The 3D Student

3D tasty stuff meets logo design

2010-07-12T15:48:50Z

Hi El here from Give A Brick and Heaven and El. This is just a quick heads up for any of Heather’s lovely readers who might be interested in a little logo designing competition. It’s been hosted by mine (and Heathers!) good friend Maria Muir over at MariaMuir.com You’ll have to head over there to read more about what she’s after but know this: there is a cash prize!

That got your attention didn’t it?!

Maria’s coming to Wales the weekend of July 24th for our Give A Brick Charity Cocktail Thing and guess what else? She’s asked me to help her pick the winning logo. How cool is that?! It means I’m spared from feeling compelled to have a go too which is good. I prefer to paint my pictures with words

So there’s £50 or $100USD for the designer of the winning logo. After that you’ll have to visit Maria’s blog to find out more.

Good luck!

Random Posts

Holiday

2010-07-02T20:29:43Z

That’s it. I’m giving in. Sunshine, happy things, fun people, beaches, good food… I’m actually putting the blog on hold. I’ve just been unbelievably busy (in a good way for a change) and there’s been very little time to even be online, much less write posts and so on.

Will be back properly in September, still likely to stop by now and then with updates or news, and my other background plans will be continuing on (actual launches of said plans are delayed too, though). Sorry! Vacation was way too alluring.

Hope everyone else is having a great summer!

Children’s Literature Lesson: Are you Sparky?

2010-06-27T19:31:57Z

Welcome to a brand new week everyone Eleanor from Give A Brick and Writing Smiles here again with the Shades of a Dream Literary adventure. We have one last life lesson from Roald Dahl’s Danny, The Champion of the World before visiting The BFG together next week. As an aside, I know Heather is looking forward to that one. She tells me it’s a book she knows

But I digress. If you’ve only just joined us and have missed our previous three adventures with Danny and his dad, shame on you! Where have you been? Really? Ah, OK Seeing as it’s you, here is the link to the very first post in the series. They should be linked forward to the next one from there.

Today we are reading a message that RD wrote very specifically with children in mind. It’s on the very last page of the book in special big letters. Look:

If you hold your computer up to a mirror, you might be able to read it!

OK, so I took that with a web cam and as such, it’s gone all back to front and impossible to read! Here’s what it says:

‘A MESSAGE to Children Who Have Read This Book. When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important. A stodgy parent is no fun at all! What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY!”

It wasn’t until I typed that out that I realised RD was not advocating Sparkly parents (as I had always read!) but instead, Sparky parents. Amounts to much and the same though I’m sure.

If you’re a little lost and wondering where I’m going with this, fear not. We’re about to have our grand ‘Ta Da!’ moment. I personally feel that this message for children is something we would all do well to remember on a daily basis.

It matters not a jot if you don’t have children. You might not have the slightest desire to produce little mini grown-ups (oooh, that actually made me shudder. As an aside, how much more shiny and smiley would this world be if it were populated with maxi children instead of grown-ups?) You deserve to be sparky (and sparkly!) The people who you interact with on a daily basis deserve to get to know the sparky you too. I’m sure the sparky you is a lot of fun

So what’s stopping you? Maybe I’m preaching to the converted. Maybe you’re already like some caffeine infused, Ever-ready bunny who lives each day to the max. If so, can I have a shot? I love to have fun. Heather will tell you, I’ve written whole blog posts about the stuff. But there are times when I must confess I am in danger of being a little stodgy.

Prior to writing this post I was procrastinating. By the time you read this I’ll have been to France but it was written well in advance (OK, three days!) of my departure. It is the penultimate post I wrote before rushing around packing but instead of sitting down to write with a sense of excitement and anticipation, I could feel the sludge creeping up. Why do we do that? Or is that just me? Why? I have no idea!

