Back to Front

I feel abit like Scott, when he slipped out saying "I may be gone some time". Except I came back, not sure why yet. I have'nt done a productive piece of 3D for nearly 12 mths, but I have'nt been sitting on my hands.

I've spent the last 4 mths looking at Maya and gave up with Maya PLE because I could'nt see any detail in the work I was attempting while learning to use it, because of the water mark.

I bought a copy of 3D Studio Max, a while back and was looking at a switch to Maya, because I had reached a point where I wanted to do facial animation like Krishnamurti Costa, and did'nt see anyone using Max with similar results.

However I have retraced my steps and I am now attempting to do what I want with what I've got.

So I have started work on a project that I attempted last year, and could not continue until now, and I am putting it in my blog so that I am reactivating both at the same time.

This is a Female model that I want to rig and animate, I have blocked it out and have now started adding detail, so I can skin and rig it.(first attempt at inserting a pic into my blog post).

3D Projects Art/Animation.

Vodcast, ViPodding or Vlogging, video Podcasting.

Will Apple keep up or will they get left behind on this one... lets wait and see.

There is another interesting article (As there always is.) on Wired.com , this time about video Podcasting. Following the links in the article leads to some useful places and info about Vlogging. I've only had a brief look through the me-tv Wiki, but there is vast amounts of info there and obviously it will only get bigger and better, being a Wiki.

Now if we can turn a TV off with TV-B-Gone, and replace it with a vlog from our wireless hand held...that would be very MaxHeadroom.

I think its time to get something together to Vlog, this development is definitely getting closer to the idea I had for 3dpodcast.com. Although I don't envisage being able to use it to download manually as I am now, except by cutting and pasting html, I can put stuff up for others to subscribe to.

me-tv video blogging Wiki.

me-tv video blogging aggregator project.

vogbrowser video blogging aggregator project.

Ant Not TV desktop video viewer project.

videoblogging info

To some of the people who have contacted me and are still waiting on replies, I don't have a lot of time right now (like everyone else, I suppose.) but will get back to you as soon as time permits and maybe even get some time to podcast and try a little vlogging.

3D Projects Art/Animation.

Electric Clothing - Place Your Message Here.

I was reading Josh Rubin's CoolHunting Blog yesterday, and he has a link to a video of a NYX sweatshirt that can have a message scrolling across it. The idea is that you can enter text into a Palm running an application called NYX software and have the text appear as a message in a panel on the front and back of an item of clothing. This suggests all kinds of possibilities, apart from the commercial advertising you might be able to put more detail and have pictures.

GizMag says about the NYX Clothing, that you can sync the message to a sound file and have the message pulse to a beat. GizMag also points out that NYX company CEO John Bell, says that a prototype can be purchased for US$900 and that a consumer version will be available early 2005 for US$250.

This technology is similar to an idea that appeared in July at E3 and had people talking about it called T-Shirt TV. Which places a small TV screen on the chest of the wearer, and has been used to good effect recently to advertise the movie I-Robot.

T-Shirt TV is an advertising tool you can't go out and buy one for impressing your friends or to provide information or even to show people your work. Where NYX is a communication device, when you purchase the clothing and the software, you can use it for what you want. Sure its not available until 2005, but there will be more of this kind of technology and eventually better choices.

What will people use it for? I imagine people will start of by putting cheeky things on them and eventually get sick of that and start using it to communicate. Imagine when you are standing in a line and the person in charge who is directing people waits until you reach the front asks you a question and then directs you to where you want to go. The question and answer could be displayed on the Shirt.

I'm sure people will come up with some very ingenious ways of using this technology.

3D Projects Art/Animation.

Back to the Blog

I just had to slip out to another dimension for a moment. I've been listening to the podcasts being posted on audio.weblogs.com that cover sessions held at the recent BloggerCon III. Today I stumbled across a link at the Internet Archive, to a video of Adam Curry's Podcasting session and noticed in the heading it was Part 3 of 4, and on returning to the site found the other parts there, and that 16 people had dnld'd the 3rd part and 6 the other parts. I hope if any one searches with Technorati they will find this post and all the links.

I heard in Robert Scoble's session " Blogging Overload " while discussing how to aggragate blogs into more user friendly lists by users defined attributes, mention of a site called TenbyTen and went to have a look...wow....what a cool idea.

There have been a few sessions posted and thankyou to all the people that put so much effort into bringing this to the desktop's of those of us who didn't/couldn't attend, I'm looking foward to listening to more of them.

It looks as if the Beeb are experimenting with Podcasting, a Melvyn Bragg Radio4 show RSS feed has been posted on their Radio website, in mp3 format, for download. This appears to be to see if its a popular and postive way of distribution. I'm sure it will be and I'm going to be listening to the next one.

Here is a direct link for those without an iPod and using a PC to hear their Podcasts.

3D Projects Art/Animation.

Are you receiving me?

I have recorded my first podcast, and submitted the link to ipodder.org for consideration, and I'm hoping that I will see it posted on the audio.weblog.com latest 100 list soon. I expect that the US election will be taking up a bit of peoples time over the next day or two so we will see what happens.

Its a bit daunted recording something on your PC and putting it out there for the whole world to listen to or laugh at. Unless of course it is a comedy Podcast.

