While I was at my parents’ house, I wanted to show David, my youngest brother, how quickly I could generate I could a humanoid while also practicing the principles I learned with Raul Domingo. (Thus Danny’s extremely blocky midsection) Then I moved on to some more advanced topics, such as light. I had always been a little bit dissapointed in the light in my renders, but I never knew what was wrong. After going through the lighting tutorial from the Blender Summer of Documentation, I realized what the problem was. A twofold problem, it was a matter of power. You see, first of all, I needed to have a sum total light intensity of 2, not one. Second, the designers of Blender envisioned most scenes to have, at least, two lights. Below are some renders of my experimentation with flashlight light and sunny light. Click on them if you want/want to see the full res version.

As I work on editing and uploading all the pictures I took during the holidays, please enjoy Penguin Flight!

Penguin Flight on Vimeo

Which means “do Bhangra!” or “dance Bhangra!” Bhangra is a wonderful and catchy style of dance from the Punjab region of India. View this clip from the introduction to Pao Bhangra 1 at Cornell University! You can follow the link to Vimeo to see the rest of the clips, go to www.dropthebombproductions.com or come back to this blog over the next few days when I post the next part.

In order to get my video to fit within Vimeo’s upload limits, I had to split up the video into different parts. This is also from VCD disc 1 that I created for them. Pao Bhangra Disc 1, Part 1
Pao Bhangra 1 Disc 1 Part 1 on Vimeo

On the same principle as I presented yesterday, I thought I would embed part one of my brother’s Sims 2-based machinima, 10 Little S’mores, so that, instead of having to go to Some Sort of Productions, my readers could watch it from the comfort of my blog.

Please enjoy this great, funny little movie from my brother and his girlfriend, Tamlin. Oh yeah, the first 3:18 minutes are an intro into mapping the characters in the short film to their real life counterparts. (This was originally an inside joke film, which I convinced Dave to share with the world) So if the first few minutes leave you confused, just watch a little longer.

I finally found out that all I need to do is to disable the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress (which I hated anyway!) and now I can get my Vimeo clips embedded. Sure, I could point you to www.dropthebombproductions.com, but people tend not to like to leave their page if they don’t have to. I’d love to be able to embed video. Now I can!

As a celebration, here is one of my earliest videos, “Anime Hurricane”. (Follow the vimeo link to get more information on it)

What I referred to as Dave’s S’mores night video is actually entitled “10 Little S’mores” and he’ll be fixing the title on Vimeo soon. (It’s my fault, as I uploaded the clips for him)

Enjoy part two at: 10 Little S’mores Part 2.

Well, after fixing it up the first time to deal with the fact that I had uploaded my videos to Vimeo, I found that the site looked a bit clunky. So I revamped the opening page and fixed up some of the organization of the content pages as well. In some cases I deleted references to obsolete things (such as 56k modem download times) and in others I added information about the Creative Commons. I also added a “legal” page where I discuss the Creative Commons and some of the legal implications of remixing my clips.

For those of who are non-Christians - I hope you can take this time to spend with your families and friends and be happy.

For Christian readers, take time today out of the pagan rituals of trees with lights and presents by a large, fat man. Take time to remember that Christmas is about the Creator of the Earth incarnating and submitting himself to a human life so that we would no longer have to spend eternity in Hell. Sure, we may not understand the metaphysics involved and why he couldn’t just pardon us with all of the coming down and all, but since He DID go through so much, take time to remember and be grateful.

Although it may seem like a philosophical or silly question, it is indeed a practical question for me. You see, we have a tradition at Christmas-time in my family where we play dominoes on the days before Christmas and whoever wins gets to open a gift. I’m sure I mentioned this around this time last year. Well, a couple of days ago I won and my prize was a Canon 50 mm f/2.5 Macro lens from my wife! It’s a fine lens - I’ve been taking some awesome pictures which I will be uploading once the Christmas Season is over.

David has created a wonderful new bit of machinima entitled S’mores Night Movie. It was originally intended as an inside joke between friends. He, with his girlfriend Tamlin as the screenwriter, put together a 35 minute movie incorporating different episodes of what has happened with their friends into a remake of “10 Little Indians”. I was thoroughly impressed as this was his first scripted movie and his first machinima. In fact, he didn’t even know of the movement called machinima, he just happened to feel that the Sims 2 provided him with a great set of premade characters and items for him to use in his movie.