Happy Friday. So It's Black Friday and for once I didn't brave the crowds in search of a good deal at any of the countless retail sales going on through the weekend. There were some rather tempting offers, but nothing enticing enough to overcome a tight budget and a bit of will power. Rampant capitalism aside, I've continued my work on programming in Euphoria in general and Musubi in particular. Making progress would be much easier were it not for various and sundry distractions and secondary projects. The distraction for this week was the impending birthday of my nephew and my desire to make a birthday card for him. My nephew shares my love of Star Wars, Legos, and Mecha so I decided on one of those themes. I started by doing a search on Dogpile using the keywords “Mecha”, “Gundam”,and “3DS”. The search yielded a few hits for models that weren't commercial. I chose a wicked looking mech with large bat wings and a scythe and once downloaded and unzipped, I imported the robot into Anim8or. The next step was to scale the whole model to fit on the screen and to delete the scythe (too dark) and some other superfluous objects. I created a minimal scene with the the robot, a camera and a light source and saved the rendered image to a file. Finally I used the word processing application of Open Office to print the image and some text. It's more work than simply buying a card, but worth the while to have something unique.
The picture of the week is a larger version of the mech image, with a backgound created using Project Dogwaffle.
Click on the image for a full-sized view
The loops of the week are a set of drum fills in 6/8 time.
The song of moment is the acoustic solo version of Overkill by Colin Hay, formerly of Men at Work.
The PC game of the week is Onslaught, a flash game with an addictive quality somewhere between Oreos and crack.
Send your comments and feedback and I’ll read it all and respond to some of it. Bye for now!
