f-log

While I am waiting for the rendering Microsoft announced that an Original XBox game is now supported on the XBox One. "Destroy All Humans"

Which I own, or more to the point forgot I had in a shoe box with other worthless games.



We put the disk in and ... "Not recognised"

Tried a few times and got the same response so went off to the XBox store and found the game £14.99 but no obvious ways of saying we own it ...

Went through the buying process and quit on the accept purchase step and then the XBox requested and update and then the disk was recognised!

Wow! This game brings back memories. Released in 2005, it plays a bit like GTA with a semi open world and missions/side-missions.

Surprising how the graphics hold up pretty well to today's titles and the game play is perfect. Start with a little and each time you find yourself under powered there is a path to upgrade.

Recommended, even for £14.99, lots of game play and replayability.

Now, I also own "Destroy all Humans 2" for the Original XBox ...

previously on
All 256 frames are now rendered and I got my "detail" and the detail shows up a tiny error :(

Less than 10 seconds to fix and now 8 more days of rendering!

In other news...

OK, so I am now at frame 166 averaging 40mins per frame, but on another computer I did do this



I worked through the CG Masters Dust in the Wind VFX tutorial - Blendernation tutorial article

The premise is quite simple. Create a boolean operation that is animated to make the Monkey(Suzanne) disappear over time. Create a Particle Emitter that gives off dust/sand but keep its position and size in sync with the original boolean modifier.

On top of that add wind and a dust/sand particle. For fun I added a pulsating brain that is exposed while the head dissolves and wire-frame monkey head outside of it all.

The reason the brain got introduces was simply that the boolean modifier seemed to be failing when the cube intersection got to Suzanne's eyes. The head would suddenly become concave and then solid again once the cube intersection had passed bottom of the eyes. This was eventually fixed by sealing the eye sockets, as the eyes on the model are separate and do leave "eye sockets".

I hate Apple! Nothing new there, but it is the reactions of the apple-fan-boys that amazes me most.

I watched in horror as perfectly working and in use Mac book rebooted without warning restarted and then installed the 10.13.4 update. The reboot then rendered the external screen blank.
There are few people having this issue, 1100+ and counting. It is not just affecting DisplayLink, Apple forum.

The scary thing is that this was reported by a large number of testers well over a month before the general release of 10.13.4 and Apple just let it go through. The response from fan-boys was that because DisplayLink was using undocumented hacks they should not be surprised. Except they are not, many years a ago they did have to try some odd hacks to get iOS drivers to work but that is for iPad and phones only. And the little matter that ALL the external display manufactures are affected.

Why has Apple not dealing with this? Easy, they can sell overpriced Thunderbolt displays that do work. Forget all those users with spare HDMI and DisplayPort monitors. In that thread are companies with hundreds of Macs all with unusable displays!

Oh, and the other thing is you can just not upgrade to 10.13.4 or rollback, ignoring the risks and the fact that Apple installed it WITHOUT WARNING!

When PCs rebooted without warning, to install Windows 10 Slashdot article the user base went mad. Apple support forum responded with "It's your fault for not setting the update settings". Except the update settings say nothing of reboots/restarts.

Back when iPhone 6 first released I spoke with an owner and while we chatted it rebooted without warning. The brushed off the issue with "it keeps doing that". Speech-less

Apple are not just bad, they are beyond evil. The list of failures just goes on and on and on and yet people keep buying their overpriced and heavily restricted rubbish.

Did you see the current news about a single piece of dust being able to render their most expensive new and shiny keyboards not just useless but unfixable?

on and on and on on on.

erm, my machine is a little slow. How slow? After 4 days I am on frame 125 of a 256 frame animation :(

What is more worrying is this animation is supposed to be the simplest of six and once I have that anim in the bag there is another image I wanted to create to complete the raw footage.

The reason these frames are taking so long is that I need a lot of details, which means a lot samples. I thought the modelling of the Pi was time consuming, but I have spent sometime just trying to get the timing right a quite basic animation.

I probably should update the Raspberry Pi Hires Project page ...