chris cunnington

So every site out there has their own list… the ‘32 Useful Portable Apps For Web Designers and Developers’, or the ‘10 Must Have Portable Applications’, and they have some awesome tools, etc. Therefore my intention is not to give you lists. I have been using Portble Apps for nearly a year now and they have basically changed the way I live and operate simply by integrating portable apps into my lifestyle. Don’t ever change your life to fit with IT, make IT work for you!

Firstly, go straight to www.portableapps.com and download their latest suite.. but only download the ‘Platform Only’ version. You seriously don’t need all the default applications that they have in their bundles. You could even be brave and try out their Version 2 beta 3… I did and some of the new feature are awesome and totally needed, like the ability to hide apps from your app list.

Secondly, whilst surfing portableapps.com go to their applications section and download a few apps that you might need.

Moving on from here…. here is a list of the apps I currently have on my 16gb portable apps specific usb disk.

Mozilla Thunderbird

You cannot go wrong having your email with you where ever you go. I check 3 different email addresses at the same time via Thunderbird. My secret though, if you are like me and have a desktop machine at home… this is your portable email so whilst setting up your email account make sure to leave the option ticked to leave the messages on the server. You can always empty your email server from your desktop machine. My desktop machine however is set to only delete messages after 7days from the server… therefore I will always receive all the mail to both my Portable Apps and my Desktop Machine.

Mozilla Firefox

Straight up for surfing the web. I love firefox its my browser of choice and with the Xmarks Addon installed I never need to concern myself with having different bookmarks stored in different versions of Firefox… Xmarks keeps that all neatly organised for me.

Portable Digsby

Yes I know… technically a portable version does not exist.. however ‘Carsten Knobloch’ has written a version that works perfectly with the PortableApps platfom and even downloads the latest Digsby updates. Instant Messaging on a portable device has never been easier, allowing me to connect to gmail, msn, facebook and twitter. Portable Digsby’s only draw back is that it does not store your message history.

Download it Here

FileZilla

I host and manage quiet a few websites in my spare time for friends, so having a portable FTP client with all the FTP account details stored within it is great. I actually don’t use a none portable version of filezilla because this version runs fine everywhere and has all the details stored in it already.

Opera Portable

What? Do I hear you asking… why do I have Opera when I have Firefox and have already said I love firefox… well basically… firefox for my cellphone has not come of age yet, and therefore I still use Opera Mini on my phone. Opera has a built in ’synchronise’ feature similar to that of Xmarks and therefore I use Opera to manage my bookmarks coming from my cellphone browsing. My next goal is to merge my Opera Browsing with Xmarks, or to even dump Opera Mini on my phone. Time will tell which I follow through with, but for now its a simple matter of exporting the Opera Books Marks as .html and importing them into Firefox.

Skype Portable

Yup… sadly Digsby does not yet support skype… but until it does Skype Portable works just fine logging me into my skype account.

Download it Here

WinWGet

Its a basic Download Manager that lets me surf at local coffee shops or via my cellphone but then to simply cue up lager files for download and then download them on my fast line at the office.

Nedbank Money Manager

Yup… being a Nedbank Client! I simply installed their Money Manager software to my USB disc. I don’t think it was intended to be Portable but it is and its a great little tool. Using the new PortableApps Version 2 made the world of difference with the Money Manager because it allowed me to hide so many of its annoying extra .exe files that showed up in Portable Apps.

Download it Here

So What Else?!

I also have a few other apps installed, but honesty they don’t get used often.. Lurking on my disc I also have :-

1. ClamWin – Antivirus
2. HP41C Calculator Emulator – Its an old school reverse polish notation calculator
3. JkDefrag – Never know, Defragging could come in handy
4. Mozilla Sunbird – Haven’t found a use for this yet..
5. Notepad++ – I love Notepad++ its a great tool and I use this when editing CSS code for my websites.
6. Toucan Backup – A simple backup / mirror application, its great if you want to keep a portable copy of a folder synchronised with your Desktop Machine
7. WinDirStat – Its a cool way to visualise data storage use on your USB Disc

Portable Apps are changing the way we compute… and I am totally going along for the ride, because I consider them to be the medium step in computing.. that’s because the big step is complete portable operating systems and netbooks.

At some point or another all 3D artists have been asked to, or have had to setup up passes for a production they are working on. XSI has one of the most powerful pass setup and managment systems I have ever worked on, however it has its pros and its cons. Working within a few simple guidelines can make a world of difference to your workflow! Here are my top 5 tips!

1) Explorer is your Friend

This may be obvious to some, but not to others…. but it really makes a world of difference! The explorer is probably the easiest ways to manage your passes efficiently and quickly! Just open it up by hitting ‘8′, then by hitting ‘p’ to take you to the passes!

