Random stuff

Still behind a bit. Some photos from Helsinki taken in middle of April:

Taipuva Luotisuora had a gig at Lepakkomies in Helsinki and I took couple of pics while attending:

http://random.kuvat.fi/kuvat/Happenings/TLS_04_2009/

And couple handpicked for the hasty ones:

Some photos from the current neighborhood we live in. These are from April… slowly proceeding with the backbuffer:

I’m not really a heavyweight 2d artist but enjoy designing things every now and then. So sketches below are more about just designing the overall idea of the robot I had to design at work instead of creating masterpieces of art. =) Here is some doodles I scanned from my sketchbook. I still find it easier to work with paper and pen than Wacom & Photoshop after almost 15 years of moderate Photoshop usage:

Going through some old stuff first to clear it out of the way to move on to the current ones. Here’s a set shot couple of months back:

Probably the most critizised feature of 5D Mark II is the video settings. Originally it was locked to automatic metering when capturing the video but the new firmware 1.1.0 changes this.

http://web.canon.jp/imaging/eosd/firm-e/eos5dmk2/firmware.html

I didn’t really test it yet. I also have a slight problem with my computer setup as it is not powerful enough to playback the full HD videos I shoot with the cam. I don’t even consider what would happen if I’d like to edit them too. O_o

Hi. I haven’t been posting on May much as I concentrated on other activities than sitting behind my comp. Just to update what has happened and might come out next:

• I should finish the post that I started about Silo 2 and some of the bugs.
• I bought Canon 5D Mark II and Canon EF 16-35mm L 2.8 II so you should expect some output out of that and probably some things related.
• Planning a small one day photography trip with my old friend to take place in June. - probably some photos will be posted
• Moving in a month: From Espoo to Kirkkonummi. -> Sad to leave a very nice place behind but excited about the new place too.
• 4-Day working weeks have taken place and seem to work very well for me.
• Currently working on a character design at work - if the project goes well, I’ll probably post something out of that as character design has been somehow a thing that’s not my greatest abilities - so - exciting learning ahead.

Remember broken telephone? There’s a very nice site with a similiar miscommunication game called Broken picture telephone. Which means that every other participant is drawing a picture from an explanation and every other next participant writes an explanation from the picture. Miscommunication is inevitable. =)

http://www.brokenpicturetelephone.com/

(oh, and my user is called Rantomi)

I’m now officially familiar with Silo. Tenfold of low-poly objects behind, got familiar with basic + some tools and starting to get in to proper speed with the modelling. Actually… I’d be a lot faster if… Let’s step a bit back:

Before I started to work with the project and Silo. I had great problems concerning my OpenGL display drivers. With the most current display drivers from my Radeon X800 (Yep. I have a 5 year old graphics card…!) all the OGL-based software crashed on initialization of OGL. I rolled back couple of versions of display drivers and ended up in a situation where the programs started but they fell back to software rendering. So no OGL again and Silo didn’t work at all with that. Then I rolled a bunch back again and found a display drivers from last fall that worked. I got it working but the rendering is very… very slow. So after I got over the “toddling”-period with Silo my modelling speed exceeded what the frame rate of the viewport gave for me. So that’s capping my progression with the speed and actually cripples my working speed severely.

First of all I’d really like DirectX-rendering for Silo but according to the Silo3d-forums that’s probably not going to happen in the near future. That would of course raise the complexity as the OGL backend helps covering both Win and Mac-platforms so it’s quite understandable. And if you red the last paragraph you probably realised that the real problem is in the AMD/ATI Radeon’s display drivers plus the fact that my card is already wayyy… old. So this is really pushing me for an comp. update. =/ I’ll need an update in any case. I’m very bound to both my CPU and RAM with my photoediting-projects nowadays.

Probably I just have to go for even older display drivers and take the performance hit until I get financially stable enough (after buying this) to buy/setup new comp. =)  Now I’m just stuck with >half a year old drivers and can not update at all. =/

Got over the first phase and started to take steps a bit faster. Actually I ended up tweaking the controls a bit. I was so used to using ctrl for adding to selection and alt for substracting that I was starting to get a bit annodyden on it. So I changed those. And of course because I was now using the Alt-key for substracting from selection, the Maya viewport controls had to go. So I’m now using 3dsmax’ish view controls and ctrl for adding, alt for substracting. Also I changed shift-key for select through as the MMB selecting started to annoy too.

But the outcome of the tweaks were a huge improvement in working speed and now I even got couple of first Silo low-poly models ready. Whee haw!

One drawback is the amount and severity of bugs in the software. I’m using Silo 2.1, which is the latest one around, and I’ve stumbled on several quite annoying problems/bugs in the first 10 hours I’ve used it. I’ll post more about them later on.