I can accept failure, but I can't accept not trying
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Alex Lovett
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Just spent all day fixing and improving this Blog *shudder* I really gotta think of a better thing to call it.

Now it has super magical powers

You can go backwards and forwards viewing 7 days at a time which means it will no longer be a gigantic 300 pages 100mb page.. damn ill miss that.

This is something it should have had from the start, but I couldn't figure out how to go about parsing XML by date and then spitting it back out, but I figured it out at last after applying myself and giving up on finding a ready made solution someone had already done.

It's rounding up nicely now, It's very very usable apart from 1 thing really
If you go back 7 days and there's nothing there it laughs at you and shows you nothing. So I need to make the buttons smarter so they indicate and go back the required distance in days to reach the next available entry. And right now I'm too tired to tackle that.

Also I've decided it will not publish the current weeks blog till the week is over thus avoiding constant changes and updates.

--

I'm having huge problems parsing XML still which is preventing me from making it awesome, so if something sucks, blame PHP poor default XML handling


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Be warned the following contains ranting's and ramblings during what I can only sum up as a winter depression, it is by no means the end of the world

;-)



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Blogs are interesting things, not that I'd call this a blog, and I do hate the word 'blog'

This started out as a Diary of sorts, a way of dumping my thoughts, a scrapbook. The more interesting personal parts of this are not online and are kept in an encrypted box for my eyes only.

This became a quick and easy way to show friends what I'm upto, to document and record all the many interesting yet unfinished things I do.

I have no care for an audience, Writing as if talking to someone seems more natural and perhaps therapeutic.

So on I shall rant, to all who would care to listen, even if it only reaches one person and that person is myself, it shall be worth it.

--

Welcome to club consciousness, population you

I don't know when it happened exactly if it was a single moment or a gradual change? I don't even know what to call it. A moment of expanded consciousness, observing ego, an epiphany or a moment of clarity.

Something is different, that much I know.

When you're a kid the world is so big and unknown, you don't even know it exists so the vastness doesn't even occur to you. All that exists is you and your small area of experience. Time is infinite and days stretch out lasting forever. Then you get older, time speeds up, days disappear faster and faster and you may not even notice them pass at all.

Slowly you begin to realize the tonnage of things you DONT know, all the possible paths you could go in and how time is slipping thru your fingers, that time isn't infinite and what you do with it is of increasing importance... at least that's what I realized.

Most people appear to be stuck in that initial child like state. Where only they exist along with there immediate vicinity. They don't think big, they go from day to day doing what they do; mindlessly. Living someone else's life and getting on with it. They live thru films and books only.

Ignorance is bliss. I was happy as a child, I think. The less you're aware of things, the easier that seems to be. At least that's my experience, if you had bad parents then perhaps the opposite is true, I don't know.

But I don't have that luxury any more, the luxury of not being aware of the finiteness of everything.
Saying 'everything going to be all right' doesn't cut it anymore. Desires and needs become more complex, to the point we might not even know or understand what they are.

As you become your own individual you have to discover what you want, what it is that makes you happy.
As a child you want what appears to be wanted, sweets! games! things you don't have, etc etc, you want them automatically, that's the done thing, you happily chew through sweets and are happy; even though you haven't stopped to think for a second, are these sweets even nice? do I actually enjoy them or am I the product of conditioning. Am I just a Sheep, our my desires my own? and are they healthy, obtainable and sustainable?

As a child that's much simpler, you want things; you don't care or even consider why you want them, and if you don't get them you have a fit.

Life as an adult is and should be much more complicated than good vs evil, no black and white, just grey. Sometimes when you finally get what you want, you no longer want it, and realize perhaps you never wanted it to begin with.

So what good is this expanded awareness? would ignorance; forever like a child, be overall more pleasant?

Probably

But I don't think you can go back once you are aware, only if you have some serious powers of delusion could you crawl back into the metaphorical womb.

It feels like most other people are in this womb, this deluded state of suspension, living lives that are not there own. I have no idea what if any internal confliction goes on in the minds of the masses. Some appear bitter, wanting to keep everyone at there level of un-success, the misserable ones, some are simply oblivious, those are the happy ones. Maybe they were aware once, failed, never tried, succumb to mediocrity. Maybe most people are just happy to just 'be' to just exist, maybe that's enough for most people, maybe they don't think about it to much, thus is doesn't bother them.

But I do think about it, a lot, and thinking about stuff like that often makes you crazy.

When you become self-aware you may be immediately disappointed, perhaps your not living the life you want, perhaps you are not in control, you work for other peoples goals, you just get by and are bored of that, you want more of something. And with that comes fear and a kind of depression, as you don't know how to get out of it, you don't know how to get those things you want and your worried you'll always be aware of that fact and wish you could go back to being unaware, to make it all just go away.

If you are living your life the way you want, doing the things you like, and every morning you can look in the mirror and honestly believe today is going to be better than the last, then chances are you are already self-aware, and have sailed your ship correctly because of it, that or your very fortunate or possibly naive and deceiving yourself.

There comes a point in everyones life when they realize their long held dream of becoming *insert dream here* is never going to happen. Maybe it was a fanciful dream, a fantastic hope, whatever it was, you secretly hold onto it in the back of your mind as if it was going to happen, one day, perhaps in another life, another you, but it was going to happen, and you've never really faced up to the reality that it really isn't, not if you continue as you are. Your not going to get a second chance. The first run thru life isn't the warm up and you don't get to try again at the end.

--

Now if this all sounds negative, It's because it is, and I am not exactly cheery at the moment.

Right now, I am not particularly happy, I have more than most people have, I have a warm safe environment, I have loving and supportive family and I have all my mental faculties and health, so I don't really have anything to be upset about... yet I still am. For the simple reason that I expect so much more of myself, that I know my own potential and yet I haven't been able to evidence it to myself properly, maybe I haven't been trying, the why doesn't matter though.

