The great stress of my December 2010 to March 2011 was organising and writing my reclassification application to basically argue that my job was of a higher level that i was being paid at.
Thankfully, it was approved with no problem. Basically this involved a rewrite of my job description along with providing piles of voluminous documentation about my job and what i do and have done recently, so as to support the case that I was underpaid for the work I do and that my job description was outdated.
I guess since I work in the field of IT, web and online stuffs and my old job description was written in the late 1990's it was a bit of a easy case to argue. :-)
Nonetheless having the application approved quickly was a great relief and my new job title is now "Analyst/Web Architect" as opposed to the old one of "Multimedia Programmer".
A good thing this is.... however multimedia programmer sorta did just roll off the tongue a lot easier...
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Monkey! EPIC!
WOW!
Just found out that Neil Gaiman may be writing the script for a new epic big budget trilogy remake of Monkey Magic!!
Well, prolly not a "Monkey Magic" remake per se, but "Journey to the West", which is what MOnkey Magic was based on so, yeah. I was a HUGE Monkey fan as a kid. So this is super exciting, especially as a big budget consideration & with Gaiman so ... Nice! :-)
Full story here:
http://www.scifitv.com.au/Blog/2011/03/monkey-to-get-epic-makeover-with-neil-gaimans-help/
and the best opening scene of any tv series here:
ohhhh yeahhhh
Monkeyyyyyy!!
Now to convince the wife to let me invest in the old series box set one day... need find it in region 4 tho... heh
Just found out that Neil Gaiman may be writing the script for a new epic big budget trilogy remake of Monkey Magic!!
Well, prolly not a "Monkey Magic" remake per se, but "Journey to the West", which is what MOnkey Magic was based on so, yeah. I was a HUGE Monkey fan as a kid. So this is super exciting, especially as a big budget consideration & with Gaiman so ... Nice! :-)
Full story here:
http://www.scifitv.com.au/Blog/2011/03/monkey-to-get-epic-makeover-with-neil-gaimans-help/
and the best opening scene of any tv series here:
ohhhh yeahhhh
Monkeyyyyyy!!
Now to convince the wife to let me invest in the old series box set one day... need find it in region 4 tho... heh
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
iPhone game... begun
Progress has begun on my Gyromonkey iphone game. First test version of one anyway.
Just using the Cocos2d engine at this stage.
Now that i have a version running on my phone and I'm happy with how easy that was to do, I think I can go forward with this...
*fingers crossed*
Just using the Cocos2d engine at this stage.
Now that i have a version running on my phone and I'm happy with how easy that was to do, I think I can go forward with this...
*fingers crossed*
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Ouch! My Liver.... a biopsy
So i spent the day yesterday in hospital.
Earlier posts mention issues with my knee. Some of the medication I am on for this can have a negative effect on my liver. So as to determine whether I can start some new medication or not, I needed a liver biopsy so that a liver specialist can have a closer look at some things that my blood tests set of some small alarm bells about. (basically some of the numbers are borderline so a liver specialist will determine if they are anything to worry about)
Well, interesting day.
I guess I partly know what it feel like to be stabbed.
While I had a local anesthetic I could still feel this long thick needly tube going into my insides... very odd indeed. I was supposed to hold my breathe but there was alike a snap and pull type thing going on in the extraction which sure as hell made me grunt and forget about holding my breathe.
Yeah it hurt... but it was over quick enough, afterwards the pain was just as if i'd been kicked in the ribs. A large part of it was the oddness and surprise of it during what i assume was the extraction...
Then it was a couple hours in the hospital bed being monitored for bleeding (standard practice) before going home.
I must say the nursing staff at Wollongong Hospital were amazingly excellent. Top notch!
The rotten old bag on the customer service/admissions desk on the bottom floor entrance to the hospital on the other hand... well she was a cantankerous old cow who's belligerent and unhelpful attitude threatened to make the whole event one crapload more stressful than it should have been.
While I do have private cover and usually get stuff done at Figtree private hospital this needed to be done publicly at Wollongong due to the particular specialist... and let me say... damn I'm glad to live in a country like Australia at times, where he have a publicly funded health system.
Just some general googling out of curiosity before having the procedure led me to some websites and questions and answers regarding liver biopsies in the USA... and prices ranged from approx $1000 to anywhere in excess of $6000 in some cases... WTF?!
For me... cost $0. Gotta love that little green medicare card.
