I’ve heard about Yafray so much and I’ve seen that it can deliver VERY photorealistic shots. The Blender internal renderer is not bad - as a matter of fact, it’s awesome. However, for all the really realistic stuff people tend to use Yafray. I tried to use it before, but all I got was a blank screen. Today, doing some research, I found out that, for some reason, the lights need to be jacked up in order for Yafray to work. Click on any of the pictures to see a larger size.

I’ve spent a pretty good amount of my free time to try and finish Jose’s Dinner. Now that I’m done, I am taking a bit of a break from animation to do some of the other things I like to do, such as play civ4. The new expansion pack is coming out and I’m extremely excited. It has all kinds of great improvements like colonies, popes, and corporations. So I wanted to play one last game, Eric XI of the Chinese is probably going to be my last game before the expansion pack comes out.

Thanks to my wife, Danielle, and my brother, Danny, for providing voice talents for the film.

What are you waiting for? Go see it here.

And check back over the next few days, I have some stuff I’ll be adding there.

Their food may or may not be worth the price, I’ve never been there for dinner. However, I do know that their club is crap. I would have to say that tonight was definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had in terms of going out for a night of fun. First of all, I got to the Powerplant Live area and no one knew how to get into Babalu Grill. The people blocking the area told us to go down the block, the people at the end of the block told us to go back to the original people. When we finally get in, the bouncer said it was $5 per person, but the person taking the cash said it was $10 per person. It was so loud outside from a concert going on that it was impossible to reconcile. Perhaps I was just tired from a long day’s work, but had the concert not been going on a mere 20 feet away, I would have disputed this.

Looks like, mentioned a couple of times in this post that there will be a Dilbert movie. This one seems to hint that it will be a live movie rather than a cartoon. I think that would be a horrible idea. Cartoon/newspaper comics make lousy movies - see The Flintstones movies and The Dennis the Menace movie. I was excited with the first and disappointed with the second one. However, he seems to mention in the first one that he doesn’t think it’s actually going to get made. (That, IMHO, would be a good idea)

To see more shots, check out my flickr page - by clicking on any of the photos.

Collections on flickr are groups of sets. Today we look at my “Favorites” collection. Here is one photo from each of the sets inside.

From Self-Portrait:

From “1 A Day”:

From “Famous” Pictures:

From Most Talked About:

From My Favorites:

From Your Favorites:

I expected this to be an awesome triumph because I spent a good deal of the weekend trying to get blender installed on bulletbill. It finally got installed, but it doesn’t work. I had to do some editing here and there to try and get it to work and I think that’s part of the problem. I’m not sure exactly how to redo this in freeBSD, but it’ll probably be another month before I dedicate the time needed to it. That said…..

I decided to give myself a little “final exam” and practice everything I had learned in Blender so far. So I combined soft bodies, the physics engine, and the fluid simulator. It wasn’t exactly trivial - for example - I had to tell the physics engine to consider the towel to be a ghost because of the way the soft body engine works in combination with the physics engine. Also, I had a lot of issues with getting the water resolution low enough to get it to fall into the cup instead of hovering over it. Overall I really liked it and if I could do something different I would have had a bit more water so that it would have splashed out of the cup or done something a little more interactive. Nevertheless, here it is, my final exam:

I got to engage in one of my favorite activities this week - building computers! My father-in-law’s Windows Vista laptop was going so slow, he often thought it was about to kernel panic. So I saw the computer he wanted at dell and spec’d it and found out I could do it for $400 cheaper than dell and it’d have Windows XP so he would have a nice fast computer.