I'm still working on links here and there to make everything work in unison, on the different hosting solutions that I have. Its coming together slowly and seems to be working. I've just added an XML Feed link to this page so people that have iPodder.NET or iPodder running on their machine can subscribe to my Podcast.

As for the Podcast, I've called it the EscapePod, and I think the name speaks for itself. I listened to a few versions of my 1st Podcast and decided to release the one that I did, even though there are still a few things I wasn't pleased with. There were a few parts where I rambled on a bit and a level issue with the first song but other than that I could live with the other minor blips in it. It's supposed to be more spontaneous anyway I think that's the whole idea, to be more real and less zeal.

The format is a loose framework at the moment, so that I could keep track of what ideas and items I had covered, so I'll work on that over time. I would like to have some CG content, but have been concentrating so much on the technical issues involved in the delivery of this Podcast that I haven't been keeping up to date with the developments in the CG and 3D Art community lately. But that will change soon enough, so if you are interested in 3D or Cg then stay tuned for more.

So my first post regarding CG is that Lord of the Rings - The Battle for Middle Earth, RTS is due for release this week. Being made by EA LA this game will have a full 3D environment and characters, it has a lot of features that have been designed to make the playing of RTS games more challenging and enjoyable and it also has some great graphics. I'm a bit disappointed in some of the animation timing and the polygon levels are pretty low but I think that these factors are probably due to budget constraint and CPU usage rather than vision and skill. I've enjoyed following the development of the game and have been watching the "Inside the Battle - Video Interviews."

My next task that I need to complete is the reduction of my Demo Reel from 89mb to 30mb so that I can fit it on the server space that I have so I can link to it.

3D Projects Art/Animation.

No time to change Lightblulbs.

I'm in the process of producing my first Podcast,......maybe post it tonight.
I recently purchased a website (3dpodcast.com) and I am working on all that as well.

Check out Dave Winers latest Podcast " Music of the Blogospheres.

3D Projects Art/Animation.

BitTorrent & the Beeb - Edge of the Network

I read a couple of articles pointed out by Derrick Oien from the $250 Million Radio Show, about Disruptive Technology and MegaMedia and the way that these technologies are about to change everything. The links that Derrick provided follow a logical progression, but the two that meant the most to me were, an Article in the latest Online version of Wired, and an article by Mark Pesce.

The first article in Wired, goes into the changes that are being made in the way we experience Media and how its marketed, and how that is being achieved. eg: When you go to Amazon and search for a title, you get suggestions made to you of similar titles by subject or titles that others who bought this title also bought. This has changed the dynamics of product sales for items like books so dramatically that it is estimated that the top 10,000 titles sell as many,but often less than the next 10,000 tiltles. This means that there could be a market for all kinds of things like books and film and music that is twice as big aspreviously thought, maybe even bigger.

The second article (Warning: Some of the Languge may cause offence.) goes onto explain in another way how media distribution has effected us and what we can do about it. It also gives an example of what the BBC is doing to make distribution of its content more effective using web technologies that take advantage of technologies like Peer to Peer networking and BitTorrent. Making it possible to brake the mold of the old broadcasting format of transmitting one program at a time at a predetermined time.

Here's an excerpt from Mark Pesce article discribing a trial being run by the BBC:

BitTorrent & the Beeb.

The BBC doesn't have the bandwidth to netcast its programming to all 66 million of its viewers. Fortunately it doesn't need that kind of capability, because the BBC has cleverly designed the Flexible TV application to act as a node in a Peer-to-Peer network. Anyone using Flexible TV has access to the programs which have been downloaded by any other Flexible TV client, and can get those programs directly from them. All BBC need do is provide a single copy of a program into the network of P2P clients, and they handle the work themselves. More than this, because of the P2P technology used by the BBC (more on this in a moment) a Flexible TV user can get a little bit of the program from any number of other peers; rather than going through the process of downloading an entire program from one other peer, the Flexible TV client can ask a hundred other clients for small sections of the program, and download these hundred sections simultaneously. Not only does this decrease the amount of traffic that any clients has to handle, it also means that it produces a virtuous cycle: the more popular a program is, the more copies of it will exist in the network of peers, and therefore the more easily a peer can download it.

In other words, the BBC has cracked the big problem which has prevented netcasting from taking off. In this system of "peercasting" the network is actually more efficient than a broadcast network, because more than one program can be provided simultaneously, and failure in any one point in the network doesn't bring the network down. In other words, this network can't be hacked, can't suffer from a power outage (unless it spans the whole network, which is very unlikely) and achieves unheard-of efficiencies in the distribution of audiovisual programming.

How is this bit of technological magic achieved? Through the use of a new technology known as BitTorrent - something some of you may have already used. BitTorrent is a P2P filesharing system specifically designed to prohibit one of the biggest social ills which plague P2P networks - a phenomenon known as "leeching". A leech grabs files from a P2P network without providing anything in return. With BitTorrent your download speed - how fast you receive your data - is determined by how much data you're sharing. This means that a torrent starts slowly - because you haven't much to share - and then increases nearly exponentially; as you have more of the file, you have more to share, so your bandwidth increases, until the file is fully downloaded.

Edge of the Network.

I think that Podcasting with BitTorrent is the way to go then you can subscribe to a peer to peer feed, and take full advantage of distibuted computing. Dave Slusher already has a BitTorrent feed for his Podcast, and I had a look at that the other day and was going round in circles. I will have to have a closer look at that again.

3D Projects Art/Animation.