glibberish.

My Now Reading widget is broken, and I am too bummed to fix it.

(Maybe it’s time to upgrade to the newest Wordpress?)

So I changed the sidebar layout a bit to accomodate the Plurk widget. I’m going to give this microblogging thing yet another try…

Feel free to mouseover and click and marvel in its Javascript-goodness. Oh and do sign up if you haven’t yet, you may find it quite fun to use. Special shout out to you, Tommy – try it and witness Web 2.0 at its shiniest ;)

I love that the Playstation 3 could stream audio and video off my laptop… and wirelessly. This through the fabulous technology called DLNA.

Currently streaming Death Cab for Cutie’s “Brothers on a Hotel Bed” (from the album Plans):

“You may tire of me as our December sun is setting
because I’m not who I used to be.”

I just e-mailed my professor about the delays I’ve encountered with doing the building models. Who would have thought 3D architecture is hard stuff? (I guess everyone. I’m probably just too naive/stupid to realize it.)

Would almost say, “this is not what I signed up for.” But to meh with that – it’s sometimes tedious, but still fun.

I would also post rendered pictures of my progress, except that I have not set up any camera/lighting objects yet.

I am supposed to be doing some work for my school project, but being that I am too sleepy to concentrate I will just describe what my project is about.

My project is about creating 3D meshes – a huge load of them! A big part of these meshes will be buildings, like this one:

This is my first test in creating such a structure (thanks to the excellent online tutorial by a fantastic guy named Yorik) using the absolute-blast-to-use open source, free-as-in-speech, free-as-in-beer Blender. Making 3D models is seriously hard work, and Blender’s feature-rich interface helps a lot in easing things out and adding some fun into the work.

But modelling isn’t everything. It’s just a preparation for the computer science part of the project, which is to put all the meshes and textures together into a proper graphics engine with proper rendering techniques and algorithms, and such. And I am supposed to put together this:

Oh my God it’s the entire campus! And I have to reproduce everything accurately enough (at least not dead-on), and as photorealistically as possible. The finished product would be this huge environment that can be explored as freely from afar as it is from within. That is, you are supposed to be able to navigate around like you would in a first person shooter game.

This graphics engine programming stuff is what I’m supposed to focus my work on academically, but it’s a work about the school, and one can’t help but think that someday it might be put into actual use by the school itself! And so I should be very meticulous about modelling and texturing, and try to recreate details that would pass the standards of, well, myself. (Because I am a gamer and I am used to living around 3D environments and so would not easily get impressed with things like this.)

It was only a few days ago that I realized I am on a very tight deadline – 2 more months to finish everything, and the whole thing actually looks like a group thesis! In any case, I am having fun. I think I will enjoy doing this to the very end…

I found that I actually like modelling. It makes me feel like part of Weta Digital, which I had wet dreams of working in some few years ago. But I am also equally excited to tackle on new software, and even a new programming language: Python! For the graphics engine, I would like to use either the top-of-the-line Ogre3D with the Python wrapper, if I finish modelling with more time to spare, or Panda3D for quick results under tight schedules. Can’t wait!

But first.. modelling. So here is what I have so far.

That is the university turkey, or sundial. Not yet very appealing, I know, but I am hoping it would look nicer after applying some good textures. And, well, it isn’t much work either!

Gotta sleep and get back to work early tomorrow!