Out my office window

Finally brought my camera to work, this is the view out of the meeting room at about 8.30 in the morning. Man.... wanna go walk the beach :-)

Sony F717, F4/100, 4 pics stitched together in PS. Original PS'd image is 5200 pixels across. USM applied, no color corrects.

Today at work.

Ok so I'm slacking. My housemate has Gnomon's Houdini Rigid Body Dynamics DVD and I'm supposed to watch it, not blog. Bwah. Anyways.

Today we had a intro to fur class. It's very interesting to see how fur is implemented in houdini, I think of the 3 fur systems I've had a chance to play with (3ds max, maya and houdini), houdini is probably the most confusing, but it would definitely be *the* fur system to use in production. The ability to control stuff like fur clumping, length, color etc is very flexible. It's hard to describe, I'll probably try to produce a video tutorial on it using the fur proto install.

I was told that this is the same system used by Framestore CFC to produce the Rexona Go Wild commercial, except that they used PRMan and not Mantra for rendering.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9dbF2gg4v0

I think Framestore has a slightly less compressed version on its site.

Apart from that... one of my colleagues took us out for lunch at Wolfgang's Express (DUH! lol), where I had a BBQ Beef Foccasia melt and a side of salad. Definitely delicious, and positively EVIL =)

Went home at 6 on the dot, and bought some frozen foods and snacks at a nearby Ralphs then headed home. I heard that Albertson's may be on strike soon? That sucks as I prefer their deli there =)

Alright, heading offline to bathe then do the Houdini RBD dvd till midnight, then I'll turn it.

Auf Weidersehen!

Alvin

The week in review.

Ok, this IS kinda late for a week in review, especially on a Tuesday night. But I got my stuff down on my pda and never got around updating here, so there :P

Hmmm what did I write here... oh... I think I'm gonna talk a little about the public transport here. I'm in the west side of California in Los Angeles, where I work in Santa Monica. I take a bus from my current residence (with a friend) to work on the Metro. It takes about 40 mins to get to work. There are *many* other services running, like the Big Blue Bus (bad tongue twister), Culver City bus and others I can't identify. Yet.

The bus services here are quite interesting. I've only taken the Metro so far, payment is by Cash, Tokens (prepaid, think of it like arcade tokens back in the day), and passes. Other bus services have card services like back home (I think....), and the BBB actually allows you to top up the cards on the bus. Very nice!

The metro buses I take are also VERY disabled friendly. I've had the chance to see this in action, the metro runs a variety of buses, and the one I saw in action had a folding step to allow wheelchairs to board the bus with ease, and onboard the bus, it's very spacious to allow movement, and certain seats fold up to accommodate the wheelchair. This makes me wonder how back home.... how is a wheelchair is supposed to actually get on an SBS bus? The width of the SBS passage ways just... doesn't work out.

Another feature the bus has are bike racks on the front of the bus? Those are so cool.... I wish I'd brought my bike over. The buses have a rack on the front to mount (from what I see) two bikes. It's nice as the bus I take goes all the way to the beach, and a weekend cycle there would be excellent, especially with the weather warming up and all.

And oh, I think I forgot, but Adrian E. if you are reading this, a subway melt tastes the same here. And I asked another friend over in NZ he says subs taste the same there too.... so Subway must have some very good QC :)

Chat in a while....

Alvin

Hi from LA!

Hi all! Well to whoever reads this barely-updated blog :P I'm currently in Santa Monica, LA doing my Internship with SideFX. They're the developers of Houdini, and I'm attached to their LA office working on Intern stuff (Brewing Coffee!) and the key point, learning Houdini.

So far, I'm slowly getting on track, more or less fine with traveling to-fro from work back to my friend's place where I'm staying, and will be getting my own (shared) room this coming April. The weather is really cold when I arrived, but I was told it is now Spring, so it should be getting warmer. It was very VERY cold a few days ago, was freezing my head off. But yesterday the skies cleared (was foggy the first few days I was here), and I was totally blown away as I was able to see from the office all the way clear to the horizon, and the amazingly greater-than-32-bit-probably-HDR gradient of blue, without a cloud in the sky. Today, the skies were somewhat cloudy, with some really UNREAL clouds. They looked like something out of a Bryce render (no offense to Brycers!).

Food is rather expensive, IMO, to this foreigner. A meal costs about 7USD, which adds up quite fast if you think about it. I'm now buying frozen food from the supermarkets to bring to lunch, and eat at dinner as well. Today I got some Hungry Man frozen dinners, for USD1.77 each. They taste like well frozen food. And for me I'm not too picky about food, so it goes down well. So long as I have my after-food tea, I'm fine :)

Will check back soon, getting sleepy and need to rest.

GW

Python, anyone?

A fellow student sent me this link for python tutorials! http://showmedo.com/videos/python