That's no ordinary rabbit
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Alex Lovett
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Tags: - Rant - Architecture
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Aptitudes, most of us have them I presume... if not all.

Though they can be elusive, what tickles your fancy, what floats your boat, what what you enjoy doing most, enjoy even if you did it badly? even if you weren't the best at it, you'd still enjoy doing it.

It's a question I've been asking myself.

I love creating stuff, that much is evident. I've probably gone over it all before, how I like creating things that transport people somewhere, that evoke emotion. That is after all what all art is meant for is it not. Music is meant to change your mood, to take you someplace or to compliment how you currently feel. I've thought before about technicaly what would best medium for that be, what would be most effective. Music and Cinema top the list by far. And Cinema with Music easily wins and no doubt will remain king till we devise ways to tap directly into your mind. Of course Games are in effect realtime interactive cinema in a way, so they should be the most effective, and sometimes this is true, but the majority of games I feel do not suspend disbelief, do not transport you emotionally and just fail to evoke emotion... at least with most FPS.

The lighting is one big reason for this, It's bad, It's poofy blurry and unrealistic of late. Now everything is trying to be super dynamic, it looks much worse for it. But it will get better real soon as they perfect realtime global illumination and even baked GI is coming back in fashion now that they have realized how stupid bump mapping looks without good lighting to go with it (Doom)

I'm not about to go produce a film, so cinema is out of the question, though FX reels and 3D animation compositions set to obligatory banging techno music shouldn't be discounted.. that I might enjoy.

But what I'm thinking of right now is Architecture. Not that boring prefab stuff that will fall down in 100 years. Not that 'landmark' outrageous symbolistic architecture designed to brand a city and invite tourism... no no... I\'m talking the virtual kind. The kind that doesn't need to stand up to weather and rain. Doesn't need working ventilation, It's only need is to be aesthetic.

We have galleries filled with photography and painting. Should we have hollodecks, id imagine the same thing existing for places and architecture. The Physical building of structure is costly and lengthy, It's far from iterative, and I'm all about the iterative design.

Games seem to be ever increasing detail focussed, you can't see the wood for the trees or the level for the decals and instanced mechanical shapes.

Thats a large sweeping statement, It's not all bad... but most of it is. Most level designers seem to have no artistic ability. They may know a lot about weapon placement and flow, but have the aesthetic sensibility of a dried raison.

Add a corridor here, another over there, then instead of designing it, just throw in some pipes, grills, vents, panels and random lights and It's a level.

Most people probably don't even know what real Architecture is, they may never have even seen it.

Link: helios.mine.nu --- Inspiration



This guy gets it:
Santiago Calatrava











I've visited some of his buildings in Valencia and It's amazing stuff (some of the above photos of my visit, I took like millions of photos!). Like your on a some giant futuristic film set. But It's simple, elegant and somehow stands up against gravity.

Stuff id even struggle to draw and grasp the shape of in my head, are built out of large very real tonnages of concrete, It's what Architecture should be in my opinion.

Anyhoo, to tie it all up. I've noticed I like architecture, a good deal, having been introduced to the real stuff. So right now what floats my boat is racing fast cars and building massive epic cool ass buildings/places. And I'm not doing either of them professionally or even hobbying in them.... so something is wrong, something has to change!

Games are about to get an injection of realism that should bring back the emotion and sense of place/space that's currently lacking as global illumination/radiosity whatever you call it, makes it into games in a big way, and hopefully bump mapping will die off and become the subtle effect it should only ever have been.

What place is their in the world for someone who makes building just to walk around them, just to look at them. Cars are somewhat regarded as the epitome of product design a lovely excuse to create a beautiful evocative form, with the benefit of grossing large sums of money. Functional technical and artistic master pieces:




Car pornography above in the form of the Aston Martin DBS/9

I'm going to go ahead and make a bold future prediction for which I may look either silly or ingenious for in the future.

People buying and selling virtual architecture/products of all shapes and sizes...

Sounds silly.. people are doing it already to a degree in virtual worlds such as SecondLife

People are making real money selling virtual produce. Maybe that's the future... maybe that's where I can make my millions doing something I'm passionate about.



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Tags: - Flash - Interactive
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I've been real busy the past month or so with a Flash based Kiosk.

The design was done by someone else, provided as layered psd's. My job was to put them into Flash and make them.. well make them do stuff. To populate the design with data from XML files and make it interactive and work. All the usual stuff was involved, Parsing XML, Printing, Shopping Carts, Loading and playing Video and lots of dynamic loading of images and data.

Not much point in me showing it you as all my work was the interactive side of it...

well I guess I can link you to a fully working copy. As of writing It's not designed for use on the web so may be slow and or die if you go to fast for it (before It's finished loading)

www.helios.mine.nu/Kiosk/Local/

It's all copyright someone or other, and is the work of many separate people. And yes It's all in French!

Also I did not design how it works, some bits I had a bit of input on, but it has many faults/weird things about it, strange assumptions and general stupidity which I can't be held responsible for!

It normally has a woman speak on every page, via a alpha masked video overlay, I have removed this as it annoys the crap out of me.

Also of note, I had nothing to do with the code that applies paint/wallpapers to the Room Scene. That was someone else, I just had to communicate with that.

And if you click the Logo in the top left on the decorating/room scene page:


And type in 12345

You get to a admin type mode where you can freely and more conveniently decorate things.





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Got myself an iPhone tadda!


And naturally It's all hacked now running custom business

Written myself some custom App to push and pull Photos from the iPhone wirelessly, which is magical to behold

;-)



Now if only I could do the same with the Calendar

I'm too cool for school now as I installed Apache HTTP/PHP server on my iPhone:



It's useful because you can connect to yourself in the browser and open files like PDF's and Movies stored on the iPhone hard drive.


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Tags: - C4D - Vray
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My First Vray Net Render!

Vray Render 2hr on 3 machines (Total of 8.6ghz) 2 minutes per frame

This render has no GI, It's just 2 Area lights, one of which is a dome giving it a GI like feel.

Couldn't get it to work at first, just rendered lots of black frames very quick, I fixed in in the end, I think it was a license issue as I hadn't entered in all the serial numbers under personalize cinema.

The diffusion on the metal is very course due to the anti-alias settings I used and cus I don't know what I\'m doing. Trying to smooth it more seemed to make the render take far too long for my taste, and It's only a test after all.

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A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks, rocks about 2" in diameter.

He then asked the students if the jar was full? They agreed that it was.
So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar.

He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else.

He then asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an unanimous --yes.

The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and proceeded to pour their entire contents into the jar -- effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

"Now," said the professor, as the laughter subsided, "I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The rocks are the important things - your family, your partner, your health, your children - things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else. The small stuff."

"If you put the sand into the jar first," he continued "there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks. The same goes for your life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you."

"Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out dancing. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the disposal."

"Take care of the rocks first -- the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the beer represented. The professor smiled. "I'm glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of beers."

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