Sunday, April 25, 2004

Brain Teasers...


John Kador has some good brain teasers on his site. For those who may have to take a brain teaser interview his book will help to get you more comfortable with this process.

As a fun teaser I saw used some time back try this one out:
Three switches outside a windowless room are connected to three light bulbs inside the room. How can you determine which switch is connected to which bulb if you may enter the room only once?

For one possible solution click here.

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Audio Post - New


Click the icon below for the first "Will render for food" audio post...

Powered by audblogaudio post powered by audblog

Monday, April 19, 2004

Programming the day away


For those who program using any of the .net goodies and those who are just interested in technology from the Redmond giant, here is a cool resource:

http://channel9.msdn.com/

Spend a little bit of time browsing the site as there are tons of things going on....

CG Filmmaking


There is a new book out from McGrawHill called 3ds max 6 Animation : CG Filmmaking from Concept to Completion by Barrett Fox. As the title says it goes from concept to completion in a real cg film workflow.

Rendernode magazine has a good book review here and a sample chapter available for download here. I have been casually flipping through this book at my local Barnes and Nobles and it is well written, with everything as the title states. Now I just need to purchase the book, if you are interested in CG Filmmaking you may want to do the same.

happy rendering...

Sunday, April 18, 2004

VIZ 2005 - shipping?


It looks semi-official from Ralph Grabowski that VIZ 2005 will be available and shipping this week. Though nothing official from the Autodesk website yet.

Hopefully more to come soon...

Saturday, April 17, 2004

Blogging Links


For those of you who are familiar with the Blogrolling work from Jason you probably saw that this was sold to Tucows. More information about that can be found here, of course thanks Kurt for pointing this service out.

I have now added blogrolling to my list of utilities as you can see from the links on the side. Rather than manually updating your links with html, this service allows you to do so much more than a static list. For those that I link too, you can see when they make new posts by the double astericks (**link name**) around their link name (another of the many options you can use). From choosing the way you would like to display your names, add sites and more give this utility a chance to enhance your own blog.

To see how simple this service is sign-up for a free account and click the "Blogroll Me!" link to add me to your list. Instantly updated and added to your site links.

happy websurfing...

Friday, April 16, 2004

Flexible Goodies


Do you spend long hours at the computer? Countless times clicking keys?

Ok, getting to the point I have watched with interest the changing styles of keyboards and typing pads over the past few years. Two types of keyboards have always stuck in the back of my head; flexible and infrared. Well today I picked up a clearance bin special from CompUSA for a great deal that I could not pass up, the mini VIK usb keyboard or "The Virtually Indestructible Keyboard".



There have been a few different opinions about this product, both positive and negative. After playing with this for a bit, I have unplugged my standard keyboard for a month test to see how well it handles the daily work. So far it is nice not to hear the clicking of the keys as these are much softer.

Micah Alpern discusses a few different keyboard models that you may find interesting here. If you have used any flexible keyboards and/or IR/Projection keyboards, drop me an e-mail to let me know your likes/dislikes.

more to come later...

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Work flow - First Steps


My specialty in renderings is with Architectural Visualization. I started out using AutoCAD many years ago so I come into the game with a deep knowledge of production drafting and the inner workings and customization of AutoCAD. Then along the way came Architectural Desktop which changed how I worked and viewed production drawings forever. We will get to that soon enough…

Let’s cover a quick overview of a “typical” project life cycle in the Visualization realm.
1. Receive a job with a need/reason for visualization services
a. Establish the needs and outline specifications for the completion of said job.
b. Modeling
c. Materials
d. Lighting
e. Output

So the first step is proper planning to accomplish your goal. Without this step you may be overworking yourself, always identify upfront what the scope of services and final deliverable will be then plan your work flow accordingly. This step helps to identify where a majority of your time and work should be spent. Items that will not be seen in your output may not need to be included which reduces your face count and will also keep your rendering times fast.

David Wright has some articles for you to read that share some great ideas and insight into the business and planning aspect of visualization services.

Next up modeling....

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

EVAUG meeting


The April EVAUG meeting is this Thursday.

Agenda

6:30-6:50pm - Meet & Greet - We will start the meeting off with some food and drinks. This is a great chance to see old friends and meet other CAD users from area companies.

6:50-7:00pm - Introduction to the Group

7:00-7:30pm - Topic #1 - A Beginners Guide to Customization - Part II - This session will be a great chance for you to get introduced to Lisp/Visual Lisp and how to get started creating commands you wished AutoCAD had. This is an introductory level exposure to lisp. If you have not a programming guru then this session was made to get you started.

7:30-7:40pm - Short Break - This is a chance to chat, eat, stretch and/or carry on a corner discussion.

