ENGINE of the EMPIRE

Baron or Arboreal?

I have an alien planetary body in the background of a shot. I had been toying with the idea of a Green Mars using NASA images of Mars, including height maps, colourised to give it the appearance of life, from shades of red to a blue/green world.

The look appealed for a while, but when you look at the planet you can see lots of neat-edged craters turned into lush vegetation. A quick search on the Internetwebmail and I found a mock-up of Tatooine, home to the original Skywalker ranches.

The desert wins the beauty contest. I’m going to look again at the Green Mars rendering, because as a texture it’s twice the resolution of Tatooine, but it doesn’t look as good. Not that it matters, sandy dustbowl for backdrop it is.

Click them for a larger version.

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Update. I mentioned looking at Open Office. Wow. The first three things you notice about it are that it’s based on MS Office, secondly that’s based really closely on MS Office, and also that it’s a clone of MS Office. Not quite as many options, but does everything you’d want from the hundred quid incarnation.

The Power Point tool looked like it could do the job, if you fed it in enough templates. Unsurprisingly there are plenty on the World-Wide, so am downloading a few of them. The Word/Excel engines look strong, but am not risking converting my documentation over at this stage. I’ll graduate to them at some non-crunch time. Shame Math is just for writing formula, it it’s not a computation. The flow-chart software is adequate. It doesn’t have anything like the scope of Visio, but enough for my immediate needs. Open Office could really do with a Gantt-chart project manger.

Paperwork Time

At the end of University you get exams. You might have some hand-in work too, but you get exams. At the end of a first-year equivalent course in college, you don’t get exams. Or you do but they’re really easy ones, mostly multiple choice. What you do have to do is hand in a ton of homework.

For June the 1st I have to hand in a CGI-film, a team-made arcade game, a personal Java card game, and fixes to a 3D shooter. It’s the documentation that’s the slog: five design documents, three business plans, three project plans, two gantt charts, three user manuals, three technical manuals, story boards, endless PDL, two design diagrams, three test strategies, three lots of weekly work logs from start of term, and the magnum opus of ethical issues reports.

I don’t mind too much getting on with it methodically. A few hours throwing a few words into Word, then head into XSI. There I model and animate for a while, a nicely creative exercise after documenting. Lately the scenes have reached the stage I get the first renders. Compositing a film, changing the models and animation, is great fun.

As for admitting to using Word, I checked out Open Office. It looks amazing, have started downloading it. I’ll certainly find a use for the Math and Draw suites.