Another update for part IX. That mech was like one of those people who, when given simple instructions, find some way to mess it up. I'm sure you've met people like that. The thing just had a mind of it's own and bits kept moving in wierd directions for no apparent reason when all it had to do was rais up on a platform.

The cord conecting the net launcher to the compressor thing was surprisingly hard to model as well.

I've just modified the version of the logo with the stary background. Hopefully it now looks like a stary background. I've changed the filter I use for the background with one similar to the one I used for the new splashscreen and the file which you get if you click on one of the last file controles (the one with the pregnant woman looking out at a departing space ship).

I hope this is an improvement.

New splashscreen

It seems that about 75% of people who saw the splash screen left without doing anything else. Maybe some were downloading SVG viewing software but I rather felt that this was an unacceptable level. Therefore I've redesigned this page so it's hopefully cooler and more user friendly. Let me know what you think!

I've also been putting a lot of links to the forums on the site, in the hope of actually getting people to post something other than viagra adverts there. I think I've done this with all the HTML pages so now I'll start of the SVG files.

I've also put up an update to part X, with Dwites bit.

Convention

Convention coming up

Hi,

OK, I'm taking a while to get the next post up. This is for a variety of reasons but one is that Nicole and myself are going to Conversion, the anual science fiction and fantasy con in Calgary. We're not just going but we're doing several things there.

We'll be performing in The Phantom of the Space Opera with the IFWA players. I'm also playing a couple of roles in the IFWA radio plays and reading a short story at the IFWA reading on Friday evening (the theme is "no good can come of this").

Anyway, I've got a Maine Reptile: Leopleurodon moddled and I'm trying to animate it. When I get that done, I'll put up the next update to part X and start working on the next bit of part IX (I think this makes sense).

Part IX update

Well I've managed another installment of Part IX. This wasn't quiet so much hassel but I had to figger out how to do clouds in Blender.

I now have new respect for Corel Photopaint. I was under the impression that it was just a pale imitation of Adobe Photoshop and didn't really use it although I'd installed it alone with Corel Draw (this must be much better value for money than Adobe Illustrator as it's a lot cheaper, you get Photopaint, and Corel Rave and a few other things with it, although Inkscape is a lot cheaper still). Photopaint creates and edits movies, which Adobe Photoshop dose not. I was stugling with Adobe after effects to put this movie together but I still ended up with a couple of black frames that shouldn't have been there. I got rid of them with Photopaint which allows you to edit frame by frame which After Effects does not (or maybe I haven't figured out how to do it or newer versions are better).

How many ways can you remove the epidermis of a feline?

ARRRR!

Finally got the first part of the Dragon Knights part IX movie made. Boy was that a load of hassel! I thought it would be a simple matter of modeling it in Blender, rendering in Blender. As per the Blender manual, I rendered it as indevidual frames. Then I got Blender to make them into a movie. Only the movie was completely blank! Therefore I decided to put all the rendered frames on my zip drive, transfer them to the Mac and make a movie in Adobe After Efects. Only I couldn't find the USB lead for my zip drive. Fortunately I could use Nicole's new thumb drive. Well this took a couple of hourse and the movie only had one frame! So I decided to re-render the movie in Blender, this time going strait to Quicktime. After a day or so of rendering, I got a movie which was short of the last few seconds, you know that part with the title on it (this firs bit is the title sequence)! I put the movie on the thumb drive, went back to the Mac and combined it with the last few frames in After Efects. Then I put the complete movie on the thumb drive and went back to the PC. Now the new movie was completely blank on the PC! Tried exporting it from After Efects as an avi file. Now I got an "Explorer has encountered an unexpected error and has to quit" message when I tried looking at the thumb drive (not even selecting the avi file). Next idea, email it to myself so I asked Nicole to do that. The next morning she still hadn't done it so she said I should do it. I emailed it to myself from her Hotmail account and got a message saying it had failed. By now Nicole was at the computer and wanted to do her stuf. After a bit of persuasion, I got her to try to send an email to my other adress from her Yahoo account. Unfortunately she didn't know how to attach files so I had to show her and part way through this a cat knocked her coffee cup over, onto her keyboard. She was not pleased. Anyway, she managed to finish sending the email with the mouse, and when it arived the movie ran on the PC.

Now all I have to do is upload it along with some changes to my web site. Then I'll have to do the rest of the movie. Don't let anybody tell you SVG is hard, movies are much harder!

Introduction

Hi,

Somebody told me the other day that I'd get more trafic if I put a blog on my site. Well this it!