Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Cold house, and DPI setting makes Maya go crazy

Two random things I thought I'd mention for no particular reason.

It's been reeaaaaaally hot these past few days, about 26-30 degrees and with Humidex it's been almost 40 (which for my American homeys in the crowd, that's like 100) Insane!! So it's been reaaaaaaaally warm. BUT!! Our house is freeeeeezing!!

Note that my roommates Matt and Matt are also both blown away by how cold our apartment is. To quote Matt Lausch:
"Our Waterloo apartment is nice (as I mentioned before) and I appreciate the fact that the air conditioning allows me to sit at my desk and type without sweating (last summer term was HOT). But, we're in the basement and as far as we can tell the air conditioning is ALWAYS on. We all wear sweaters, jeans and socks when we're home and it's over 30 degrees Celcius outside! It's just not right when I have to remove extra clothing to go outside."
Hehe well said. I am wearing a Hoodie and long Pyjama pants, and The Weather Network says it's 27 Celcius outside and "feels like" 35 Celcius. In here it "feels like" -10 Celcius, haha. :)

Also random thing I thought I'd mention, I found a Maya bug today. Looks like if you're system's display settings have a DPI larger that "normal" small fonts (in Control Panel -> Display -> Advanced -> General), then lots of the MEL Menus and options in the Attribute Editor in Maya don't show up!! This is very confusing as I thought this would have been due to an incorrect Script path or missing MEL Scripts but aparantely this is the fix. Weird eh? Anyway hopefully someone knows about this and can fix it (or hehe maybe I should ask Matt to fix it) :)

Working on shading for Fine Arts

Tonight I worked on putting together my first major scene for Fine Arts this term. It is going decently well, I've finally found something that works for the Pop Can, and the glasses are looking good and will look better once I have the lighting figured out.

I have some possible ideas for the wall texture, but the wood table I haven't managed to find anything decent yet, I might just take photos of real tables and map those images onto this table.

Anyway it's going pretty well but I gotta get to bed now cause I am going to go meet my Graphics Prof tomorrow morning to discuss my Project.


First test in new environment

Fixed pop can tab, made a table

Added walls to environment

Raytraced Shadows look pretty sweet

Whooa crazy shader here

Chrome shader looks good

Chrome shader on top and bottom of Pop Can, Red metal shader for rest of can

Green metal

Nice blue colour and test of wall shader

Nicer wall shader

Possible wood shader

Monday, May 29, 2006

My 24th Birthday

On Sunday it was my 24th Birthday! I had a really awesome time this weekend doing tons of fun and exciting stuff.

On Friday, I went to dance all night at REV, a hip hop club in Kitchener. It ROCKED!!! Lots of awesome people showed up, awesome friends and super amazing VOC frosh leading friends too. So that rocked.

Saturday night we went to see X-Men 3 which was cool followed by some Tea.

Sunday my family and I went out for breakfast, then I showed my Dad some of my recent Graphics work, then we went to Norm's house to open presents. Then we went to Grace and Harry's house, had some coffee and then went out for a Picnic!! It was really fancy and awesome. In the evening I met Heev, Kim and Matt and we went to Mongolian which was amazing and everyone was really nice and even got me a Mango Colada too!! Hehe good times. After that, Heev and I went to the Tea place and met Yung and Jeremy and chatted for 3 or 4 hours while drinking 4 or 5 pots of Rooibos Tea.

It was a fantastic birthday and there are lots of great pictures. I got all the Cars toys, a Mack Truck from Heev, a random watermelon from Mom, lots of other Cars stuff, and Tea and a Bubble Gum machine from Norm. Good times!!


Norm and Dad at breakfast

Birthday boy (me) with Mom and Dad at breakfast

My presents!!!!

Totally sweet Cars Mack Truck from Matt

Another awesome Cars poster!

All the Cars toys

My Mom also bought me a random watermelon for some reason, hehe looks tasty though!

Excited about Belgian Chocolate Rooibos Tea that Norm bought me

Yes!! Norm got me an awwwweessome Bubble Gum machine!

Sweeet

Harry, Dad, Norm, Grace and Mom setting up the Picnic

Fancy picnic

I'm 24!!!!!!