2) Never Duplicate the Current Pass

When you are busy working in the render options never click Pass -> Edit -> Duplicate Current Pass. Its a straight up time saver. Duplicating the active pass simply takes XSI double if not longer to duplicate a pass. Having moved to another pass or the original ‘Default_Pass’ seems to clear up resources that allows XSI to create a new pass quicker by simply using cntrl+d in the explorer.

3) Make an Empty Pass

An empty pass may seem silly, but in heavier scenes it may simply be the quickest route to setup a new pass. Duplicating passes (cntrl+d in the explorer) functions and works well, but when scenes become large and complex and you have many partitions with multiple overrides within each partition, they can really take a long time to duplicate. The only draw back is that if you are not rendering to .pic format you will need to change that every time you create a new pass. In my opinion, better that than wait for ages for a pass to duplicate (or not to duplicate and XSI to crash)

4) Hide Base Partitions

I have heard arguments against this, but in my opinion a good starting point is to always keep your ‘Background_Objects_Partition’ and the ‘Background_Lights_Partition’ set to ‘Hide Members’ on both View & Render Visibility. The reason for this is simple, if you are working in a team, and each shot file grows as elements are added (by different people) such as a back plate, then the foreground animation, and then background extras, you need the person who is going to open the file next and import more objects not to be worried by the fact that they may be changing the passes that were setup before them. Turning off these partitions to start with means that any new object imported will simply be hidden and never effect passes as your scene goes forward.

5) Create Passes Based on Layers

Here is a tip for those users creating multiple passes for the same group of objects. Using the New Pass -> Based on Layers option, will change your work flow forever. Effectively you create and store all your partitions as layers, you place all your objects and all your lights in their own specific layers. This speeds up the process of creating new passes because all your partitions are setup during pass creation.

A few downfalls of the system include the fact that if you use your Layer Manager (shortcut = 6) for greater scene managment then you may not be willing to destroy your current layer setup for pass creation. A work around for this would be to create a layer system with your scene structure by using ‘nulls’ and grouping objects under nulls. You simply middle-click the null you wish to hide and hit ‘H’.

Note:- Make sure all layers are set to Visible, Renderable & Selectable, otherwise v7.0.1 x64 crashes.
Note:- All lights & objects in the ‘Layer_Default’ will be moved to a new partition. It will not be ignored and they will not be left in the ‘Background_Objects_Partition’ or the ‘Background_Lights_Partition’

Note:- This is experience based solely on XSI 7.0.1 (Adv 64bit)

Probably old news for some, since that title was used on Duck Studios website in Feburary sometime! Shy the Sun (aka, The Blackheart Gang) are directing and animating the new Jack Splash Short Film. Its been roughly two months since my move here to Shy the Sun, and work is progressing at an amazing pace! We’re all hard at work, working some pretty long hours (I’m here at work writing this on a sunday afternoon , coz XSI just crashed on me again, lol) The fact of the matter is… if you work hard, you’re probably gonna party harder, and that is to true of all of us here!

I have been intergrating a few of my ‘gaming methodologies’ into our animation pipeline. It prooved rather painfunful (oh look, XSI crashed again… maybe I should stop multitasking… but seriously why can’t I have XSI and firefox open?!) at first becuase XSI has mutiple, Instancing, Cloning, Duplicating options each slightly different in behaviour, but in my opinion none of them are perfect.  Let me explain! I have been building suburbs and a city enviroments, so I decided to use a modular system where each window face of a building would simply snap to the next adjacent window panel and thus build up an entire building. It works well until I referenced each panel into my city scene and then duplicated the referenced model. Each ‘reference’ model gets re-imported everytime you re-open the scene, thus making the scenes take hours to load. The better option I have discovered is to use an instance of the orginal reference model, however instances stay totally indentical to the source model. Effectively these means that you cannot change that instance at all, another silly bug within Softimage is that an Instance cannot be made local, so that connection can never be broken! Sorta annoying hey! Anyway, this annoyed me and off I went to xsibase.com and thankfully managed to find a great script that allows the conversion of instances to local models. Viola, problems solved… if only I had found that little script about a month ago! Thats life though, you live and learn!

The modular system really does pay off though, just yesterday I was sitting with the director and he wanted to move some of the city shops around! This was a simple task of just moving each section around which would not have been possible if each building had been specifically modelled.

Okay back to work! Need to start setting up passes and lighting these enviroments!

~C

Its HERE! Marble Blast Mobile has hit the market. I cannot wait to watch the response to this new release! Available on the App Store for an introductory special of just $4.99!

Take your iPhone or iPod Touch to the next level with the first real-time multiplayer action game on the iPhone. Challenge up to 4 of your friends at the same time to race across the levels to collect all the gems.

Be sure to go check out more on Garage Games Website

Exciting times! The world has begun talking about Marble Blast Mobile for the iPhone! It was the last game I worked on whilst working at Luma Arcade and its really great to see the reponse that the market place is having! It was officially showcased at the iGames Summit 09 in  San Francisco a couple of weeks ago.

