Time in Motion.

Ok,over the last 24 hours there have been 65 comments about the first post on this blog. All of them SPAM ok, now strap yourselves in.I am about to soapbox a little here and there is a chance I might get a little sweary too

Congrats Spam merchants,thanks to your automated crap peddling I have spent the last hour or so clearing up my inbox . Guess what I don’t want tyadol or any pharmaceuticals off you. If i want drugs i will go see a doctor and get a prescription. as i am english and contribute the our glorious NHS .

of course this could be advertising tailored to overseas client. In which case will I get a cut of your takings? After all people pay to out up posters on billboards. no didn’t think so. well screw you. I will be liasing with Animationblogspot to find a way to combat you r crap peddling once we have a way to stop you I will be clearing ths site and i might very well be forced into disabling comments on this blog I ABSOLUTELY refuse to put up with this situation

EDIT
Ok there should be some spam filters in place now. sorry but if you are legitimately posting a comment with more than 1 link in it then it will not post. Sorry thank the shit-peddlers for that, spoiling it for everyone

EDIT

right now i am seriously considering finding a way to totally disable people posting to this blog its contrary to the whole ethos of the internet. but even today I had 30 or so posts for tramadol. which is a lot less than 300 but the filters should have stopped them but they don’t seem to work properly

Second Life!
Yes second life the oh-so-open MMORPG that the world and its dog is jumping on.

first up its not a game. really there are no goals, no missions, nothing all you can do is customise your avatar and maybe build a bit of a house on some land. Essentially its animal crossing with all the charm surgically removed.

secondly your avatar is limited to a terrible humanoid model of a human, but surely the point of an avatar is that it is a digital representation of you and therefore can be anything, a ball of wool, a dog a floating sphere. Yes you can customise your avatar by giving it a custom texture, if you can find the templates by trawling on the net you can make your own textures and uploading them for 10 L$
L$? what That’s right SL has its own currency that you have to buy and it costs for you to upload stuff. I notice When you first start SL Linden labs do not credit you with a bunch of L$ for having downloaded the installer its ab it like going to Disneyland buying a load of Disney dollars and then having to pay for tie up your shoelaces or breathe

thirdly, and admittedly this is a personal gripe of mine, animation, SL offers you the chance to upload custom animations to SL Sounds good? well not quite, The animations have a limit of 30 seconds at 30 fps which give us a limit of 900 frames right? WRONG there is also a file size limit of 240k which would in real terms means a 10 second piece of mocap

10 seconds of mocap? what’s the point i could roto 10 seconds and save a bundle on mocap expenses
finally support offers technical support via a ticketing system, if you have a basic account then don’t bother asking anything other than “how do I log into Second Life” because unless you want to upgrade your account to a premium account, technical support is non-existant

So step up Second life and receive the 2008 most-dumb-ass-designed-piece-of-software award

finished up a new tool yesterday for adobe Photoshop.

I have a bunch of smart objects in my photoshop layouts that are MASSIVE renders from 3ds max,the smart object has been resized to fit nicely in my layout but there is a problem. I could do with saving out the individual frames of the MASSIVE smart object the same size as the resized graphic.

thats where Smart Animator comes in. It takes a smart object, acceses all the images inside then spits each frame out as the source graphic to a specified location and filename. Took about 10 minutes to output 50 frames of animation but it would have took longer to do it by hand.

I am a 3ds Max fan. I have been using 3ds Max for 10 years now. but i think that Autodesk may well have dropped the ball with the latest release of max (2009)

The main problem is the splitting the product into 3ds max design. whats the difference? According to Autdodesk max2009 ships with SDK whilst Design has a bunch of architectural materials and lighting tools

on paper its ok but here is the problem, there are fundamental differences between max2009 and design when it comes to UVw co ordinates on max primitives. This means that a number of things we take for granted when making or texturing models in max no longer apply in max design.

The purpose of a max primative is that it is a standardised object that you can use as a basis for a model or to test a technique By altering the method of mapping for the same primative across 2 pieces of what is essentially the same software (don’t forget, autodesks press releases never mentioned the new UVW layouts) by mucking around with something that was working fine they have added loads of new chalenges to solve ; especially if you do anything with texturing I am currently having to work out a series of workarounds for a number of scripts I have written that makes the assumption that primitives all share the same UVW layout

spent Most of last Night prepping a workaround which i need to test