Another one of me

On the picnic

Dad laughing about something

Me, Mom and Grace

My strawberry shortcake and balloons

Trying to blow out the candles before the wind blows them out!

Heev at Mongolian Grill

Kim in the middle of eating dinner, haha

Matt happy about the sweet sweeeet Mongolian Grill vibe

Me, Heev, Yung and Jeremy at the Tea place

My new Cars sheets and pillowcase, yes it is totally awesome

Sunday, May 28, 2006

An early birthday present!!

Tonight was sweet, we saw X-Men 3 and it was pretty awesome. Lots of amazing effects, the Golden Gate Bridge part looked really cool and in general the effects rocked pretty fierce. Couple of really ridiculous lines, but some really funny lines in there too. Good times!!

Anyway I just got home, it's about 3am and now it's officially my birthday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I came home to find a Pixar Cars Mack Truck Playset on my desk, with a note from Matt (aka "Heev") that said "Happy Birthday Mike!!" AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hehe I totally wanted this too, hehe, it will go really well with all the other cool toys I am going to be getting tomorrow!!!!!!!!!! Hehe yeeeeeaaahhh Cars toys!!!!!!!!!!

Mack Truck playset!!

Haha there is a car wash in it!!

Saturday, May 27, 2006

Oh man!! Last night was nuts

Well in the interests of keeping myself well-rounded (and not letting the world of Waterloo Computer Science turn me into an anti-social nerd, hehe), we went to REV last night, a hip hop club in Kitchener. Oh man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It was so ridiculous and awesome, the music was fantastic, and we, as they say, "tore up the dance floor" for a good 3 or 4 hours. It was AWESOME!!

Tons of people made it out there, which was sweet. My friend Andrew Lam from high school drove all the way from London and just showed up at REV which was an awesome surprise, and lots of Waterloo CS and VOC (frosh leader) homeys made it there which made the night just fantastic. I really enjoyed it and it was good to break out some fierce dance moves, good times. Right ON!!!

Tonight we are going to see X-Men 3, I heard the ratings kinda suck for it, but that is certainly not going to stop us from checking it out. I really want to see Da Vinci Code soon too (what with Tom Hanks being so awesome and all.)

Well, I am off to the school to submit my Graphics Assignment. My birthday is tomorrow!!!!!!!!!

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Graphics Assignment 2 Almost Done

Tonight I wrote the Near and Far Clipping Plane stuff for my 3D forward projection pipeline assignment.

At the beginning it didn't work (check out these crazy pics) but after working through the equations a bit and talking to Matt, I got it figured out. Now I just have to add side clipping and then I am done and onto the next assignment which is a 3D Hierarchical Model "Puppet" in OpenGL. Sweet eh?!


Normal perspective cube before clipping

Moving in near clipping plane??!

Lines going crazy

Haha, and yeah, this is definitely not right

Clipping fixed!! Near plane clipping only

Far plane clipping only

Near and far clipping at the same time

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

3D Pop Can modeling for Fine Arts

Things are coming along well for my Fine Arts course. This afternoon and evening I spent a bunch of time modeling a Pop Can and then playing with some shaders and doing some lighting tests and checking to see how refraction looks through these glass shaders.

We had a JSA Exec Meeting today too which was sweet, I am the "Communications Liason" this term which is a sweet title, basically it means I send the emails for the upcoming events and therefore I will have to add lots of ridiculousness to the emails as you might expect.


Fixed the tall Beer glass - the new one is on the right. Fixed base, made inner part of cup flatter (the one on the left doesn't make any sense), widened the top of the glass to better match what a real glass looks like.

Fixed one on the left this time for lighting tests

Lighting tests with other random glass shaders, I don't think I am going to use any of these

Another shader test, the left one is a Phong glass shader that I thought I didn't like, but it is MUCH better, as it actually reflects the lighting in the scene well. The glass on the right comes with it's own reflection map, so it won't make sense in my scene with my own lighting.

My Pop Can!! Spent some of the afternoon and this evening on it. I spent a good 2 hours on the Pop Can tab. :)

Testing out Refraction through the glass shader

Lighting test with Phong glass shader - it looks sweet!!

Testing Aluminum shader and Red Aluminum shader - the red one is weird

Aluminum shader - I am going to need a smoother one than this.

Testing double refraction