retire at 60 years if they have worked long enough is being withdrawn. On the other- as many parts of industry are rasing their retirement age to 70, there seems to be some resentment that the puplic sector is sustainting an early age in an era where people are living much longer. Private sector workers have even included that they, in effect produce the wealth that public sector workers earn through taxes.
Our school is barely affected by this action.

Orange night: interesting evening; quite a stormy day, heavy rain and strong-ish winds but all is still now. Out with the dogs the sky is like a roof. Or at least like a ceiling, a very high one like a Cathederal. Clouds are clearly visible- lit up by sodium streetlights. There are dark lanes up there, where the clouds overlay the surrounding farmland. Then there are islands of light in the cloudbase, one above Burntwood town, another Whittington and Sutton Coldfield is there in the inverted map in the clouds.

Action- look down.

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Rain @ 11°C

Flash: Drawn a bloke’s head and animated some short movie-clips- one looking down, the other to look up.
the idea is to play the clips when the mouse rolls over defined areas of the stage. It should look as if the head is following the mouse. It’s possible to use actionshcript to make the head follow the mouse, but that doesn’t give controll over sub-animations as it moves.
If I can get this wqorking, then I can make the sub-animations in Poser. How neat would it be to have a poser character oin on-screen presentations. Eventually, I want to phase out PowerPoint in favour of Flash.
 
Wait! I never use Powerpoint anyway.

Chi-ha

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6 to 2°C, cold NE wind

Far Cry level now has some vegetation! Nevermind the fault with the ground texture, now I can place objects and am formulating a kind of plot for the mission. Trees bend in the breeze- and there’s a setting to make them flex more in the wind- this shows up on screen. not only that- there is a brush tool for "painting" various trees and other things onto the landscape. This is neat, shame we can’t have this in a 3D application like 3Ds max.

Sandboxing

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6°C.light grey.
Sandbox turns out to be a very capable and relatively easy to use game editor. The interface is remarkably 3dsMax-like. Here is a basic landscape and begun texturing it so far. Heightmap editor has excellent tools to work with rather like Sitni-sati Dreamscape 2. The height brush is especially neat- since it works in the perspective viewport (which incidentally is fully textured with an animated saea surface). Beat that!
It’s built in programming language is LUA– which I’m reliably told -is easy and light.
Make sure, if you get into this that youhave the most recent sandbox manual- the one supplied in the box is terrible.
In short- it’s a fully fledged 3d app, sold as a level editor but cost me only £5.99. It would be good enough to use at school, in some kind of after-school club except for  one thing: the game is rather violent.

Pigs

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Sir Winston Churchill :

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals
 
and:
 

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

33 miles cycling today; cautiously.

Sandbox

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6°C

Removed Far Cry to make space for Brothers In arms on the PC yesterday. Unfortunately, my first impressions of BIA is not overwealming. It’s all a bit boxy- and resstrictions in movment are quite frustrating. You can jump but not over a low gate, there are ladders but you can’t climb them.
Cryek hae released a much better manual for the Sandbox editor– it’s the level editor for Far Cry which makes the possibility of making my own level more "do-able". So it looks like I’ll be re-installing Far Cry – even though I have actually overplayed the game somewhat. Perhaps, with a bit of luck, if the plugins are available, I can make my own objects to insert into the game.
 
I dunno.

Nine horses!

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1°C, more sleet.
A horse called "War of Attrition" won the Cheltenham Gold cup today. A co-incidence because of what happend yesterday it seems. Six horses died in racing yesterday- three in one race. I first heard of this on breakfast TV. It’s strange how pathos and tragedy seem to hit more at that hour of the day than if we hear the news later on.
What an unbearable thought- it seem like a violation of innocence. Horses put absolute trust in their owners/trainers, they live together for years and race for the excitement. A trust builds up as in any relationship  Now they are dead. One death was shown on breakfast TV news. The horse fell over a fence and tumbled and tumbled over, body limp & separate from rider. Ragdoll.
"Animal rights group Animal Aid called for the public to boycott the meeting and suggested that Prince Charles and his wife Camilla should stay away on Friday "out of respect for the horses that have died".
 I can’t imagine much is going to be done about it though. A sad day indeed.

Jenny Saville

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2.4°C, Sleet

Cycling: ‘Orrible ride home in the sleet & headwind. Shouldn’t have bothered.Jenny Saville: a colleague bought a book on her painting recently which I looked at yesterday. A later lesson – I was pulled by by a morbid curiosity to look again. The pictures were full of blood, light by strip-light green and portrayed women who appeared to have had surgery- cosmetic surgery. They had stitches, were soaked in blood, and mostly were naked. The pictures in real life are very large indeed. In close-up the paint is boldly applied, in thick daubs with a palette knife and usually not densely covering the canvas.

The pictures seem to be about human beings as lumps of meat, objects for the surgeon’s procedures- helpless and injured. they look as if actually dripping wth blood, anatomically vivid but also often distorted by wide angle lens of just mounds of body fat.

Jenny Savile can really paint. She has insightful colour vision, solid anatomy and the people depicted are really alive with a warm sympathy. The pictures are frightening to say the least-and so test your stamina; repellent, but curiosity draws you back- how can a mere piece of canvas cause such a strong reaction? I haven’t even seen the paintings in real life, it’s been years since seeing any of her photographs as well but now I must have this book. It such a compelling desire that I don’t care how much it costs financially.

Autodesk Inventor: Played with version 8 during a free period today. I really regret that we can’t use this in teaching, it’s a very competant program- far superior to Pro/Desktop.