Macworld Keynote Parody

Kind of silly, but still accurate IMO.

"Cool Guy" Paul

If you happened to catch last week's episode of The Office, it featured the Scranton, PA version of the Mafia's Five Families.  Here's a nice story about how a regular guy got to be hired as one of the family members.

trueSpace Vase

My first serious attempt at modeling and rendering a scene in 3D was when I recreated a Greek vase for an art history class back in the mid '90s.

To start, I researched some art books, found a Greek hydria vase and used that as my reference image. The modeling part wasn't too difficult, the vase was basically a 2D spline curve lathed into 3D, but the texturing was definitely the harder process.

I hand illustrated the textures in CorelDRAW and exported them as BMP images but couldn't figure out why the artwork looked so jagged (aliased). I ended up exporting them to a much larger file size than I needed and used Fractal Design Painter to scale them down. A somewhat roundabout way of anti-aliasing, but it worked.

The final, letter sized 300DPI render took all night on our 486DX. It wasn't until I viewed the image in Painter the next morning (no other standard Windows app could view it at such high res) that I realized I applied too much reflection on the vase and wood floor shaders. But it was too late to change anything, I had to take the file to the printers that day. Because of the final file size, I had to span it over multiple floppies. I still remember the look on the printer's face when I handed him the stack. I guess they were accustomed to receiving Bernoulli or SyQuest drives from clients, but I didn't care, the final $20 dye-sub print was beautiful.

So why the blog? Well, I kept a copy of the source file (but foolishly didn't keep the original render) and always meant to remodel, retexture and rerender the scene file using Maya. The only problem was that the file would always crash any modern version of trueSpace that I had. It wasn't until today when I was browsing through an old book which bundled a book version of trueSpace 1.0 that I decided to give it another try. Success!

While the scene file that I saved over the years isn't the same file I used for the art history render (looks like I was being inspired by the 7th Guest with the mood lighting), it's close enough for an accurate recreation. Now all I have to do is haul all of my trueSpace 2 floppies to work, copy them to a drive, FTP them back, install, and export the data to a format that Maya can read. I'll be sure to post the results later.