Now I guess I get to find out if I can take this medication or not...
Earlier posts mention issues with my knee. Some of the medication I am on for this can have a negative effect on my liver. So as to determine whether I can start some new medication or not, I needed a liver biopsy so that a liver specialist can have a closer look at some things that my blood tests set of some small alarm bells about. (basically some of the numbers are borderline so a liver specialist will determine if they are anything to worry about)
Well, interesting day.
I guess I partly know what it feel like to be stabbed.
While I had a local anesthetic I could still feel this long thick needly tube going into my insides... very odd indeed. I was supposed to hold my breathe but there was alike a snap and pull type thing going on in the extraction which sure as hell made me grunt and forget about holding my breathe.
Yeah it hurt... but it was over quick enough, afterwards the pain was just as if i'd been kicked in the ribs. A large part of it was the oddness and surprise of it during what i assume was the extraction...
Then it was a couple hours in the hospital bed being monitored for bleeding (standard practice) before going home.
I must say the nursing staff at Wollongong Hospital were amazingly excellent. Top notch!
The rotten old bag on the customer service/admissions desk on the bottom floor entrance to the hospital on the other hand... well she was a cantankerous old cow who's belligerent and unhelpful attitude threatened to make the whole event one crapload more stressful than it should have been.
While I do have private cover and usually get stuff done at Figtree private hospital this needed to be done publicly at Wollongong due to the particular specialist... and let me say... damn I'm glad to live in a country like Australia at times, where he have a publicly funded health system.
Just some general googling out of curiosity before having the procedure led me to some websites and questions and answers regarding liver biopsies in the USA... and prices ranged from approx $1000 to anywhere in excess of $6000 in some cases... WTF?!
For me... cost $0. Gotta love that little green medicare card.
Now I guess I get to find out if I can take this medication or not...
Me being wheeled off to my biopsy...
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Lightwave Animation: Video & Process for Gyrocopter Monkey
So a little while ago I posted a still scene render of the Gyrocopter flying Monkeys... and included a short animated gif from the animation. Well, here's the full 35 second video clip of the final product, along with pdf's of the reports submitted as part of the assessment.
I'll go into a bit more detail about the animation etc, my specs, the problems I see with it, and the creation process, but first, the video itself.
The Video
As can be seen there are some real problems with it of course and it pains me to watch.
But anyway, let me explain about this video.
Why and when was it made
This was done as part of the CSCI236 3D Modelling and Animation subject at University of Wollongong in 2008 (some time ago). This is essentially the first Animation I had ever done in Lightwave (or anything else for that matter) that was more complex than a car moving across a scene or a ball bouncing and so on. It was a pretty big learning experience and I think, perhaps a tad ambitious.
This Subject was taught across Spring AND Summer session, so basically a standard semester to do our lectures and small incremental assignments. And then an extra summer session period, during which we were to complete two major assignments. The still scene render using a 'complex model' that I posted in the last post here. PLUS a 30 second/900 frame animation that is the video file linked above.
The Reports & Process
We then had to submit a report with each of those that detailed the assets, textures and methods used, as well as (for the animation report) a short 'reflection' on what we learned as well as our original plan and storyboards.
In case anyone may ever get any use out of them, I shall share these two reports in PDF for you here (click the images):
Welcome to Problem-town
Okay, so as I said, we had the summer session to complete the project. Summer session (for us here in Australia) runs over Xmas and New Year... Which also coincides with the annual family holiday for a couple weeks up the coast to Queensland. (Lofty ideals of getting a lot of work done on my trusty Mac Book Pro while on Holiday with the extended family proved to be loftier than practical...) And in general, having 3 kids, one of them 6 months old at the time, and all of whom also got rather ill over this period put a bit of a wrinkle in my grand plans for my first major and polished mighty animation.
Sooo, cutting to the chase, the upshot of all this, coupled with my general inexperience with Lightwave and animation/modelling in general (I'm actually a programmer) as I arrived back in town and the Universe rapidly approached the due date, I then realised that RENDERING actually takes a HELL of a lot Longer than I ever expected...!
The couple of rough renders (as i wasnt really in a position to properly render anything much on my laptop) revealed that a lot of the animation needed to use a lot more frames to look like it wasn't some kind of sped up Benny Hill themed animation... And of course having re-used models in the animation that were originally created as "complex" models for the still scene requirements meant that there were a lot of unnecessary polygons there.