But you and I are not destined to a life of sludge and stodge. There is a solution. Just recognising that we’re being a little dull can help. Do you want to know what I did to eradicate the sludge? (No? Just skip this next sentence, I won’t tell anyone.) I took a photo on my web cam of me looking dull and boring. It’s not a pretty picture (and no, I’m not going to share it) but it gave me the virtual kick up the bottom I needed!

What about you though? Are you ever aware that you’re slipping into stodge mode? What do you do about it? Let’s talk …

Practical 3D Tips #3; Backing up is your saviour

2010-06-23T15:44:51Z

Everyone loses a vital piece of work at least once in their career. It could happen at a relatively harmless time when you haven’t done much work on the project anyway. It could also happen at the worst possible time, five minutes before deadline with your boss (or tutor, sometimes that’s the same thing) breathing down your neck.

With this tip we may not remove that dynamic entirely, but we can lessen the chances of it happening. Do you want to limit the amount of times you’ll have to go through that particular uncomfortable, sickening experience?

Storing backups of your work in several different locations will limit the chances of you losing that piece of work when you need to use it.

How you can lose everything:

Even if you’re using incremental saving with your 3D work, you can lose everything. Lets say you go into work one day and your computer’s died, or your hard drive’s failed, or the disk needs to be reformatted. Your pen drive (if that’s where you keep your work) refuses to work and your only copy of that important file is now gone. Or worse, you send the finished product to the appropriate person then lose the original file; they misplace the email and its now on your head.

What happens when you don’t lose it all:

Assuming we follow this tip and back up our files the way we’re meant to we can erase this entire problem. If your hard drive gets corrupted, no big deal – you have your files elsewhere. Your pen drive may still fail however aside from some minor annoyance you can get through it quickly. Sent the file to the required person and they lose it? No problem, you can just resend at your leisure.

Here’s my method:

1. Back up to the cloud. There are a number of different places online you can store files; Dropbox and iDrive are a couple that I use. A quick google search will return various options (some paid, some free) that can help you here. Use only for your most important files.

2. Back up to a pen drive. You can quickly make copies of your more important or current files and store them in strategic places (ie. work, home, college, parents’ house, etc).

3. Back up to a portable hard drive. Back up your entire system every couple of weeks or every month; if something goes horribly wrong you’ll always have your main files and system configuration.

Bonus: You can also copy important files onto DVDs and store them at different locations; this works best when they’re not in the same place as the rest of your backups. Give them to a friend or family member for the unlikely event of a fire or flood.

Conclusion

Following even a couple of these technique will save you loads of heartache and re-work. I’ve been there recently; one of my best 3D pieces managed to fall through the cracks and now I only have one of the very beginning files. Don’t do that, it’s not worth it. Backing up, in the long run, is so much quicker.

Children’s Literature Lesson: Giants and Snozzcumbers

2010-05-31T21:51:22Z

Hello again Welcome to another Friday Shades of a Dream Literary adventure with me, Eleanor from Give A Brick. If you’ve been around these parts before, you’ll know that we finished reading Danny the Champion of the World last week. As promised elsewhere, we’re now reading The BFG (The Big Friendly Giant), a personal favourite of Heather I’m told.

Personally speaking, his rich palette of is one of the delights of the genius that is Roald Dahl. Have you read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? That was my daughter and my first shared reading experience and it was refreshing to see the rules of good writing being bent and twisted. I’ve heard it said that you need to know the rules in order to break them. If that is true, Roald Dahl clearly had a good grasp of what should and shouldn’t be done I’m sure there’s a lesson in there for the bloggers amongst us but I digress.

First, a little scene setting. Sophie is a small orphan girl who has been taken by the BFG to his cave in giant land. The other giants with whom he is in residence take it upon themselves to fill their tummies with humans (affectionately called human beans) but our friend prefers to dine on a diet of foul tasting greens known as snozzcumbers. I’m told they taste like fish skins and have been known to make full grown giants lose the contents of their rather large mouths. Sophie however, is unimpressed with talk of snozzcumbers. She says there is no such thing. The BFG has something to say about that!