Read up on a few of the reviews here:-

N4G.com
Marble Blast Forum
Garage Games
Slide to Play
iPhone Games Network

Marble Blast Mobile has been ported using Garage Games’ iTorque Engine and a whole bunch of new little tricks and wizzardry by the programming guys!!
The game should be getting submitted to Apple in a few weeks time, so keep you eyes open for this one!!

~C

Its been 2 years & 4 months that I have been with Luma Arcade! Sometime at the beginning of this year the desire to evolve, grow & experience a change in my life, finally led me to move from the 3D gaming feild back into the field I was trained in, Animation. As of the 23rd of March I joined Shy the Sun an animation firm based in Cape Town. The move came with an entire life change, a new job, a new city, a new car, a new home!

Its my 4th day here, and so far its been pretty awesome. The Cape Town lifestyle is completely different to JHB and the company seems awesome! I am no longer working in 3DS Max but have finally made the move to Softimage. I am missing my modifier stack with simple tools like the Shell Modifier, but have found a script to do a similar job and already used it about 4 times! I dunno how I could work without it. I am busy playing with the Roadkill Plugin for unwrapping my models. Roadkill is an awesome little tool, so once I get it fully integrated into Softimage it will add a great boost to my UV texturing productivity.

Just to rub it in, here is a pic of the view out my office window!!

I still can’t belive I get to look at that everyday!!

Any Torque artist has most likely landed up having to work with DIFs at some point in the lives. DIFs are basically BSP files generated from .map files.
Recently we have been working some old .map files generated in Quark (from another company) These .map files however cannot be used ‘as is’ and thus require either reloading into Quark (or Constructor) to make the changes needed or we need to figure out a new method for making our changes.
With that said, it has lead to an interesting investigation into the .map format that has proven valuable to me and our programmers. I thought I would share those findings here!

Lets start by pointing out that the .map format only store Tri’s (or 3D co-ordinates for 3 verts per polygon), the format does not actually store all the data needed for a quad (or single surface of a brush)

So how then does the .map format store a cube, do I hear you asking?!
Its actually pretty clever! The format, by only storing Tri’s has enough ‘vert position’ information to easily calculate where the extra verts for the missing Tri’s go. It allows the format to store only 6 polygons (Tri’s) to create a Brush, instead of 12 polygons.

Lets look at a visual representation of this!

Image showing a simple cube ‘recreation’ within Max.
This image only shows the tri’s stored within the .map format.

As you can see from the image there is a vert at every corner of the cube, thus there is sufficient data to generate the missing Tri’s to complete the cube.

Below is the .map representation of the brush pictured above.

“index” “Brush 1″
“primitive” “B03[D]126″
{
(18 18 13) (18 -18 13) (-18 -18 13) GENHS [ 8 0 0 16 ] [ 0 -4 0 8 ] 0 1 1 -> TopFace (Pos Z)
(18 18 0) (-18 18 0) (-18 -18 0) GENHS [ -8 0 0 16 ] [ 0 -4 0 8 ] 0 1 1 -> BotFace (Neg Z)
(18 -18 0) (-18 -18 0) (-18 -18 13) GENHS [ 8 0 0 16 ] [ 0 0 -2 16 ] 0 1 1 -> Down (Neg Y)
(18 18 0) (18 -18 0) (18 -18 13) GENHS [ 0 8 0 16 ] [ 0 0 -2 16 ] 0 1 1 -> Right (Pos X)
(-18 18 0) (18 18 0) (18 18 13) GENHS [ -8 0 0 16 ] [ 0 0 -2 16 ] 0 1 1 -> Top (Pos Y)
(-18 -18 0) (-18 18 0) (-18 18 13) GENHS [ 0 -8 0 16 ] [ 0 0 -2 16 ] 0 1 1 -> Left (Neg X
}

The .map format is broken down as such

(18 18 13) (18 -18 13) (-18 -18 13) GENHS04 [ 8 0 0 16 ] [ 0 -4 0 8 ] 0 1 1 -> TopFace (Pos Z)

• Green = The 3 verts listed via thier specific location in 3D Space, XYZ
• Blue = The Texture Name mapped to that specific face.
• Red = Texture Offset (x_off, y_off), Floating Point Value indicating Texture Rotation (rot_angle) & Texture Scales (x_sclae, y_scale).
• Pink = My added comment (this does not appear in the actual .map file) however this tells you which face this line represents.

Basically that’s all I am going to cover, as this was never meant to be an in depth look at the .map format. It is simply intended to point out to the artists how the format functions and stores geometry. See the Quake MAP Specs for a much deeper explanation of the .map format

~C

So in between learning Modo, which is totally awesome from my dabblings so far!!
I have finally gotten around to Retopo’ing the rest of the windmill! Its come out at 5,127 polys which is pretty good in my opinion!

So far I have baked all my occlusion, normal, etc passes and will now be moving onto texturing! I am aware of the weird dark edging around the windows etc, that I will be fixing shortly!!
I’m really excited to see this guy textured.