I'm just not where I want to be right now and it is all my own doing for being complacent, for thinking ill always have more time, for being scared and for being weak. We can all go round blaming it on things, blame it on your upbringing, blame it on lacking enthusiasm, lack of energy, whatever. None of that actually helps though. Not of it fixes the underlying problem.

In any case, I'm itchy and anxious to change how things are right now

I'm trying to figure out what the problem is, what it is inside of me that's not working the way I want.

I've spent so long knowing inside I have potential, It's become a simple expectation that ill get the rewards I deserve, that it will just happen by itself and my internal beliefs are enough. That there's plenty of time to mess about. I started thinking like that back in School and it stuck even though 7 years or more have passed. And while I've learned a ton in 7 years, I'm still going along like everything lasts forever, like I'm not getting any older like there plenty of everything left.

So now I feel rushed, anxious to catch up, like time slipped by while I wasn't paying attention

--

"If the human brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldnt"


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Tags: - C4D - Vray - Maxwell
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I have no idea how optimized or un-optimiszed Vray is for Mac right now as It's not feature complete in Cinema yet.
Heres my 3rd vray attempt took 3 minutes!

Don't ask me what happened to the colors, pilot error is highly possible.
Reason it took 3 minutes was I swapped out the White Sphere for an area light. Which makes it substantially faster.



Ok heres my second vray render attempt, took an Hour just the same oddly


Vray 1hr


Vray 2hr It's a bit smoother, more noticeable in the full size image than this small version

I get the feeling if I rendered for the same 4 hours of the maxwell render it would be very close to the same accuracy and would have 0 noise
(you can't see the noise in the maxwell one as It's zoomed out) But at the same time id take noise over glitchy dented looking GI any day.


Maxwell 4hr

Now to compare this to another renderer, Cinemas:

Cinema 4hr 25min, I think I had it setup a bit wrong, but even so... what a load of shit.

Someone elses comparison of Vray to Maxwell:

5 hours versus 16 hours

Link: www.treddi.com



And the yellow light in the Vray render is due to the color mapping type, Maxwell employs a burnout effect in post which I'm sure you could do with vray/photoshop on a 32bit image.

So to summarize, Vray is awesome

Vray will let you render all the GI and save it as a file, then reuse it, meaning you can re-render with different Depth of Field, different exposure and there's even an option so you could render an animation if only the camera moves from 1 GI calculation. This means you can re-render using the same GI at any resolution so render small, then re-render at print size and it will only take 2 minutes. Maxwell gets exponentially slower the bigger you render.

-- update -- ok turns out I misunderstood the vray GI, you can't just render the GI once and use it in whole animation. It will only calculate the GI it knows you are going to see by looking ahead at places the camera goes to. And you can't use this method with Irradiance you can only use it with light cache mode which is very very slow and hard to use in my opinion. Making it somewhat useless really. But if your camera doesn't move you'll be fine.

It says light cache mode is better, which I guess it produces nice more maxwell like results but it seems so much slower and harder to setup/tell what the final will look like till the last moment.


Maxwell is better in that you can change individual light strengths after rendering and you can render for as long as you like, if your vray render looks shit after 4hours you have to start again. Maxwell can always resume and refine.

so vray = best for animation and large stills

maxwell = best for small stills

cinemas default renderer = uhm... useless, maybe best for basic motiongraphics where no GI is used.



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I kid you not!!

Looks horrid and costs loads, just the sort of thing all materialistic idiots with no taste crave

I'm kinda hoping It's just a publicity stunt, which would be worth It's weight in gold if they only made one of these and some idiot actually buys it

Lets not give any thought to the fact the value of gold in this thing will; by a staggering amount, outlive the value of the computer parts. Which will loose 20% of It's value in the next 6 months at least

:-)





24k gold and naturally it has diamonds too cus I mean.. well duh it has to have diamonds







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Tags: - Funny
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A sweeping statement I'm aware, but seriously, I see it countless times:


In what universe do reflections take up less space than the item being reflected, It's as bad as drawing cups in perspective with a flat bottom, as bad as drawing people with arms coming out there sides, exactly the sort of thing you can be forgiven for only if you pre school and have some flawed mental model of how the world works.

Use your eyes people! goto life drawing class or something!



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Also, relating to this art by the same guy (im not picking on you honest)


A great deal of art lately looks like this, and I\'m somewhat a fan of it in moderation, but It's almost always so flat looking. 2D designer listen up, get more spatially aware, things can exist in depth too you've spent too much time in photoshop on a computer screen.

Ill forgive them for the most part as It's particularly hard to integrate vector and stock photos together in 3D space

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Link: www.dynamikart.de



This is better, it has depth, though It's almost entirely the original photograph, you lazy bastard.
Oh that and the women looks retarded, seriously, am I the only person who thinks skinny women that look like this are retarded.

Steps to good design, step 1: Insert glamourous model that's underweight and takes self too seriously, step 2... there is no step 2!

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Nice engrish



Nice somehow has put up for download all/most the Channel 4 idents (Which I Love)

Link: idents.tv --- four-to-the-floor-the-possibly-complete-collection





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I've been trying to fix my RSS feed so when I make changes they get flagged as so, but It's not working... at least it doesn't appear to be working. It's driving me quite mad. I could do with a programming/rss/php parsing genius right about now.


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Need to vectorize a logo.. look no further than... a website???

Link: vectormagic.stanford.edu



I just handed it this bitmap:

And it gave me this:



Not bad, it screwed up the little R, but I didn't want that anyway

:-)



Or just go here if It's a logo

:-)


Link: brandsoftheworld.com




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Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary -- Steve Jobs
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