As Maria and I gear up for the next 5 busy months of wedding planning, we're suddenly confronted with what to put up on the front page of our wedding website. We've got some pictures we're planning to toss up and some links that will probably start working in the next couple of days, but we have no idea what should greet new comers. So far we've had and passed on the following ideas:

-"Do not print"

-"We hope everyone will enjoy our party" <--- extra lamified for humor

-a brief synopsis of the third hour of the Battlestar Gallactica mini-series (which was awesome!)

-"Welcome to a stripped down, no frills wedding informational site."

As you can see we are having trouble. Hopefully, the clever and fun little love poems of others will be the way to go.

Slit scanny madness

Here you go! For your viewing pleasure, the fruits of my slit scanning efforts. Mind you, I didn't have a film camera or a motion control rig hooked to a light box. I did however have a scanner, my hands, a map, a toy car, a mystery item of a glowy blue nature and Photoshop to help me. See the meh results here:
http://photos.pley.net/User+Galleries/killyin/Gnomon/slitscan/

I took too many days off

I've spent the last day and a half not working on projects, and it was probably not the smartest thing in the world. I need to complete a portion of research today as well as do some poor man's slit scans using a scanner. I'll post the results of that excercise later. Hopefully LEDs and a hotwheels car will make for some pretty cool source material. With any luck, I'll also have time to put into my Maseratti and leg models today, but I think I'm crossing over into fantasy territory. Beyond that, has anyone seen the news? Like have I missed any important stuff happening in the world? I guess I should just listen to the radio or something.

New Photos

Happy Valentine's Day the day after by 1 hour and 7 minutes PSD.

I've added some of my renders from school over here so check them out!

I was going to write some diatribe about my days and so forth, but I'm just so freaking tired. I think it's to bed with me, but I'll write some more tomorrow.

Late and getting later

I'm waiting for WoW to login and getting ready to watch Lost. I'm also wondering what the Disney-Pixar merger will bring. It's definately an interesting time.

On movie etiquette

Last night, Maria and I went to see "Memoirs of a Geisha" which she has been dying to see for a while. All in all a good movie despite every effort of the couple behind us. For some reason they were a little rusty on how to behave in a cinema house, so let me illuminate a few of the subtleties.

1) Don't talk during a film.

Now I understand that occasionally something strikes you as funny or interesting and you want to share it with the person you came in with. Hell, sometimes you just want to let the person you are heading to the restroom and not fleeing the theater for no apparent reason. Just whisper whatever you have to into that person's ear and voila, information has been exchanged and no one will be bothered.

Another exception is cheering during the opening night of a blockbuster. Everyone in the theater is excited, and whooping and hollering are both expected and appreciated. However, Memoirs of a Geisha opened nearly a month ago and is simply not that kind of movie. Moreover, grumbling in a conversational voice is a far cry from whooping or hollering. Okay then, moving on.

2) When you are asked by another patron to keep your voice down, apologize in a slightly embarrassed manner and stop talking.

I know this can be confusing, but it's really for the best. It's better than, say, staring down the offended patron, or continuing to grumble throughout the movie, or grumbling louder when the movie gets louder. This will also prevent other patrons from expressing their dissatisfaction with you. It is considered especially rude to start throwing popcorn.

3) When asked by an usher/manager to keep your behavior under control or else you will be ejected from the theater, start acting like a person who isn't crazy.

For example sit still. Don't speak. Watch the movie you paid money to see. Eat the popcorn you paid good money for. EAT it. Complaining about your new not friends so that all of them can clearly hear you is considered rude. Throwing food stuffs at this point will only make you look worse.

4) When confronted by the manager/usher a second time, listen to what he has to say.

He will say that he has warned you already that if you acted up again you would be ejected from the theater. He may give you one more chance but will likely advise you that he has "had it" or some such.

5) Directly after your final warning do not hit the chair of the person in front of you, yell "Are you happy now, you F@#%ing asshole?" Or "F#$@ him!"

This is especially a bad idea if the usher/manager is still within earshot.

6) As you are being escorted from the theater, DO NOT dump your jumbo popcorn all over the guy in front of you.

This makes you look really crazy and will likely get you banned from the theater.

Following these simple steps will ensure everyone has a good time.

