The Undeclared Variable

After a month of downtime, courtesy of my host, my service has finally been fully restored. It is great to be back tho there is much catching up that has to be done. There is much to share which I plan to do this weekend.

Thanks for returning and I am excited to finally resume my posts.

The email that took ZZhosting.com a month to send out to people:

Yes, we have finally broken free of Nvidia PhysX with our own solver which gives Fracture cross platform support. Unfortunately there is no support for the Win64 versions of Maya, yet. Also our solver isn't much over a month old and is only now being distributed to testers.

Last Friday I caught the opening show of District 9. After the previous disaster (GI Joe) it was great to see a movie that was original and fresh in so many ways. Let me go over the things that I enjoyed the most about this movie:

I first played with Zbrush shortly after the 2.0 release, and then briefly again on the highly anticipated 3.5 release. I was always extremely impressed with what they achieved and how flexible Zbrush is. The ZSpheres was not my favorite even though it was very efficient for blocking in the framework of a character but the resulting poly output always felt a little dodgy and just didn't feel as intuitive as it could be though it was hard for me to exactly put my finger on what was missing. Since I spend most of my time doing MEL and FX I had fallen behind on the progress of Zbrush.

August courses being offered at TD College will be covering MEL, Python, Houdini, and RealFlow. Currently the TDC is running a special which is $200 dollars off the normal course fee.

Procedural Effects with Houdini
• Mentor: Mark Story
• Start Date: August 30th 2009

Getting to the point: as the story is concerned (and the ability to sit and watch the whole thing without praying for a quick death) it doesn't suck as bad as Transformers 2. As far as the FX go, they were bad. After the failed attempt to steal the warheads Duke (Channing Tatum) is flown back to GI Joe headquarters. As the jet, Duke and the other Joe's are in, is flying over the desert (and even while entering the hidden base) I was in awe at some of the worst rendering and compositing I have seen in recent years. Even the design was just bland and not the least bit eye catching.

I will be the first to admit that I was a total SG1 nerd. I even enjoyed the spin-off SG1 Atlantis, though early on I was a little skeptical. The series finale of both left a bad taste in my mouth and was an abrupt ending to legacy that deserved so much more. During the final episode of BSG me and my brother seen the first trailer for Stargate Universe. We both were excited and skeptical; is this to be another spin-off feeding on the left over questions of the previous two?

On July 30th the pre-sale campaign began for the Durian Open Movie project. This time around the goal for the pre-sale was set to 2000. I did not feel this was too ambitious after the success of Big Buck Bunny.

Since Autodesk launched the streaming masterclasses earlier this week I have been swamped with people interested in testing Fracture. I have been trying to keep my inbox organized and respond accordingly. If you have contacted us for testing and have not heard back yet then I screwed up so please send me another message.

Just to remind people once again:

• Our cross platform solver is still not ready, so Windows testing only
• We do require you to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)
  

According to the BlenderNation article:

"The first of the official 2.5 versions will be released in October, during the 8th annual Blender Conference in Amsterdam. The Blender team plans to give regular updates, with the 2.5 project to be completed with the Durian film premiere in 2nd quarter 2010."