3D Fluff - Mash

Sometimes you go out for a drink and end up somwhere odd, with strange people, who do bizzare things. Last night was one of those nights. For some reason in this part of Italy all of the local restaurants, supermarkets and bars are closed on Sunday and Monday, seeing as the hotel we’re in doesn’t serve food, this leaves us somewhat knackered.

During our desperate scouring for food we managed to find a bar called Original Joe’s; quite why this bar has an english sounding name I have no idea, theres nothing english speaking about it, especially Maria.

We picked this bar largely because it was open and also because they were still serving their single menu item: Grande Toastie! Its a toasted cheese and ham sandwich which when you havent eaten for 12 hours is most delicious.

The best bit of this bar though is Maria. Maria is the loud, usually drunken barmaid who is desperate for every bit of attention you would care to give her. At random intervals she will pull out a giant rubber penis and start hugging it, this thing is about the size of a cat. So large is Maria’s penis (I assume its hers) that she uses it to store a second slightly smaller penis inside, Its like a penis version of a russian doll.

Maria follows her responsible drinking rules very carefully, if she asks you want you want and you tell her you’ve had enough and are going home, she will ask you again. You *will* be asked what you want until you pick a drink. If you don’t pick anything, or if you do anything else to invoke her wrath you will have to endure a sudden stealthy nipple twist as punishment.

Even if you do pick a drink, don’t expect her to give you what you ordered, just be glad if you get something that even vaguely resembles what you asked for. A rum and coke can apparently be any combination of rum, vodka, coke, soda or gin.

I’ve done 3D work in some unusual places; I once turned up for a day of corporate training, only to find the client was a student that lived at home with his parents and shared a room with his brother, who was asleep snoring in the background the whole time.

Ive worked in a window-less basement with no source of food for 5 miles other than petrol station sandwiches.

Ive even worked in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s office after he moved to somewhere bigger. Not many working spaces have an ensuite shower room, 20 foot high ceiling and a mezzanine level, but this one did.

None though compares to working on a half built cruise ship in an italian shipyard. You need steel toe capped boots, hard hat, flourescent jacket and the ability to dodge various forklift trucks, monstrous cranes which put the death star to shame and hazardous italians who swing ladders on their shoulder like a Laurel and Hardy sketch.

The power goes off at random several times throughout the day which doesnt help the render machines, though it tends to cause a slightly bigger problem for the projection guy when his burning hot 10k bulbs suddenly lose all their cooling without warning.

I hate flying. I also hate not flying.

Almost 2 hours stuck in traffic on the motorway, a mad dash to the terminal and I miss my checkin desk by 5 minutes. I got bumped to the later flight at 4pm, but then the air traffic control went down and most flights were cancelled.

I go home and wait for the phone call from the travel department, 11pm rolls around and theres no call so off I merilly go to bed. Next morning, 9am and theres an email waiting for me which informs me I have a new flight booked…. It leaves in 50 minutes.

I’m now known as the guy who missed 3 flights.

My brother has just recently started a wedding video company in the last year or so. Within this time he’s picked up dreamweaver, photoshop, filmography and editing in sony vegas. Though it pains me to say it, im really impressed with what he’s managed to do.

A grand of software, a few more thousand for a pair of steady cam mounted HD bodies and hes off making work which genuinely is approaching the sort of quality you would see on a home makeover show or documentary.

http://www.mintyslippers.com for the main site and http://www.vimeo.com/1588413 for the video which just impressed me.