7:45-8:30pm - Topic #2 - CAD Standards and How to Get There Part III - Now that we have an understanding of what type of items CAD Standards encompass and some tools to help us get started lets look at the best method of all, "CAD Standardization Through Customization".

8:30-8:35pm - Wrap Up, Prize Giveaways and Dismiss

For more information check the EVAUG website.

hope to see you there...

Saturday, April 10, 2004

Happy Bunny Day


Very shortly it will be Easter. Just wanted to take a moment to wish each of you friends who visit this site a happy easter.

happy holidays...

Time for Updating


Had a small break of time last night thanks to being under the weather and insomnia. =)

With the freelance work picking up I took an opportunity to update the Triple D site. Noted improvements include; a new layout, content simplification to show our market focus, css integration to control the look across multiple pages for consistency and a few other goodies. There are still a few more items to complete in this phase that will be finished up in the next week. Of course the next phase is shaping up to be released in a few months (thanks to Miker the Biker for the discussion on this)!

Speaking of Miker the Biker, he has just launched his own freelance work site. If you are looking to have any "rendered" site plans, stop by his site to see what he has to offer. Best of luck on this new endeavor.

happy coding...

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Rendering Project Work Flow's


Funny how much this topic keeps coming up in conversations recently. I started a small post about this topic earlier this evening, but it has turned into 10 pages so far and could easily fill a book. So I need to cut back some information or break it up into several posts (the third alternative is to have any interested publishers contact me for a book deal). =)

For now I think I will break this topic up and cover a few key areas in detail.

As a start here are the programs I use for my "typical" workflow:
1. Architectual Desktop - A piece of software that can change the way you view production drawings/work forever (I will expand more on this later). In the meantime check out the new release of 2005, the AutoCAD and ADT team(s) have put out another amazing release of software that I cannot say enough good things about.

2. Autodesk VIZ/MAX - Need I say more? No really.

3. Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter - For 2d compositing, tweaking, textures etc.. both programs have their strengths and weaknesses. Together they are a great match.

I will be expanding on these items in regards to workflow for Architectural Visualization services soon.

happy rendering...

Autodesk VIZ Users


Wow, I cannot believe I missed this post from Shaan sometime back. If you are an Autodesk VIZ user and interested in possibly beta testing a future release this is the link for you.

There are plenty of good reasons to want to get involved with beta testing. Think about your's and then be sure to fill out both the Motivation and the Beta site profile.

happy rendering...

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

McTartan


Happy Tartan day!



Nice skirt heh.... =)

RSS History and Tools


Dave posted a nice link to a history of RSS and a history/overview of RSS from Microsoft for those interested.

Why do I mention RSS? As you may have read when I first started this blog I love the flexibility that RSS and syndicated feeds offer. My current newsreader of choice is still Newzcrawler. From newsgroup access, blogging directly, to getting the latest news from various sources this is one tool in my kit that I find useful daily and would not want to be without. If you visit a few web sites/pages each day to catch up on news, what better tool than to have something that does the work for you in one convenient wrapper.

Monday, April 05, 2004

Charity


Just noticed on Shaan's blog that Shawn Gilmour (Autodesk personnel and great guy) will be performing a Charity Ride on May 29th at the Bike For Breath, Two Rock Ride and is looking for sponsors.

Not only does this support a great charity but it also helps to sponsor someone who helps to make the great products we all use. Please take a moment to check out Shaan's blog for more information and please give what you can to support Shawn on this trek. Any amount you can offer will help Shawn to meet his goal, donation is easy. How easy you ask? I just donated in under 3 minutes, it is that easy so come on and donate.

Good luck Shawn and ride hard...

Films and Cinema


If you are in the Eastern Virginia area you may have noticed that Architecture week has kicked off and is in full bloom. This evening we had the pleasure of watching "My Architect" at the Architecture and Film program held at the eclectic Naro theatre.

This was a wonderful film by Nathaniel Kahn in his search for an understanding of his father. Good cinematic moments and visuals in this documentary, I highly enjoyed watching it. If you get the opportunity see it in a theatre with plenty of others, in our case try a few hundred architects. ;)

happy designing...

Thursday, April 01, 2004

Galleries


Got the chance to upload some images to the gallery. Currently there is a gallery of Dylan pics, for those asking to see some updates, and I finally got a chance to go through some of my AU 2003 photos. From the parties, learning, good friends and more here are some random shots.

In the past I have used a few different "automatic" web gallery creation tools but never found "The Dream Utility" until now. I am hooked on JAlbum. What makes this different from other utilites? How about CSS integration (and customization) to control the look/layout of your pages. Simplicity, and did I mention free?

If you are looking to post a gallery of images I would highly recommend you to check this product out. I will be working on a new gallery of events around town that I find interesting, so stay tuned for more.

happy web wrangling...
 

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