hour of the wolf | 12:17 AM >

I've felt like I'm living in the hour of the wolf for the past week, for a number of reasons. It's unfortunate that I'm out of vodka.

This is going to be another busy week, ending with Grandma's funeral on Saturday. I'll be in Georgia Friday through Sunday, if you're looking for me.

Got to play a bit this week with Gelato in Maya and in Blender. It's a really interesting renderer. I've never had the opportunity before to play with an external renderer that does subdivision surfaces in the renderer (although I suppose such is an old-hat trick to Renderman users), so that alone was interesting. But also interesting is the speed of the renderer -- it's fast, particularly so from the command line. The export from Blender works best so far -- the Maya version spits out a zillion files, all of them with hard-coded links to each other, and only inside a maya project directory, which is annoying. Either way, it's good to start learning about this stuff now, seeing as my student film will have to be done next year and I need to have all the information I can collected before I start animating.

Although, now I feel like I want to learn a bit about Renderman. Could never afford the rendering licenses for it, though; I'd have to go with Pixie.

The other thing I got into over my very busy weekend (sister in town, and of course, the ever-present AnimationMentor homework) was looking at the new Allegro 5 API. I've been a user of Allegro on and off since v2, back when djgpp was still king. The new API makes a lot of breaks with the old systems, but for the better. New bitmaps are accelerated by the GPU, so the demos go from running at 15-30 FPS to over a thousand FPS on my MacBook Pro. (Curious to see how it runs on FARMBOY-ONE, my quad-core Vista 64 machine.) Some of the API calls are broken in the current beta -- for example, mouse calls crash the system -- but overall it's an amazing piece of new work. I was hoping to use it to hack out a few tools this weekend but it's not quite ready for what I need at the moment, so it's back to the older version for now.