Alas, time was running out. In the end I had to break up the render process into blocks of couple hundred frames and set some going on my home PC, some going on my work PC and some going on the faculty's computer Labs, and then edit those renders together. I cant recall the actual number of hours to render, but I had numerous computers tied up for days...
Also, as a complete novice at this, I had no idea at the time if there was a way to easily reveal and hide objects in a scene during a render, of the best way to switch cameras etc, so I did a lot of keyframes where I suddenly jumped a camera from one spot to another and dropped elements out of sight for a few frames. Which had unintended consequences when i enabled motion blur. So I REALLY need to investigate a better way of handing that.
Overall, it very much meant that the final product, as submitted was a Hell of a Lot rougher and has a lot more flaws and dodgy animation than I had time to fix.
Result & Onwards
Basically I consider this animation to be a rough draft, and now that the rest of my degree is finished, I hope to go back to this to fix some of these issues and polish it up. :-)
But I did end up getting a 94% HD mark for the whole subject overall so I guess I should be happy with the end result. And of course learned a hell of a lot, and despite the stress, really enjoyed it.
I don't know if im actually really any good at this, I know a lot of it is dodgy and I really suck at setting up lighting and stuff, but I do think I'd like to dabble some more with it and see what i can do, if only to improve this particular video and make it a bit more polished and a bit more in line with vision I had for it...
Of course the Monkey models have already been reused by me in some other projects and experiments...
A follow on subject in this degree from this was Game Design, so the Monkey model was revived as a dancing, poo flinging, banana chucking, hat wearing, coconut lobbing and knife wielding soviet genetic experiment in our game project "Monkey Knife Fight"... but I shall perhaps talk about that one another time.
I'll go into a bit more detail about the animation etc, my specs, the problems I see with it, and the creation process, but first, the video itself.
The Video
As can be seen there are some real problems with it of course and it pains me to watch.
But anyway, let me explain about this video.
Why and when was it made
This was done as part of the CSCI236 3D Modelling and Animation subject at University of Wollongong in 2008 (some time ago). This is essentially the first Animation I had ever done in Lightwave (or anything else for that matter) that was more complex than a car moving across a scene or a ball bouncing and so on. It was a pretty big learning experience and I think, perhaps a tad ambitious.
This Subject was taught across Spring AND Summer session, so basically a standard semester to do our lectures and small incremental assignments. And then an extra summer session period, during which we were to complete two major assignments. The still scene render using a 'complex model' that I posted in the last post here. PLUS a 30 second/900 frame animation that is the video file linked above.
The Reports & Process
We then had to submit a report with each of those that detailed the assets, textures and methods used, as well as (for the animation report) a short 'reflection' on what we learned as well as our original plan and storyboards.
In case anyone may ever get any use out of them, I shall share these two reports in PDF for you here (click the images):
Welcome to Problem-town
Okay, so as I said, we had the summer session to complete the project. Summer session (for us here in Australia) runs over Xmas and New Year... Which also coincides with the annual family holiday for a couple weeks up the coast to Queensland. (Lofty ideals of getting a lot of work done on my trusty Mac Book Pro while on Holiday with the extended family proved to be loftier than practical...) And in general, having 3 kids, one of them 6 months old at the time, and all of whom also got rather ill over this period put a bit of a wrinkle in my grand plans for my first major and polished mighty animation.
Sooo, cutting to the chase, the upshot of all this, coupled with my general inexperience with Lightwave and animation/modelling in general (I'm actually a programmer) as I arrived back in town and the Universe rapidly approached the due date, I then realised that RENDERING actually takes a HELL of a lot Longer than I ever expected...!
The couple of rough renders (as i wasnt really in a position to properly render anything much on my laptop) revealed that a lot of the animation needed to use a lot more frames to look like it wasn't some kind of sped up Benny Hill themed animation... And of course having re-used models in the animation that were originally created as "complex" models for the still scene requirements meant that there were a lot of unnecessary polygons there.
Alas, time was running out. In the end I had to break up the render process into blocks of couple hundred frames and set some going on my home PC, some going on my work PC and some going on the faculty's computer Labs, and then edit those renders together. I cant recall the actual number of hours to render, but I had numerous computers tied up for days...
