Ive been meaning to post at least once a week, apparently not for the past 4 weeks. Time flies :/
Over the past month a few interesting things have happened. Heres a summary:
----The first ever Blenderheads meetup took place in Adelaide.
I got to meet some very cool people who Id known and talked to online for several years. This included Ben Dansie who worked on Sintel, and Lee Salvemini who runs CGMasters (http://www.cgmasters.net/)
It was also great to catch up with the guys who run Monkeystack again (I did work experience with them at the start of 2010), they were very kind in hosting the event in their studio.
We had a pretty relaxed dinner and chat initially, then some people did presentations (including me) about work they've recently done or a particular area of Blender.
Lots of interesting things were discussed and my only issue with the night was that it ended so quickly, I felt like we all could have talked for days (even though the meetup went for several more hours than planned)
Theres a thread for organizing the event on Blenderartists here. This is where all future meetings will be organized.
Blendernation Post
On the forum thread Ben did a nice writeup about the events of the night, he explains:
The recent Blender User Group meeting in Adelaide was a great success. Big thanks to Michael, Lee, Duann, Alex and Levon for sharing and again to Monkeystack for hosting.
After a pleasant round of chitchat and greetings, I got the ball rolling with a demonstration of the Cycles renderer with an emphasis on characters. (Slightly embarrassing side note, my drivers weren’t actually up to date for CUDA on the night so “only” showed off the CPU rendering.) Michael then continued on by showing some very high res Cycles renders (up to 7k from memory!) and talking about his findings as he pushes Cycles in its current form.
Lee gave an overview of creating the trailer for the CG Masters Rigging DVD – animation, rig controls, adding titles and the sequencer. Also of note were his recent efforts in talking to local schools about the potential to use not only Blender but the growing training material as well. This is certainly something I’m keen to keep an eye on.
Duann then shared about his work with Shapeways and gave a general overview of what the company can offer artists. Some really cool examples were shown including a very neat little walker. After some further questions and discussion, Alex shared his experience with getting a Shapeways print made and painting it. Neat trick – simulate the model falling in the BGE to see if it will stand on its own when printed!
To cap off the night, Levon shared some of his work on various projects and those of us who were left (rather long but enjoyable night) had a quick chat about future meetings.
Further meetups are more than likely going to happen, we all agreed that 2-3 months between meetups was a good amount of time.
My presentation was pretty unorganized and was on the topic of one of my current projects (the one hinted in a past post with a node setup) - it involved some 3D printing testing, Id only finished getting the presentation video together the morning of the meetup, next time I hope to have something more detailed prepared.
----Space Shuttle Atlantis launched - The end of the era of Space Shuttle flight
Might be a strange thing to mention here, since its not *really* related to my current work. But I did have a trip to America planned for this year - at the start of July - to see in person the final space shuttle launch. Unfortunately exams and money became an issue, so I wasn't able to see it in person, but I did watch it live online which is better than nothing.
Id planned to do some kind of mini documentary on the space shuttles, their history and my trip to America and back again, using a lot of footage Id take myself. Im thinking of doing something different now however, perhaps a 3D animation of some sort as a tribute to the 30 years of Space shuttle operation. We'll see...
----Ive purchased an 'Eleven'
Which is basically an Arduino-compatible microcontroller board designed and produced in Australia. Very nerdy, very cool, very fun.
Its a rather powerful little device, which lets you program microcontrollers. I have several little projects planned, and some larger ones. I might take on some graphics related projects with it, but a lot of them will be electrical engineering and programming based. Ill probubly end up posting stuff about it on here as well. One project relates to the next topic Ill mention below:
----I attended Avcon
Avcon is the Adelaide Video Game and Anime Convention. It happens once a year and is pretty much one of the only events in South Australia for geeks to get their geek on.
It was a pretty interesting weekend all round, lots of *interesting* cosplayers however (some terrible of course, but some surprisingly awesome)
This guy took the place of one of my favourite outfits for the event, it was something I was looking to do, but didnt have the time (and couldnt be bothered anyway)
SSSSssssssSSssssssss........
All that aside, I plan on definitely coming in costume next year.
Another highlight of Avcon was the indie games room (pretty much the main reason I attend the convention), its a place for indie developers (or even hobbiests) to display their games, and have them played for pretty much 48 hours straight by thousands of people. Its a great place to network, and I met several people there over the course of the weekend who were good to network with.
Next year I hope to have something to display in the Indie games room. Something to work towards...
----Operation Moonfall began
This one kinda came out of nowhere, but Im not surprised. In an interview only a couple of days ago, Eiji Aonuma stated that if fans made enough noise about it then Majora's Mask would be remade for the 3DS (MM3D) like Ocarina of time (Oot3D) was.
This was quite exciting to be heard, coming right from one of the top guys at Nintendo, the fact that theyre actually considering remaking Majoras Mask.
This is a game which has firmly sat in my top 3 games of all time, ever since I played it way back in the 90's on my N64.
I had plans myself, before hearing of any of this, to make it heard that MM3D needs to happen, and many other fans have been voicing this since Oot3D was announced as well. So to put it simply, I need to get my plans up and running a lot faster now, since now is clearly the time to make as much noise as possible.
Either way, Nintendo will be recieving a message from me in the near future, heres a sneak peak at part-of-something-to-do-with-it:
I should probubly drop the link to the main site as well while Im at it. So here it is - http://operation-moonfall.org/
Theres a petition to sign, and a facebook group to join + twitter feeds to follow.
Thats about it for the wrap-up of the past month. I have done the occasional 3D work, but not as much as I had planned and Im back to Uni as of this week as well, so finding time for this stuff is even harder again.
The Ludus Cinematic is still not 100% finished, hit a snag when all my file allocations messed up in Premier Pro and I effectively had to re-import everything to the timeline again from scratch (very frustrating)
The problem was caused by the way Id imported the files, and the way they were named after being dumped from UDK.
Hopefully this doesnt happen again...
