SOH-CAH-TOA SOH-CAH-TOA!!!

So I spent my lunch learning a little about right triangles. What did I learn, well nothing new, just that I hate learning math. Looking around the net I found some videos over on 3D Buzz free to all, but they seem to go a little to fast for me, guess I will have to go back through all the basic math VTM's they have to refresh myself on multiplying and dividing fractions. Anyway, here is what I learned.



I understand the basics of it laying out the formulas, but it is in solving the formulas that I start to get a little intimidated. But it all boils down to why i have always hated math, I have no real use for any of it yet. Once I am able to start applying it to a real world problem then i will get into it and it will start to make sense.

In Too Deep

So In my quest to really learn all there is to know about being a TD it has become abundantly clear that math is a very important part of it. The problem I have not a clue when it comes to anything higher than basic algebra (yes, I know i should have paid attention all those years ago in school). So I started teaching myself what I could find that I need to know. So far sin, cos, tan, arcsin, and mod seem to be the really important ones. So the next few posts will most likely focus on what I am learning as I go.

Numbers

Seems the most basic concepts need to come first: the types of numbers that I seem to be dealing with in 3D.

• Rational numbers - Any number than can be written as a fraction - 3/4 = .75
• Irrational numbers - Those that can't be written as a fraction - ∏ and√2

Interesting point I found out is that the float comes from floating point which refers to the decimal point floating back and forth. i.e. .75 x 10 = 7.5 or .75 / 10 = .075. I know I am kind of weird, but I like to know the origins of things like that.

S to the H to the Ape to the Node

Quick post to get back into rigging and TD information. For some reason I got to thinking about creating rigs and using complex curves for control objects, but only had a slight idea of how to go about it. I figured that it would somehow involve getting multiple shape nodes under a single transform node, but had no clue how to do it. A little looking led me to a CGTalk article (*1): parent -r -s shapeNode transformNode.

Hmm, just parent the shape node to the another transform node, but why the -r for relative. Well looking in the help, I see that relative makes transforms relative to the parent, thus not needing its own transform node. Exactly what I was looking for. Now I will have to play around with it to see what creative uses i can make for it.

*1 - CGTalk Article - http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-310723.html

What the hell are Z-Men?

Holy Crap! Check out the whole poast over at CG Talk, gonna have to keep an eye on this guy.

CGTalk thread - http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?threadid=426903

e338's home page - http://www.e338.com/

Emergence Day!

Yesterday was officially Emergence Day!

Basically, Gears of War was released and is available throughout the U.S. The graphic (if it is still there) to the right of the skull is in tribute to such an awesome game. Now I am not one to be a huge video game player, you know I am busy learning to make them and everything, but this is the type of game i have been waiting for all my life. It is the dawn of a new era in video games where I finally agree with the convergence of cinema and games. Could it have been better? Well sure, but not by much with the given technology I think, but none the less, I love this game. Now I just need more time to play it.

Friends are like roses...you have to look out for the pricks!

I know, its been like a year since I updated. I started to move it all over to my own web page but that ended up being more trouble than it's worth, not to mention some prick who kept commenting about how my page riped off dataforge.net. Oh well, it actually makes me laugh at all the time he spent trying to defile the page and it took me like what, 5 seconds to navigate to the control panel and press the delet button.

Anyway, I started reading over my past blogs and thought, you know this is really cool to go back and read all this crap. So here I am, back again if for no other reason than to entertain myslef sometime in the future. So with that out of the way on to blogging and other sillyness.

So I'll start things off with something really cool that happened this week and that is getting intouch with an old friend, Darryl Sheakley. It's been twenty years since I last saw him and talking to him was really cool. I'm not talking about another kid on the palyground kind of friend here, but someone who greatly influenced my life. Iron Maiden, Comics, Drawing, it all pretty much started there and became the foundation for the love of 3D that I have today. The coolest thing is that he had a few comics published, and not only that but he is damn good, I love his style. Check him out at http://www.darrylsheakley.com