The BFG looked at Sophie and smiled, showing about twenty of his square white teeth. “Yesterday,” he said, “we was not believing in giants, was we? Today we is not believing in snozzcumbers. Just because we happen not to have actually seen something with our own two little winkles, we think it is not existing. What about for instance the giant squizzly scotch-hopper?”

“I beg your pardon?” Sophie said.

“And the humplecrimp?”

“What’s that?” Sophie said.

“And the wraprascal?”

“The what?” Sophie said.

“And the crumpscoddle?”

“Are they animals?” Sophie asked.

“They is common animals” said the BFG.

Literary life lessons aside, you’ve got to just love the language! Fabulous

But aside from the glorious language, what do you think? Reading this with my seven year old, we entered into a conversation about how sometimes we don’t have to see a thing to know that it is there. Love was our agreed example. When was the last time someone presented you with a gift wrapped parcel of love? I gave her a more scientific and concrete example too, electricity. Like love, we can only see the effects of electricity’s presence. It’s absence is very obvious too, especially on a dark, cold night

Having just read a wonderful post that discusses the power of the human mind and something called our Reticular Activating System, I’ve been thinking a lot about how unseen, and often unacknowledged, things can effect our day to day activity. Seeing really shouldn’t be believing. I could fill a small book with examples of occasions where unbelievable circumstances have prevailed and I’m sure that if you were to start thinking about it, you’d be forced to concur. I’d love to hear about it. Let’s talk

Webcomic is Online

2010-06-20T15:37:43Z

Another quick note to remind you of the webcomic; new one just went online about my thoughts on arriving in Canada. Stick men style; you should take a look.

Last reminder here about the comic, if you want to keep updated you can subscribe here for more stick man goodness.

Flights and Sleep

2010-06-19T17:32:47Z

I made you a blog post yesterday but Canada ate it.

Here now though, and the wather has been beautiful! Canada’s great, if you’ve not been you should visit. Seriously. Anyway, this is really just a quick note to say that the summer schedule will be running properly from now on, that I did arrive safely, and that all is well and according to plan. You’ll hear more from me a little later through the webcomic too (hilarity will ensue, honest).

Have a great weekend folks!

Practical 3D Tips #2; Need your scene simplified quickly?

2010-06-15T20:01:29Z

This tip is for the people (like me) that love to load up our scenes with all sorts of junk so that they look as real as possible; whether we see them on camera at a specific time or not.

Your polygon count skyrockets, your materials are so complicated that a small piece of them takes ten minutes to render, and you’re ready to resign yourself to the sad truth that that particular piece is unrenderable. Don’t do anything; here’s what might fix it without impacting on quality.

Hiding the objects you can’t see will remove the extra calculations your program has to make, speeding up the creation and rendering process.

Can’t work because of the detail

Complex 3D environments and scenes take a lot of processing power and memory, particularly when it comes to rendering. Sometimes they can be so complicated that even working on the scene takes forever; have you ever had to wait longer than five seconds for a mouse move to register? You’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. You spend more time waiting on your changes to update than you do making the changes, and you keep getting more and more stressed out by the state of things. Deadlines start to collapse, pressure gets piled on, and you begin to contemplate throwing your monitor out of the nearest window.

Complex scene? No problem.

Wouldn’t it be so much more enjoyable if you were able to keep that level of complexity and detail on camera while ensuring your computer didn’t hang up over the slightest movement? Imagine being able to tweak things without having a super computer, being able to walk away from a render without worrying it’ll crash. Or being able to save without the program failing, your computer rebooting, and losing large amounts of work. You’d meet your deadlines far easier, there’d be less pressure on you, and your poor abused monitor won’t have to learn to fly.