Analog class this quarter

Just got back from the first session of my only analog class this quarter: Production Design. The teacher seems cool. He's very right-brained but I like what he has to say. We spent most of the class drawing our impressions of freeze frames from Baron Munchausen. We were going to draw out of Lawrence of Arabia too, but like I said he's very right-brained and prone to not follow through on every idea he has. Sometimes, I think I'm really envious of that kind of mind. I'm sure it's my imagination but people like him seem to have inexhaustible energy and are somehow always psyched. Sure you might come off as flighty or unreliable at times, but that kind of creative energy is contagious and impresses even the most left-brained of us.

Either way, I think it's going to be a fun quarter and I'm looking forward to the next 9 weeks.

Couple of things

So first off, I've finally given up on hosting my own website. That old piece of crap website is gone and now if you go looking for it, you will end up here. The positive side of this is that this site will be kept fairly up to date and that the old site was a piece of shit and good riddance anyhow.

Secondly, me and a couple of others had some issues in Texture Mapping 2 tonight but they've been resolved. Just in case you're curious or just so you can read something impenetrably geeky the problem was this:

If you want to use a Surface Luminance node to control your diffuse, you want to use the normalCameraX value, however it's not enough to just feed this into the ramp node as you would with the Sampler Info node. For this value to be usable it must be interpreted and clamped by the Set Range node. Easy enough, you just feed the normalCameraX value into the Set Range node's valueX input, set the min and max range to 0 and 1.7 respectively and the old min and old max range to 0 and 2 respectively then connect the resulting output into the ramp node's U coordinate. For some reason, our surfaces were getting evenly divided into 2 separate UV spaces regardless of the lights which looks terrible. Turns out instead of connecting the Set Range node's outValueX to the ramp node's U coordinate, we were connecting the ValueX output which is completely silly because the ValueX output is exactly the same as the ValueX input on the Set Range node. Doing that effectively bypasses the Set Range node, so it's just like connecting the normalCameraX on the Surface Luminance node directly to the U coordinate of the ramp which we stated right at the beginning is pointless. I mean, why even have that as an optional output to begin with, right? So this ever happens to you, just make sure you're using the outValueX output and not just the valueX output.

If you read all of that, I am sorry. I know it's boring as sin, but it's my new life! Yay!

More images from Xmas

I've tossed up a few images from my Xmas vacation here. Enjoy!

Me at Yellowstone =]

Me at Yellowstone =]
Originally uploaded by Killyin.

This may very well be the best picture I have of me. I had to touch it up because of a snowflake that was oriented perfectly to look like a giant eye booger. I'm sure you probably didn't need to know that.

Here's the first!

This is my first post and my first blog so forgive me if I open by saying, "this is an experiment" and "hello." There, that wasn't so bad. Cool. In any case, I set this thing up so I can comment on whatever I feel like be it games, movies, or my own life as a 3D animation student in Los Angeles.

I guess if you found this page you either know me or you're really, really bored. In fact if you found this page through boredom, wow. My hat is off to you sir. That is mighty bored. In any case, I'm gonna tell you where the handle Killyin comes from so if you were bored before, you might want to look at something more entertaining like this. (I should note, I will always try to mention if something is not safe for work so if it's not marked NSFW you're fine.)

So back when I was in highschool, all of my friends named their cars. Chuck's dad's car was called Hope (it had brake problems). Tom's Camaro was called Merlin. Matt's parent's Miata was called Bitch (I think though, I have no idea why). In any case, my maroon chevy Lumina (the sedan not the minivan) had no name, and I was just waiting for one to occur to me. One summer, while driving around and listening to the radio, a Killian's Irish Red beer commercial came on and it just seemed right. The car was red, the beer was red and I liked the name. Hardly genius I know, but hey, at least the car got a name.

For some reason, I really got attached to this name. I used it with friends when we were doing dumb things where we felt we needed code names or whatever. Then, I went off to college and immediately got addicted to the internet and espescially mIRC. Now in internet chat rooms, your handle is the face you show to the world, so I put a lot of thought into it and picked Killian. Unfortunately, that was taken so rather than be Killian4534 and announce to the world that I was the 4533rd unoriginal person, I went with a sneaky alternate spelling which is Killyin. Since then, I've taken the domain (the website was really awful and is probably down now), the gmail account and most recently this blogger account. I've used it a number of online games so if you've seen it there's a decent probability that it was me.

That's enough for now. It's time I went to school and worked on modeling cars and cacti for class.