Animations… and more!

As you can see, I’ve changed the appearance of the website once again. I really like this layout, and the whole big-huge-rotating-graphics banner at the top. Might actually keep this layout longer than six months… or not…

Inking progress on Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog this past week has been excruciatingly slow. Real Life has been tossing me just enough adventure to keep me on my toes and away from the drawing table. I’ve also been putting constraints on the amount of time I spend in front of the computer, to keep the migraines down to a dull roar. Of course, my brain is doing its best to drag things out even further by scheming and plotting loads of stupid little projects whose only goal is to waste time. In short, not a banner week…

I’m hoping this week sees an improvement, but I’m not putting down any money on it.  We shall see…

Coming up for air for a spell.  Honeymooning with the iMac is more like a working vacation where you get to go to Aruba but end up locked in a conference room filled with sweaty meatheads for eighteen hours and never see one lousy beach.  But it’s Aruba, so you shouldn’t complain…

The pre-compiled versions of POV-Ray and MegaPOV - my animation axes of choice - for Mac OS X Leopard are huge disappointments. POV-Ray just flat-out doesn’t run at all — per the developers, it’s Apple’s fault — and they changed MegaPOV so it no longer uses saved preference files. What the …??? Why the HELL did that do that??? That’s just plain stupid. Fortunately, there’s source code, so I now have Unix command-line versions of both progs that run at least 25% faster than the pre-compileds (I have no numbers to back up this claim, but I can see it with me own eyes, and since it’s my website I can pull whatever number I want out of thin air and that’s all there is to it!)…

Another MegaPOV annoyance is the lack of Quicktime support. When I run MegaPOV on my old G3, I can opt to save my images as a Quicktime movie, which is important since, well, you know, I’m a moviemaker. The new version of MegaPOV won’t do that, and I see no reason to kick out another thirty bones to Apple for functionality their program should have in the first place (not to mention the chunk of change I’ve already dropped to get the iMac). To get around that, I’ve employed MPlayer, the movie player and encoder of choice amongst Linux-heads. My first experience with MPlayer two years ago, when the G3 was sporting Debian Linux, was an ugly mess, mainly because I’m a moron and had no idea what I was doing. This time around, I’m getting muuuuuuch better results (even though I’m still a moron). So, problem solved…

I just about have all the necessary tools in place to get rolling again on Scary Monster Vs Lucky Frog. Still looking at June sometime, although I’m thinking it’ll be more towards the latter half of the month…

In case you missed the added link, I have a Twitter account now. Not exactly sure why I have it — just one more thing that requires attention. Whatever. Anyway, it’s out there, check it out, enjoy…

Please put your hands together and welcome the newest member of the Goofy Graffix army:

I’d show a larger picture, but the iMac’s sheer power and beauty would frighten mere mortals and small children.  I myself have to wear protective “doom-proof” clothing when operating on it, to prevent its evil from overwhelming me…

Living and working dangerously, all for you.  Thanks ain’t necessary…

All wisecracks aside, I’m pretty darn pumped up about my new little toy (well, not really little — the 20″ screen totally dwarfs the measly ’94-Quadra-era beige monitor I’ve been staring at for 14 years).  I’m in the process of adding all the programs and doodads I need to make it into a smokin’-hot rendering machine, and trying to figure out how to work the new OS 10.5 features (some are sure to be absolutely worthless, but there might just be that diamond in the rough).

What happens to the old G3?  Well, nothing bad.  I’m still going to draw with Painter on it — the Wacom tablet uses the old ADB port, which the iMac lacks.  In fact, in the next few weeks, I’m going to pimp it out with a faster processor, more RAM, a bigger hard drive, and probably a new graphics card (that way I can toss the measly ’94-Quadra-era beige monitor I’ve been staring at for 14 years, in favor of a flat panel).  It’s not broke – it’s just slow, like me…

So, I think we can pretty well write off getting anything movie-related done for the remainder of the week.  Which is fine.  I’m back to having fun now.  Fun rules.