I'm sysadmin!

I have a job now! It's my first job. I'm sysadmin on a store that sells wood and construction material. You can check out their site here: www.ajmoreira.com. There's much to do about the site...

But there's more!

They're going to install new terminal and server software, due to new regulations from the capitalist pig which require companies to upgrade their software to have a link to our country's financing, helping our country get every last cent we need to get out of the financial crysis while keeping the political class nice and spoiled.

I digress. I'm going to be a key element to help with this upgrade. The people working there need training and help with the new software, and I'll also have to move the old data from the old Unix server, to the new system. I'll also have to find a way to create backups of all the data, dealing with never-ending (but not very serious) data growth. Will zlib and a python script cut it? Do I really need full redundancy? Where will I keep the data? External 1Tb hard drives? How often to backup? Nightly? What's the best way to schedule this?

Another task is the website. A website replacement might be in order, complete with full design, and everything. I'm also going to have to find a way to link the website to the database of the system without having to query the system for every page loaded. I could build up a cache, put it online. Cache would be built nightly, as well. Do I really need to update everything on the cache? How could I avoid that?

A lot of problems to solve, and a lot of interesting ideas to solve them come up all the time. A huge system in my hands, I hope I'm up to it.

The Emo Programming guide, Part 1

1. Get Python from http://www.python.org/


2. Open it up


3. Type: print ('Goodbye, world!')


4. Cut yourself

Started a project outside school -- Finally!

I started a project with a few colleagues from college. It's meant to help you use public transportation. We wish to solve difficulties like having to check multiple websites and manually cross-referencing information, just so you can catch the right bus(or buses) to get you to your destination. We consider this to be hard, so we are creating a website, coupled with an android app and a smartphone-ready website, to help people find their way using public transportation.

It's probably going to be hard, since we're thinking of putting up a graph structure for our app, and we'll search it quite often, so we need to optimize a lot!

I've read somewhere that drawing the interface of a user-interfaced application helps programmers in its development. Since we don't really know where to start and our ideas for features are a little vague, That's where we start :)

I'm really excited about this. It could become big, but even if it doesn't, it's bound to be a wonderful learning experience.

No Matter -- Finished animation

The No Matter animation is complete!

No Matter -- Rendering stage

I used two computers to do this, since I didn't finish the facial animation. As a computer was rendering a certain sequence, I was finalizing and fixing the facial animation on the next sequences.

It took a whole week to render the whole thing, since I used HDTV resolution, and the character's materials had large textures which slowed down rendering considerably. The average per-frame rendering time was 20 minutes.

After this, I assembled the video together with Francisca's 2D animation, made in Adobe Flash, and the song we made with Ricardo Pacheco.

Finally we have all the posters on the walls! They're animate-able and are constrained to not leave the walls. A lot less complicated than the posters which will crawl away from the wall onto the floor.



Now, I'll start animating. After I'm finished, I'll correct the loose ends in the character skinning, and in the character itself, and then the 3D part of the animation should be good to go.

And this happened. I only had one light in the scene so far (to keep renders quick), but I was quite surprised to find out that my character turned out to be a ninja!

Latest Updates!

Today, the character was (almost) completely rigged to the armature.





And we have a little world going. It's got all the walls and floor that we could ever wish for.





And we need some posters on those walls, since the posters are major characters in the story! I created 10 different posters (although I never got to using them all) and put them on the walls.





These posters are going to be rather aggressive. They will stalk our character, crawling the walls. Some will even move to the floor. Being 2D plane primitives, they can't be bent. I had to create a system to make it easy for me to animate the posters through the walls and floor.



The little sphere thing is an Empty. The poster seems to bend because of two perfectly aligned posters, which are following the Empty, but not moving off their wall. This can be achieved with a "Copy location" Constraint, without the Z axis (in case of the floor portion of the poster) (or Y in case of the wall part). The Empty was rotated 45 degrees and will only animate in local coordinates.

No Matter -- Character model (3)

I'm on vacation this week! Vacation to work, I mean.

I finally installed Ubuntu 10.10. I hadn't used Linux in a long time, but Ubuntu is a really mature and user-friendly operating system, and it was easy to adapt. The installation was a lot easier than any other Linux distribution I used before. I used Dropbox to keep my files around, so I was able to quickly install Blender 3D and GIMP and get to work!

Blender runs a lot better now (I have an onboard intel graphics card, so it's pretty impressive that blender is able to run, given the fact that it uses opengl a lot.) and renders have become a bit faster too!

I worked on the hair, a lot. I used only one texture, and some noise maps to make the hair look more volumetric. Here's an early test of the hair:

Here's a beauty render of the character, and an in-editor screenshot. You can see that the hair is formed by alpha planes. This is to help keep the load off the renderer, since I need it to make fast preview renders to test the animation as I go.

There are about 5 lights casting raytraced shadows, but still the render took 9 seconds.

The character has a little skin texture (intentionally made not clearly visible) and doesn't have eyebrows or eyelashes yet...

After the eyebrows, eyelashes and finishing touches, I'm going to create an animation rig. This set of objects will help me animate the model, but it's a hard task to create and set them all up. Stay tuned!

No Matter -- Character model (2)

Here's some progress on the main character. Head was created and finished, eyes roughly rigged, arms ready to go! Next up, hair and all textures (Painting soft shadows, remember?)

The aim here is to create a cartoonish character. Since it won't be so based upon reality I had to make an awkward rigging in the eyes. Fortunately, the software I'm using (blender 3D) supports a "track to" constraint which turned out to be extremely useful, together with constraint attenuations.

I'm on Windows 7 but, since one of the main points of this short film was to only use software which is open-source, I'm going to change to Ubuntu linux this week.

No Matter -- Character model

This is a WIP character model for the short film, "No matter". I'll take some time to talk about this project, later.

There is still a lot to do. Including, the head, hair, and some proportions need attention here.

The film will not have global illumination or indirect lighting, so I need to paint soft shadows in textures. Here, the shoes are ready. They will stay that simple because they will only be seen in the animation for a few frames.