Action Steps:

1. Look at your scene; what doesn’t appear on the camera?
2. Select all the objects that don’t actually appear, right click, and select ‘Hide’.
3. Enjoy being able to move around your scene with greater ease!

Conclusion

This method won’t work on every type of scene; only the ones in which you have a lot of clutter out of view of the camera. You can do something similar by assigning objects to layers and hiding the layers you don’t require while you’re working for a greater level of control.

However this is the quickest way to save your file if it becomes too crowded suddenly. Try it, let me know if it helps. I use it on all but my simplest environment scenes and it works for me.

Children’s Literature Lesson: Greed

2010-06-14T14:07:32Z

Hello Welcome to Friday. Eleanor from Give A Brick with you again today And welcome to our penultimate literary adventure with Roald Dahl’s Danny, Champion of the World. It is a pleasure to have you here and I hope you are enjoying the little gaunt with Danny and his Dad. Did you get a copy of the book yet? You really should. Roald Dahl is an absolute genius. It’s been a joy for my daughter and me to share these books together. She was fascinated to think that you and I would be talking about it too. I have promised that she can come and read these blog posts one day soon. (In case that day is today, “Hello Em ”)

We’re near the very end of the book with today’s quote. To give you a little necessary background info (and something of a spoiler too so if you do intend reading it, feel free to look away now) Danny and his dad have caught over one hundred pheasants from nasty Victor Hazell’s wood. (Do you remember him? If you weren’t here a fortnight ago and need to go and catch up, you can do so very easily.) They did it by feeding raisins laced with sleeping powder to the pheasants. However, the sleeping powder wore off and many of the birds escaped (you’ll remember I told you about the scene with the scared birds and Hazell’s shiny car?)

Just when Danny and his dad think they have lost, a family friend, Doc Spencer, presents them with a gaggle of very, very sleepy pheasants. I’ll pass the mic to the Doc:

“It seemed fairly obvious that some of those pheasants must have gobbled up more than one raisin each. Some, if they were quick enough, might have swallowed half a dozen each, or even more. In which case they would have received a very heavy dose of sleeping pills and wouldn’t ever wake up. Those were the greedy ones. It never pays to eat more than your fair share!”

Wise words indeed Doc This lesson about having more than your fair share can be equally applied to a wider context. Can you think of occasions when it really is better not to be greedy? Are you ever greedy with your time? Or what about someone else’s time? Do you, like me, thrive on love and affection? I don’t believe it’s possible to be too loving or too affectionate. However, there are people who you might describe as greedy with their love, in that they’re so greedy with it, they don’t like to share it around very much

Do you know people who are financially greedy? I’m reminded of the popular quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? I stopped watching it years ago, largely because it was so frustrating to see people lose a small fortune purely because they got too greedy.

The list of examples could go on and on but I don’t want to be greedy with your time I’ve had your attention for long enough (for which I thank you ) Instead, it’s now over to you. What speaks to you when you think about greed? Let’s talk about it

Comic Update

2010-06-13T15:12:02Z

Hey all!

Just a quick reminder to let you know that the first of the holiday comics is online over in the webcomics blog. Check it out, let me know what you think!

Note: Still working on the theme, it’s not that pretty yet. Honest.

The 3D Student

3D tasty stuff meets logo design

Random Posts

Holiday

Related Posts:

Children’s Literature Lesson: Are you Sparky?

Related Posts:

Practical 3D Tips #3; Backing up is your saviour

How you can lose everything:

What happens when you don’t lose it all:

Here’s my method:

Conclusion

Related Posts:

Children’s Literature Lesson: Giants and Snozzcumbers

Related Posts:

Webcomic is Online

Related Posts:

Flights and Sleep

Related Posts:

Practical 3D Tips #2; Need your scene simplified quickly?

Can’t work because of the detail

Complex scene? No problem.

Action Steps:

Conclusion

Related Posts:

Children’s Literature Lesson: Greed

Related Posts:

Comic Update

Related Posts: