I’ve been having a hard time working on personal projects the past few days.  This is how I feel:

This is my Spore creature, Frank.  As you can see, he has a very large suctoped to help him get around.  Watch him dance here.

I read this article here the other day about future technology as predicted by Ray Kurzweil. It had some really interesting items to discuss.  Highlights include:

1. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
2. Solar power will be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.
3. In 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

While some of these seem far-fetched, he does have a really good track record for predicting future technology.  Number 1 will result in the bacon market exploding.  Number 2 will result in not having to go broke every time you fill up your tank.  And number 3 basically says that as long as we don’t get hit by a bus in the next 15 years, we’re all going to live forever.  Sounds fantastic.

Lately, I’ve being wondering through the lands of Hyboria in Age of Conan.  It’s been pretty fun hacking and slashing with Jigglybits, my Dark Templar.  On my latest adventure, I ran into a soldier with no pants:

Poor Balthas, he has no pants! I’ve been playing for a about a week now and it’s pretty fun.  If anyone picks up this game, I’m on the Stormrage pvp server.

That is one big burrito.  I must find the place that makes this burrito.

Today was a pretty big day:

The auto industry puzzles me. Over the last 3-4 decades, cars have remained relatively the same. You could take someone from 50 years ago, teleport them to the present day, show him a car, and he would probably say, “Yep, that’s a car.” Sure, cars have fancy gadgets like MP3 players, GPS navigation, and electronic dashboards. I’ll even give the industry credit for adding useful things like anti-lock brakes and catalytic converters. But in the big picture, cars haven’t changed. I recently saw this news article titled Six New Technologies Will Help Manufacturers Reach the 35 MPG Goal (Without Hybrids). This caught my attention a little bit because I in fact already have that technology. It’s called a 1996 Honda Civic. My car is over 10 years old and it gets better gas mileage than most cars available today and apparently better than most future cars not yet made. Now I’ll admit that a Civic is considered a small economy car, but it is 12 years old. Let’s compare this to the computer industry.

Take someone from 50 years ago who worked on a computer that looked like this. If you showed that person a modern-day computer, they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. 12 years ago, I was rocking a Pentium II ~200 MHz machine. Since computing power doubles roughly every 1.5-2 years, we have computers that are exponentially more powerful and exponentially smaller. A computer from 12 years ago is no match for even an iPhone from today. So why is it that my car from 12 years ago is more efficient than most cars available today? I’m no car freak, so someone’s bound to tell me about all this other junk that’s available in cars these days, but my day-to-day use with cars has not changed my entire life. Why is that?

So apparently, the plastic that my water bottles are made out of, called polycarbonate plastic (not to be confused with the carbonite that encases Han Solo) contains a chemical called bisphenol A.  A quick search on bisphenol A reveals such lovely facts as “it can act as a synthetic estrogen” and it is an “environmental estrogen.”  As much fun as having a surplus of estrogen sounds, I think I’ll go buy some of those stainless steel drinking containers.

And now, kittens bobbing their heads.

Has it really been over a month already since my last post? Work is keeping me busy. A job in the CG industry is like no other job out there. Whenever I tell people what I do, their eyes light up and they want to know more. When I get home at the end of the day, I am still excited about CG.

I finished my last set of personal training sessions last week. After 2-3 months of working out with a trainer, I gained about 13 pounds. The problem with working out a lot is you have to eat a lot. It almost becomes a full-time job. I like eating probably more than the average guy, but the amount I need to eat and the number of times I should eat was getting ridiculous!

I picked up some drawing DVDs called The Structure of Man. They’re all about drawing the human form from your mind. I’ve watched the first few videos and it seems pretty interesting. Hopefully, with practice I’ll be at a level where I am satisfied with my own drawings. I basically would like to be able to draw my own character/creature designs so I can turn them into CG characters. I also really like concept art and would like to be able to draw some sweet work myself.

And…here’s me in 3d:

The past few weeks have gone by pretty quickly.  Work is still exciting and I learn new things every day.  I started getting into physics simulations and linear algebra programming.  You can do a lot of really cool things once you know a few basic concepts such as vector/matrix math, cross products, dot products, etc.  When you hear TD’s (Technical Directors for you non-industry people) should be good at math, they’re right.  Not all TD’s know or understand this material but they are still really talented.  But the ones that do understand it can go above and beyond creating really cool systems.  I’m finding it a lot easier these days to read a SIGGRAPH paper and actually understand it.

I had an interesting conversation today with some of my coworkers about sharing knowledge and source code.  If you’ve read my site before, you probably know that I like to share my knowledge with people and give away code and such for free. People helped me when I was learning and I like to return the favor to others. Someday, I would like to write up some pages on character rigging and coding with Maya but now that I work for a company, it can be a bit more complicated.  If I were to post code and certain techniques, I would now have to be careful that I’m not posting too much that could be deemed sensitive company information.  I realized this is why there are not really any in-depth production worthy character rigging resources out there. Most of the knowledge is learned on the job and most of it is specific to the company’s pipeline. As a result, a lot of this work and knowledge can be seen as belonging to the company.  So what can be shared or posted?  Unless we have specific permission, we could probably only share extremely dumbed down versions of tools or plug-ins. Maybe even break down material into the fundamental building blocks that the material is based on and not even talk about the specific tool at all.  With physics simulations, for example, I could probably only write about the basics such as vector math and verlet integration and then leave it up to the reader to build upon these principles to make complex systems. Now if I were to go out and find a SIGGRAPH paper and implement it and modify it on my own time and equipment, could I talk about that?  Maybe.  But it could be seen as knowledge relating to my work.  It’s a tricky area that I’m not too knowledgeable about.  Once I’m in the industry longer, I’ll probably have a better idea about this.