The fair
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 27.06.08My sister Lisa has been doing clothing design and construction for a few years now, with a growing involvement in local theatre and not-so-local historical pieces. I try to make it home for major shows (that any family members are a part of), but sadly wasn’t able to this month. But the latest event has even made it to the Peru Tribune with a short paragraph and a photo. Lydia and Matthew did very well at the fair themselves, and needless to say, I kinda enjoy playing the proud older brother!
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Flickr API
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 27.06.08Several weeks ago I attempted to figure out the Flickr API, with the purpose of setting up a Textpattern plugin for easy photo blogging. 10 straight hours. No luck.
Thankfully Elihu Ihms was online, and graciously started to help. In under 30 minutes, he had a working prototype, and spent the rest of the night getting a polished solution finished. I stayed up and worked out the Textpattern integration, and by the end we had a pretty decent alpha release, albeit 6 in the morning. I kinda slept through church… and then through the late service… and then through lunch.
It’s an amalgam of PHP and JS, allowing a user to access photostreams, individual images, and much more. Eli’s site has more information on the Flickr API integration and the PHP / javascript code usage. It’s far more useful than just the Textpattern plugin!
Tonight I spent a few more hours working out updates and feature enhancements. The result? an7_flickr – a Textpattern admin extension that adds easy Flickr blogging. Enjoy!
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Moho to Lightwave
iaian7 » blog » projects John Einselen, 10.06.08Convert Moho format phoneme animations to Lightwave channel keyframes for use with lipsync morphs.
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an7_flickr
iaian7 » code » txp John Einselen, 9.06.08Loads Flickr photos in the Write tab for easy photo blogging, includes embed options to control how images will be displayed and linked.
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Phoneme Translation
iaian7 » blog » projects John Einselen, 6.06.08Lip Sync utility for converting from Yolo and JLipSync phonetic phoneme sets to Preston Blair or Flash frame numbers.
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Server outage
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 1.06.08My websites are down, and have been for at least a day. Well, all of them except Iaian7.com, which is still hosted on the same server I had years before switching most of my hosting to HostNine.
Evidently transformers for the master servers in Texas blew up. Once building inspections are over, and equipment accounted for… hopefully things will be back up and running. This is rather unfortunate, but especially difficult as I depend on symboleffects.com for much of my email and demo reel promotion, including online resumes!
I know random disasters like explosions can never really be anticipated, but with months of constant email server problems, and now complete inaccessibility, it certainly raises the same old question – why am I still with HostNine?
I had a few lengthy problems with my host as well until I switched to midPhase. Those guys have a great service and pretty much no downtime (that I have experienced).
Check them out: midPhase.com
Oh and as fishy as it sounds, there unlimited plans really are unlimited. No account suspension or anything like that.
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Macbook surgery
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 1.06.08Last week my macbook died. It was happily playing an iTunes playlist, then started randomly pausing. Then freezing. Then nothing, save for the clicking noises emanating from the hard drive compartment.
TimeMachine had backed up my files early that morning, so nothing was actually lost (save for application installations, which in my short sighted wisdom, I removed from the backup list to save space!). I think I’ve learned a little after losing 2-5 years of my life just a month or two ago in a freak hard drive format. Backing up is very, very important. TimeMachine makes it easy. If you have a mac running Leopard, use it! (Though beware the caveats below)
Since the hard drive clearly had to be replaced, it was finally the perfect chance to upgrade! I would have liked to go for a nice 7200.2 Seagate drive, but found a slower, larger (and perhaps more battery efficient) Western Digital on sale. My frugal scottish genes were happy.
Drive installation, unlike Macbook Pros, is really rather wonderful. I took out the battery, detached the internal compartment guard strip, slid out the old hard drive, attached the new drive to the sliding tab mechanism, slid it back in, closed everything up, and was done. The entire process took less than 15 minutes, though it certainly helped that I had a hex bit handy, and a decent set of miniature screw drivers.
Then came the challenge – when installing Leopard, you can easily restore users off an old mac, an external hard drive, or a TimeMachine backup. However, I’d stored my time machine backups on the second internal hard drive in my G5. Which is inaccessible via network during the Leopard installation. Booting the G5 into FireWire disk mode only helped a little – the macbook backups were somehow stored in a compressed volume, and only the G5 backups were visible to the Leopard installer!
The process was circuitous (and ended up involving the Migration Assistant and multiple user accounts), so I won’t bore you with the details, save for these suggestions: back up to an external drive, and if you can, use a different drive for each computer. It could simplify the process greatly.
Now that the painless hardware upgrade and painful software install is over, everything is finally happy again. All my documents, music, videos, emails, settings, and preferences are restored, and the Macbook is humming away happily with well over 3 times the hard drive space (Vista should be happier too, I doubled it’s partition size!). While it’s not a particularly speedy drive, it should suffice till its own untimely demise, and I can upgrade to something better suited for photo editing and video work. Perhaps by then the solid state drives announced last week will be cheap enough for a mere mortal to afford.
Just can’t catch a break, what with the server implosion and hard drive failures, can you?
I feel your pain in any case, but I’m glad to hear you had everything backed up.
Also, hello short hair buddy!
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Much less hair
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 24.05.08
Since I no longer need to be growing my hair out for a faun costume, I took the liberty of cutting my hair the morning following the movie. From several inches of curls to 1/4 inch burr. Sadly, my old hair clippers are rather dull, and only just barely made it through the ordeal. Meijer had hair trimmers on sale, and this week I finally got a new set…
So I cut my hair down to 3mm. Definitely the shortest I’ve had in many, many years, possibly ever. Shocking, I know (and as always, more on Flickr).
