I just got back from rainy rainy cornwall. While I was down there I got my university results, I got a first, so I’m a happy bunny.
While me and Leanna were stuck in doors we began working on a game idea, we’re creating a game called Gumzilla, I’ll have some more info on it when we knuckle down and do some more work on it, but let’s just say it’s going to be epic!
I’ve just finished coding my first plugin for Wordpress. I’m calling it Vimeo for Wordpress (original huh?).
The plugin is simple to set up, it uses your Vimeo user name to grab your videos and your friends videos but there’s still an option to enter the URL of the video (the plugin takes the http://www.vimeo.com/ part out of it).
Anyways you should go try it out!
This is a test
Yesterday, 3 guys went into a travelodge in Morden, and only 3 guys came out.
Yes, yesterday was the day of the shooting of our epic short Face:Redux. We’ll be submitting part of it for our SFX project but we all agreed to shoot some extra footage so could make it into a short film to include on the DVD we’ll be putting together. We are also going to be putting out-takes on it, most involve fuck ups but there were some truly magical moments like the one below.
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Face: Redux Out-take 1 from Colin Wren on Vimeo.
I hope to edit and upload part one of the making of very soon
My FireWave came today, it’s pretty good though I’ve told to get the most out of it all I should have got a proper kit and used the optical out but meh, I just want to muck about with Logic once I can get it working. I’ve tested it with DVD Player and though the sounds not as loud as I’d have hoped it does do it’s job. The Subwoofer is amazing for music though, really hits the bass. makes my feet vibrate 
I can’t say how I’ll program the 5.1 surround sound into my double project but I’m thinking of using openAL because it has a good programmer base already there for me to steal code off
It’s Monday again which means me and Leanna buggered off to London to go see some art, this time it was Leanna’s turn to choose where to go. Leanna chose to go to the Dali Experience along the South Bank, claiming that we’ve past it loads of times but never gone in even though she loves Dali. Well today we went in.
On the way there we got a bit confused as the que for the London Aquarium went all the way back to the London Eye so we didn’t know if there was a que for the Dali exhibition, luckily there wasn’t. In fact it was kind of dead, kind of a shame really. Inside the exhibition (which I paid full price for due to losing my wallet with all my cards in it) it was pretty cool, at the start there’s florescent lighting and loads of information about Dali’s life and events that happened in his life time. The works which I couldn’t take pictures of yet again (what is with these places!) were pretty good, there was this statue of a thumb which had a crack at the bottom revealing brick work that I liked and I took a fancy to Dali’s Through the Looking Glass illustrations. There was only really 2 rooms of works in it. There was a Picasso section downstairs but we didn’t venture down there.
Today really made me want to do some drawing and make something with my hands, so I decided that a way around the whole no photography thing was to take a sketchbook with me instead, so I stopped off at an art shop and bought a cheap A3 sketchbook to take with me. At least that way I can have something to show people and remember all the visits me and Leanna make
I find it weird how we define what a day counts as. I work in a pub and because we close at 12 I’m hardly ever home before 1 and because of this I can never grasp why I always seem to post blogs then looking back at them they are on the wrong day. I know that wordpress is just trying to organise my posts but I wish that it would (or if I found out how to make it) start each day at 7am instead of 12am. This way I could blog to my hearts content and still have the posts appear when I want them to.
It’s currently quarter to 5 in the morning and I’ve just finished my essay for Nicks lesson (it’s crap, but it will do as it’s a draft) and I’m just about to start my other pictures for my Double Project. Thank god for Pro Plus!
Finally finished texturing my fly model, I still think the wings could do with some work, but for my distance shots this model will do. The body is just near-black all over apart from the eyes which are light red (should add highlights on the spec map at some point). I then made a specular map which has light green,purple,and reds blended in to give it that awesome fly-y look. The bump map is just a simple eyebrow brush all over.
The wings are a bit cartoony, I had originally planned to use an existing picture from the web but I decided against that as it wasn’t a good picture. I’ll probably go back and do them properly with splines so I can make sure everything looks awesome.
I did a test render and tried to match it up to a photo I had taken of my desk.
A final comp of my fly model made in photoshop
Due to the fact I’ve got no deadlines until 2 weeks time I’m having a lazy day. I went to Leanna’s walked her to the bus stop and then went to the New Malden Post Office to pick up my parcel (Leanna’s anniversary gift). The guy behind the counter had a go at me because I was tapping my fingers and it’s his pet hate. I also came home to a big box, in it, A 1:1 scale Gremlin resin model. It cost me £65 on eBay which is cheap as they normally cost much more then that.
Gremlins has always been my favourite movie and I have a fair bit of merchandise(giant Gizmo cushion figures and posters) and when BT ran their gremlin campaign earlier this year I took a knife to one and cut the gremlin out and its now taking up the majority of my wall. When I was on youtube Monday I stumbled upon some awesome movies by Sacha Feiner, who goes under the name batgremlin on youtube. The guy is a genius. Luckily he posted a making of which shows how hard he worked to make them and all I can say is well done. Here’s a collection of his shorts.
and here is the making of
If I can work a way to make my own casts I would love to make a homage to this guy. It’s just a pity he hasn’t been able to get much recognition outside of his home country. I hope one day I could collaborate with him
I installed Vista on my Mac Pro today so that I could start modding Fable(as a little project to keep me happy, but also as most of the people in the game industry started out modding, so it’s a portfolio builder 
) It runs ok, but it has issues, like how it’s stated that my 10GB of RAM is only 1.99GB, now I could understand that it’s a 32-bit version and so can only address upto 4GB but I have 2 1GB and 2 4GB sticks in there, why couldn’t it just use the 4GB stick?? Either way it wasn’t the RAM that let it down on the Windoze Index Test thing, it was my hard-drive, it scored 5.7 whereas everything else got 5.9 but 3DS max 9 doesn’t run and Cinema 4D crashes so I suppose I’m stuck with using OSX to model everything up then restarting in Vista and then getting the files off my mac partition to use for the mod. That’s just long, but I can’t see a solution happening any time soon 
This week we talked about the Cave, and how it relates to life. Last week Nick gave us a section of The Republic by Plato called the Simile of the Cave to read. Now I’ve never read any Plato because philosophy has never really been my kind of thing, but I enjoyed reading this. It all centers around a person who breaks the rules, flees the cave and comes to realise that the existence he led in the cave (watching shadow puppets on a wall) was false, yet when he returns to the cave to show his fellow cave dwellers the ‘light’ they try to kill him because he is challenging their knowledge of the world. Jamie put this into more modern terms by saying it’s like Jamie Oliver’s crusade on junk food in Rotherham. I’ve not seen the program but I know the situation that it deals with. A middle class ‘mockney’ celebrity chef goes to Rotherham to show the working class families there that eating junk food isn’t good and tries to show them how to cook for themselves. I had the exact same thing when I lived with my mum, she would be doing 12 hour days at work so when she got home she wouldn’t be in the best mood to cook so would just get take away delivered and watch TV, whereas at my dad’s house my stepmum who does about 8 hours a day always cooks when she gets home, of course she then goes on the slag my mum off saying she doesn’t have mothering skills but then she’s never been in the same situation. But instead of siding with the Rotherham lot I will side with Jamie Oliver, people seem to have lost all sense of how to make, cook and maintain things. I think it’s just consumer culture that’s totally fucked us over on this front, where it’s easier to get someone else to do it.
On the other hand, Nick loves my Paedobot idea especially when I explained the idea of using a ‘webcam’ element to put my paedophile notion towards it.