14°C <- for real!
Exams: there are too many, everyone admits it, but maybe some change is on the horizon.
It’s not cold enough to wear a hat.
Hats off to that!
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Author Archives: essiep
Chi-ha
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
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
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
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!
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
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.
Firefox fine
2 to 9°.
Firefox: the more I use this the better it seems. Obviously ( odpheusly) the tabbed pages are an improvement, but the download manager is much more controllable.
relevant? I’m downloading Far Cry missions for playtime later. They are big files- not the 50Kb of a Il-2 mission. Some over 60Mb!
Cycling: maybe tomorrow! My limbs want to stretch a lot right now, so they want to go, I want to go , but has the virus gone? Batteries on charge.
Crymods
2°C, sun & rain
Nearly there. Cheerfulness has returned, feeling cold all gone, but I still need a lot of sleep- over 7 hours!
Far Cry: some interesting sites for "modding" the game.
There is a free exporter for 3ds Max, so it’s possible to make models for the game.
Crysource: mostly in German, but that’s not too much of a problem.
I don’t know if I will follow this up or not. Who knows?
I don’t know if I will follow this up or not. Who knows?
Far Cry maps.com: page of downloads to play in Far Cry.
Linseed:
working on a page of rough sketches, which is more trying out ideas and a warm-up than any planned finished piece. Warm-up is os important in drawing & painting- it gets you rmind into the right mood and loosens up the muscles for good co-ordination.Sticking plaster
2°C, snow nearby, but not here.
Litigation culture: We are hamstrung by lawyers.We have to stop pupils throwing snowballs as it’s a breach of health & safety regulations. If I want to take an art class acrross the road to the park, I need to send letters of consent home and produce a risk assessment. If the pupils forget the signed consent letter- they can’t go.
But look here: BBC Sticking-plaster story.
Note this bit that emphasises the ridiculous:
But Emily’s father Kevan, 39, criticised the guidelines.
He said: "The whole saga is absolutely ridiculous. My daughter had a tiny cut and I just cannot see the reason why a plaster couldn’t be put on her finger by the staff.
If it’s a tiny cut – then why does she need a sticking plater? What do plasters actually do? My advice on the matter is- if you want your cut to heal more quickly, then don’t put a plaster on it. If it’s more use as some kind of comfort blanket – then that’s another issue.
In a smiliar vein, we aren’t allowed to give out paracetamol to pupils in school either. Most kids who want it because they have a headache, they mostly have a headache because their main intake of fluids is sugary "pop". The solution? Drink water?
Creationism: BBC ( again), It looks like some (christians) want to replace a theory that has some holes in its evidence with another theory that has no evidence to support it at all. Similarly, I was talking to a y8 pupil this week who was convinced that Astrology is for real. I know that teenagers can be remarkably naïve, but the worrying thing about this variety of misunderstanding is that quite a few adults believe it too. Luckily the move here ( from OCR) is that scientists will have to discuss creationism- they are however in the best position to refute such mythology. I hope they can learn from the astrology fiasco. When they have done that can we put God onto their syllabus too?
Micycle 