Well, after a hellish last week we are all moved into our new house (when I say "all moved in" that means we live here, that doesn't necessarily mean we're all unpacked :-P). It's wonderful. Our room is almost double the size of what we had and the backyard is superb (we've been out at least twice everyday since we moved last Wednesday). Of course, there's been a few problems but all have now been worked out.

Last night I e-mail Phil Vischer, creator of the popular kids show VeggieTales, inquiring about how he rigged the veggies. To my surprise, waiting in my inbox this afternoon was a personal reply:

Hey Matt,

When we produced the shows in Softimage, it was all lattice deformation. Each eye was in a lattice, and then the entire character was in a lattice. We just animated lattices. The mouths were simple texture maps created by a separate animation and applied in rendering, and then reapplied slightly blurred as a bump map. Very simple stuff. (All developed in 1991 when I built Larry for the first time.)

Virtually nothing changed until we moved to Maya in 2000. By then I was no longer animating, so I'm not sure what they changed. Now everything is done in Canada, and I'm clueless.

Hope that helps.

Phil

Talk about cool :-D. With that knowledge I can now finish my models for MeatStories (R) ;-).

Also this afternoon I became the webmaster for a bunch of monks. Tomorrow I'm going to call their "outside guy" to get a list of everything I need to do. I poked around their server a bit and it looks like I'm going to have to do some ASP[.NET] work (which I'd actually been tinkering with shortly before we moved), so that'll be fun (and bring back some memories).

Well, that's enough for tonight. Now that my computer is setup again (with internet) I'll be making my usual every other day entry.

It was certainly an exciting weekend for those of us paying attention to TGS (Tokyo Game Show). The new Nintendo Revolution controller was finally unveiled. At first I was kind of skeptical, I mean the thing is a freakin' remote:

Part of me kind of died because I've grown up holding a controller in two hands using super quick thumb reflexes to get myself around. However, the more I thought about the possibilities of the tilt sensors, the more I began to like it. One thing that I would love to see is a Star Wars lightsaber game. I was still kind of leery, but then I heard that there's a conventional controller that you can plug the remote into. Besides, I'll be able to play Tetris Attack, so I have to buy one whether I like the controller or note. Needless to say I really can't wait to get my hands on one of these and see how it works.

On the house front: A good 75-80% of the house is packed now. Mainly just the big things (furniture, appliances, computers, etc.) are left. Sometime tomorrow we'll be getting a dumpster and emptying the garage and packing the U-Haul. It's going to be a long, tiring week but it'll be well worth it.

As an interesting closer I post some things I've unearthed (either through packing or cleaning up my computer):

19 years later

And finally: Jack and Jill (flash)

We went through our grand tour of the house today (second for me) and I was able to snap some pictures. So, here they are:

I seem to be missing pictures of the master bedroom as well as Steve and Joe's room, but that's the gist of it.

Most of our stuff (and when I say our I'm usually refferring to Jeff, Chris and myself since we are roomies) is all packed and ready to go.

Well, we're getting down to the wire on this but it looks like we're gonna make it! Part of me is kind of sad that we're going to leave this house (I mean, I've lived here 18 out of 19 years of my life), but it'll be nice to move on.

Our realtor called today and apparently we should've been packing a week ago because now we're left with exactly one week to pack! So, I've been going through my stuff today (nuked a few CDs :-D) and getting ready.

Yesterday was the first night of bowling and a good night of bowling it was. The first two games were sort of ehhhh, but the last game was my best yet. I'll let the image speak for itself (haven't tested this Tetra feature, so it's overdue ;-)):

Yeah, 207! My dad was only 18 ahead of me at 225 (I beat him the first game :-D). If this had been last year I would've gotten my 100 pins over average watch. Pooh :-P.

Well, with the moving and all, it may be a while until I can put anything up. I'll try to squeak out a little blurb before I have to pack my computer. Cheers :-)

It seems like the biggest problem to us getting out of our house is no problem. The people who are buying our house have basically set everything in stone and so now our house and the house we're getting will all have "Sold" signs. So now the packing begins (our room'll be a nightmare :-P) and in probably about two weeks we'll be in our house :-D. btw, here's some info on our new house.

A couple days ago I picked up my free version of Linspire and I decided to try to move over to Linux full time for a month. I got it installed and it was certainly nice looking. I went through some trouble figuring out how to use apt packages but I started to get the hang of things. And then the trouble set in. PHP was giving me problems with MySQL, depending on what program I tried I couldn't get the sound working/synced on DVDs (or avis) and Lsongs, while nice, obviously was running on a low priority because it would cut out frequently. And things went down from there. So, I'm back on a fresh install of Win2K3 and it's nice to be home.

Got an interesting piece of mail the other day about a college down in Florida called FullSail that specializes in film [pre/post]-production. It's quite interesting because next to game programming the realm of film is my other big area of fascination. So whether I'm going to DigiPen or this place is kind of a toss up. I guess I'll worry about that when I get there. Right now I have to keep studying for ye olde GED and get a job (so I can buy my laptop ;-)).

Well, that's enough for today. Stay tuned.

Well, we've had an offer, the papers are signed and with any luck the moving will commence soon. So for those of you out there who pray please add in an extra word to the man upstairs that all this goes through :-).

Bowling league starts again in a couple weeks (13th) which I am looking forward to. Dad and I had been on a Monday league over the summer, but it was with "commoners" (i.e. people who come and bowl every now and again) and the atmosphere was.... common :-P. Now we'll be in a USBCC sanctioned league again with all our bowling buddies from last year :-D.

I will be updating in as much as I can. Stay tuned. Now back to our regularly scheduled program...