Also, as a complete novice at this, I had no idea at the time if there was a way to easily reveal and hide objects in a scene during a render, of the best way to switch cameras etc, so I did a lot of keyframes where I suddenly jumped a camera from one spot to another and dropped elements out of sight for a few frames. Which had unintended consequences when i enabled motion blur. So I REALLY need to investigate a better way of handing that.
Overall, it very much meant that the final product, as submitted was a Hell of a Lot rougher and has a lot more flaws and dodgy animation than I had time to fix.
Result & Onwards
Basically I consider this animation to be a rough draft, and now that the rest of my degree is finished, I hope to go back to this to fix some of these issues and polish it up. :-)
But I did end up getting a 94% HD mark for the whole subject overall so I guess I should be happy with the end result. And of course learned a hell of a lot, and despite the stress, really enjoyed it.
I don't know if im actually really any good at this, I know a lot of it is dodgy and I really suck at setting up lighting and stuff, but I do think I'd like to dabble some more with it and see what i can do, if only to improve this particular video and make it a bit more polished and a bit more in line with vision I had for it...
Of course the Monkey models have already been reused by me in some other projects and experiments...
A follow on subject in this degree from this was Game Design, so the Monkey model was revived as a dancing, poo flinging, banana chucking, hat wearing, coconut lobbing and knife wielding soviet genetic experiment in our game project "Monkey Knife Fight"... but I shall perhaps talk about that one another time.
Friday, January 07, 2011
Lightwave Animation... GyroCopter Monkey
UPDATE: After checking this out, see this new blog post for the full animation video & more.
So one of my subjects was 3D Modelling and Animation. CSCI236. So in 2008/09 (across the Xmas break) I was frantically working to get that done on time. I was a little ambitious for my final project but i think i managed to get the bulk of it done. I had intended enemy gorilla-mechs to be under attack instead of a banana dropping aid mission, but anyway... heh
So essentially we had to do an approx 30second animation, but first, one of the earlier major assignments was a rendered still of a 3D scene with at least one relatively complex model.
So i did a Gryocopter to be flown by a monkey. ;-)
A monkey modelled after my little 'mascot' "Hercules the Wondermonkey"
This Gryo and monkey scene is essentially a precursor to the animation i had planned for later on.
The Final still Scene:
All done in Lightwave.
Although the far background is a still image, the closer shrubs are modelled & mask the transition from model to background image.
(I didn't get around to putting motion blue and smoke on the 'falling/crashing' gyro, and yeah - shadows/lights are just a mess)
And here's the wireframe of the Gyro with the Monkey.
So one of my subjects was 3D Modelling and Animation. CSCI236. So in 2008/09 (across the Xmas break) I was frantically working to get that done on time. I was a little ambitious for my final project but i think i managed to get the bulk of it done. I had intended enemy gorilla-mechs to be under attack instead of a banana dropping aid mission, but anyway... heh
So essentially we had to do an approx 30second animation, but first, one of the earlier major assignments was a rendered still of a 3D scene with at least one relatively complex model.
So i did a Gryocopter to be flown by a monkey. ;-)
A monkey modelled after my little 'mascot' "Hercules the Wondermonkey"
This Gryo and monkey scene is essentially a precursor to the animation i had planned for later on.
The Final still Scene:
 |
| (click to embiggen) |
All done in Lightwave.
Although the far background is a still image, the closer shrubs are modelled & mask the transition from model to background image.
(I didn't get around to putting motion blue and smoke on the 'falling/crashing' gyro, and yeah - shadows/lights are just a mess)
And here's the wireframe of the Gyro with the Monkey.
 |
| (yeah the monkey's rather polygon heavy, but that's cos they were to be used as reference points to bring the 'fur' effect out of) |
And the textured but unoccupied Gyro:
One of my disappointments here was that i didn't get around to putting the Banana-rocket pods on the gyro, but I managed to get that done for the Final Animation assignment.
I'll cover the whole animation thing in the next post:
Oh, and a quick shout out to http://cgtextures.com/ man, that site was the source for nearly all my textures.
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Custom Miniature
One of my awesome supercool workmates (pancreasboy) is into the miniatures scene and for a birthday some time past he made me this cool little custom version of my 'mascot':
Hercules the Wondermonkey, a sword wielding stuntmonkey of the "Rare Tropical Snowmonkey" variety.
Just wanted to make mention of it since I never got around to it in the past and I just love the way this monkey sits, forever upside down, upon my workstation all day. :-)
It can be seen and voted for here: http://www.coolminiornot.com/202698
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