I’ve been doing a lot of drawing recently, and thought I might post a few new pictures. Then I realized that I haven’t posted any drawings of my own here at all. So here are some pictures from my old blog.
These are just random scans from my sketchbook. They’re a mix of pencil, ballpoint pen, and pigment marker. Continue reading
I’m playing Grand Theft Auto V right now on my Xbox 360. Sure, it’s a violent and sexist story about some bad people and their criminal activities. I’m fine with that – it’s a fantasy for adults, and I take it the same way I take Scarface, Boardwalk Empire, or even The Sopranos. It’s an exaggerated world to visit, not a realistic guide for how to live life.
OK, with that out of the way, here are some ways I’ve found to quickly level up each character to 100% in all skills.
Warming: SPOILERS AHEAD! I’m not giving away anything about the story or the plot – heck, I’m only a short way into it myself. But I like to get “ahead” of games, in the sense that if gathering up skills will help me play, then I want those skills right away. Then I never have to stop the flow of the game just to go work on those skills. So my goal was to get all my characters up to 100% on all their skills as fast as I could. There are lots of online guides for leveling up, so I’ll focus on the ones that gave me the most trouble. Continue reading
I bought a couple of new big hard drives, and decided it was time to re-organize all of my computer’s disks. I have 3 hard drives inside my Mac Pro, and nine (yes, nine!) hard drives sitting on a nearby table. Most of these disks are partitioned into multiple smaller regions. I have so much storage because I want every partition to have a local backup (in addition to backups from Backblaze, an automatic cloud backup service I pay for). So each internal drive has a corresponding backup partition on one of the external drives, and each external partition also has a backup (the backups get updated automatically every night in the wee hours by a program called SuperDuper). This organization works well for me because I need some partitions to be fast, some to be secured, and so on.
Moving everything around properly was risky, because if I messed it up I could lose both my original and backup data. To reduce the risk, I wrote a Processing program to let me first simulate (and debug) the re-organizing process, and then provide a step-by-step guide for actually moving stuff around.
I finished up a project the other day, so I gave myself a few minutes to make something just for fun. Here’s a grid of hexagonal tiles with little bits of graphics in them. Over time, random tiles rotate to create a new pattern (in this screenshot, you can see 5 tiles in mid-rotation). I played around with a whole bunch of different coloring schemes, and found that this combination of light and dark warm browns had just the right kind of feeling for me. Although it may look like the tiles are circular (a sensation that’s even stronger when you watch them rotate), they really are all hexagons. Read on for how I did this and the program itself.
There’s a group of functions built into Processing (and almost every other programming language in the world) that can help you create great images and animations. They’re drawn from the mathematical field of trigonometry, or trig, but you don’t have to care about that. What’s important is how to use them, and what they can do for you. The attached document covers all of that. I assume that you’re at (or beyond) Week 4 of the 2D Animation & Interaction class. Just click here for the PDF: Trig For Computer Graphics
The course has been running live now for almost a week, and so far it’s been smooth sailing. There have been a few little bumps: one student signed up for the July class a few days after the May class began on the 5th, so I offered him the chance to jump into this one, and he accepted. A little database magic and he was enrolled. And I heard today that one of the videos had about 30 seconds of black in the middle. Luckily, that was easy to fix. I was kind of dreading getting the new file live on Vimeo, because I feared it would turn into a snarl of many little changes. Happily, Vimeo has a “replace video” button! Easy. Tomorrow night the first week of homework assignments arrive. I can’t wait to see what these folks come up with!
I recently received a DVD, packaged as in the photo. In tribute, I’ve written new words to “There’s A Hole In The Bottom Of The Sea.” Sing along with me, won’t you?
“There’s A Disk That’s Holding All The Code”
When writing graphics programs, you frequently need to dream up little bits of geometry to make things look the way you want. While writing a program last night, I needed to figure out how to draw the lines that smoothly connect two circles of different sizes, like this:
The geometry isn’t quite as simple as it might appear.
Nomads starting on circles, then finding their own way in life
My 2D graphics course went live today! It was hot here last night so I slept on the couch downstairs, and by coincidence my dog woke me up around 12:30. Since the course materials were supposed to appear on the site at midnight, I checked – and there they were! So everything seems smooth so far, and I’ve had no complaints from students.
More Nomads, searching for fulfillment
To celebrate, I decided to make something pretty. I wrote this program for making little splindly-yarn things. Here are a few images I just made. It’s fun to play with this – I could sit here making little things like this all day!
Here’s the code. If you’re in my class, you’ll find all of this easy to understand by the time we’re done.
Continue reading
Apple has a product called Boot Camp, designed to let you run Windows right on your Mac. You can run virtual Windows from OSX using Parallels, but for fancy 3D work I wanted better performance, so I decided to install Boot Camp.
I have an older Mac Pro, and that made the whole process ridiculously hard. There are gotchas and hidden tricks all over the place. For the sake of anyone in a similar situation, or myself in the future, here’s what I had to do for 32-bit Windows 7.
The key things: use an older version of Boot Camp, make sure your Windows DVD is in an IDE optical drive (not SATA), and before installing Windows, physically remove all internal hard drives except the one with the Windows partition.
Read on for the step-by-step sequence.