Surfacing…

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…