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Narnian horns
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 17.05.08With the release of the latest Chronicles of Narnia film, I wanted to go as a faun again (I have a weakness for dressing up, especially for Lord of the Rings and Narnia films). For the first film I wore full fur pants, hooves, custom costume, and horns. Since finding out how dangerous the hoof extensions are to ankles (and without a workshop to develop something more stable), I had to give up up on that… and by extension, much of the rest of the outfit. The old horns I had were also pretty rough, and if they were going to be the only real costume piece, desperately needed an update.
I found some nice translucent Fimo clay (I usually use Sculpey, but Fimo was on sale at Jo-Ann Fabrics), and started sculpting some basic horn shapes a month ago. The first three tries weren’t great, and I didn’t get back to it till this weekend. My fourth attempt turned out to be too smooth (though the shape was fairly goat like, thumbprints showed up too easily during the painting process), so I tried again using a stiff hair trimmer cleaning brush to texture the surface. Though the results are perhaps more antler like than horn like, the painting was a lot easier and turned out surprisingly natural looking, for how simple it was (just one wash of a custom brown paint / matte finish combo, with some brushed water and finger rubbing to blend and wear it down a bit).
(more on Flickr)
Super glue is not the smartest choice, perhaps, but it does work beautifully. I have some water-proof (and non-toxic) glue that seems to work well on skin and prosthetics, but I wasn’t sure it’d hold up to an evening at the movies, or if it would work with the larger horns (it’s important to note that these are still a good 3 and a half inches shorter than the original pair I made in 2005, which at that length caused much pain and trouble when getting in and out of vehicles!).
Unfortunately, the paint job around the horns didn’t turn out so well. It was shiny, and way too prominent. Next time I may try gluing the horns to my head without any blending done on the skin at all. An abrupt growth of horns would probably look more natural than something as poorly blended as this was.
After a few photos to prove to my friends I really did grow horns, it was off to the theatre! I thought the movie was… ok. Some people like it more than the first, and it is a decent second movie, but overall I’m just not sure I felt it.
The writers did a good job on a tough assignment. Prince Caspian is a difficult story to translate to film, and the added storylines and character flaws only seemed to accentuate many of the themes C. S. Lewis was writing about. Tyler Smith wrote a longer writeup on the story, so you can read more about it on his site.
The visual effects, on the other hand, seemed off to me. Aslan comes across flat, both in performance (which, in its defence, was also nicely subtle) and in shading (which did seem especially flat and overly-CG). Rythm and Hues, the studio that so brilliant brought animals to life for the first film, was replaced by Framestore CFC this time around, and sadly the characters seem to suffer. The badger, the bear, and others were hardly as lifelike, or loveable, as the beavers were in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_.
Due to new leg rigs for the actors playing centaurs, they move around a lot more in this film. Sadly, the movement just looks weird! I think I liked the more stationary centaurs of the first film better. Walking around, they just look silly; it becomes painfully obviously that they move nothing like horses. It isn’t entirely a problem with the visual effects, but just in how the performances were captured on film. As written up in the CGworld article, the actors were able to change direction in ways a horse simply cannot.
It might have just been me, but fauns (and even fully digital characters like Repicheep) also seemed to have foot placement problems. People balance using their toes, and it felt like the hooves were placed roughly where the heel of the actor had been, causing them to look completely off balance, and in danger of falling on their face. Perhaps I should withhold judgement till I can watch it again when it comes out on DVD or Bluray, but I was not particularly impressed by what I saw on screen at the theatre.
This all does sound rather negative; I actually enjoyed the movie quite a bit, and the music is great! Hopefully the next one, Voyage of the Dawn Treader (currently filming), can step it up in terms of realism and quality. A new director is at the helm this time, and it’s going to be interesting to see what he brings to the series.
And just in case you were wondering, I removed the horns by… pulling on them. Hard. Next time I really should try something other than super glue!
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Art and animation
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 14.05.08I’m gearing up for a pretty hefty animation project at work. My first “real” character production, and it’s going to take a lot of research to do it right.
First off is character rigs. I can handle the modelling, and certainly the texturing, lighting, or rendering aspects (my background in VFX seems a bit overkill here!). But the ever elusive character rig, especially in Lightwave, seems to… well, elude me. I can manage minor expressions, understand IK and FK, have even tried some procedural and reactive flight simulations using purely native Lightwave solutions. As I try to rig an expressive character, though, I’m reminded just how much I have yet to learn!
Also, character animation in Lightwave sucks. 
It’s doable, but man, is it painful. Anyway, as I learn more about the workarounds and techniques needed for a stable rig, I’m trying to pick up as much knowledge as I can about the art of animation itself. I have a lot of catch up to do, but through tutorials, articles, and blogs, I’m starting to get the animation education I never thought I’d need.
Which brings up an interesting topic, something I’ve touched on before. As postulated on an animator’s blog discussing the differences and similarities of 2D art versus 3D animation, there is essentially no difference in the art of animation, merely in the path, the medium, to get there. Be it film, animation, illustration, photography, or otherwise, good art is always recognisable.
A visitor then left a comment asking wether they should use 2D or 3D animation to make a film that connected with adult audiences. I can think of few questions more misplaced!
Cowboy Bebop and Advent Children are both (admittedly youngish) adult films; one using hand drawn 2D, the other hyper-real 3D. Both are successful, and both have been lauded as highly artistic films.
Story trumps all; if your story doesn’t connect with the audience, nothing with fix it, and an arbitrary technique for telling it will only further deface the sad and desolate remains.
mediaboxAdvanced
Hi Iaian I came across your site through twitter and wanted to say I like your site. I’m going to keep checking it out, but wanted to say hi.