Another interesting request from cgtalk, how to unroll a poster. This reminded me of someone else who asked this a while back but with a red carpet for a film opening night. So here we go, a scene for R9+ which doesnt need any plugins. There’s a bit of texture squashing on the roll at the end, but nothing terrible.

http://www.3dfluff.com/files/rollin.zip

Attached below is a graphic equalizer scene file for C4D, requires R10 and mograph. It basically uses mograph to adjust the visibility of some duplicated cubes, probably as inefficient as is possible, but hey it works.

http://www.3dfluff.com/files/graphicequalizer.zip

I bought a 5-way power strip today, I think it might have been on the shelf a while

Just thought I’d share these after seing someone asking about how to make soft rounded text, particularly where the font gets really thin on the serifs

Option 1 uses hypernurbs based on the original spline shape rather than just tracing around it as most other people have suggested.
http://www.3dfluff.com/files/bubbletexthn.mov

Option 2 is far less work but makes really inefficient and hard to edit meshes by using metaballs.
http://www.3dfluff.com/files/bubbletextmetaballs.mov

At the start of the 1900’s and through the second world war, lots of western countries were stationed on various pacific islands where they set up military bases. The natives from these places were of course amazed with the magic that these new people controlled. They spoke to their god on small metal boxes (radios) and then the god would send them gifts from the sky in floating boxes (air drops).

This began what is typically called the Cargo Cults. The local people who wanted this powerful god to bless them with gifts from the sky would re-enact the rituals they saw the white men doing. They made bamboo boxes as radios, wore coconuts as headphones; they even built entire fake runways, airports and control towers complete with plane shaped structures to encourage the gods to give them cargo gifts.

Having heard the English or Americans speaking on their radios to someone in command called John Frum, they set up their own religion worshipping John in the belief that he is a god. Perhaps the scariest thing about all of this is that virtually identical cults were set up in around 50 or so individual tribes which had no contact with each other. Some would wrap themselves in wire or vines and convulse as they received divine messages from John Frum and would then of course relay his wishes to the rest of the tribe.

I have decided that most people are gullible enough to fall for it, so I think I’ll start my own religion to abuse and manipulate as many people as possible. Hey, if it works for scientology then how hard can it be?

The big buildings, wondering If I would set off the metal detectors, great big long escalators. Getting on the plane and the great big acceleration smacking you back into your seat as the plane took off.

Then I got about 10 years older

Now I loathe being charged £60 to leave my car on some gravel half a mile from the airport for 4 days; they’re charging me more to leave my own car doing nothing, than the airline charge me to fly a thousand miles to Spain. That 3×5 metre piece of gravel costs more to rent than my apartment does.

I hate the ridiculously useless security measures which don’t do anything to save anyone and serve only to piss me off. Nobody is going to down a plane with 100ml of diet coke or any other liquid. The brilliant thing is though, I’m allowed to carry up to 10 of these 100ml bottles, as is my girlfriend. This means we’re now up to 2 litres of potential explosives, that’ll leave a hole. Next time I’m going to piss in a 150ml bottle and let them confiscate it.

I can bring only one bag, although that bag is able to contain as many other bags as I like. Im assured that bringing more than one bag visible from the others is a security risk, only a terrorist would let his girlfriend bring a handbag.

Waiting lounges used to be spacious and fun; arcades, shops, food. Now at Luton its overcrowded, there aren’t enough seats for all the people that want to sit down and all the food is stale and overpriced; served by students who don’t want to be there and work as slowly as they feasibly can. It’s 4am and the airport is pretty quiet, yet the zombie staff have managed to make a queue for the food by refusing to take any orders until the single person they are serving has been served. This means standing there by the food hatch for five minutes waiting for the single item.

You then trudge down the depressing junior school inspired grey concrete hallways, stand waiting on a cold windy stairwell for half an hour and then you have the joyous free-for-all that is easyjet’s seating plans. If you can’t keep your legs closed and you pop out a kid then you get first pick of where to sit. Naturally all 12 mothers spread themselves out as evenly as they can, thus there is no location on-board which might yield sleep.

Im 6 foot 3, I dont fit in the generous space provided on most public transport. And of course the selfish bitch in front of me absolutely must recline her seat back another 2 inches, because of course you can only sleep at an angle of 30 degrees, 20 degrees obviously would keep you awake…

The girlfriend’s ice cold air-con nozzle in the overhead panel above won’t turn off, luckily I can aim it at the irritating cow in front of me.