Playing with and testing animation using the new Rigid Body Tools in release 2.66, pretty dang easy. No fancy lights, just ran the sim and animated.

While working on my new personal project, no tutorial, I have decided to start a material library. Starting with the materials I am coming up with for this project along with alternate materials I come up with during the process.

I have class all week! I thought this was not until next week. Great now I am 2 days behind and have a boat load of work to do in order to get caught up with SOW’s (statements of work) from my other group. Hopefully I will be able to get it all done in the morning, catch up in class and finish things up this afternoon. Boi this will be cutting it close.

When it rains it pours as the saying goes. All is well and last week I started not feeling well, more specifically, Friday afternoon. By Saturday I my throat was starting to hurt and the down hill spiral was starting. Strep is was and in bed I had to go. Working very closely with others it is never a good idea to go in contagious, everyone gets pissed. I took today and Monday off and feeling good now. Time to get the computer back on!

The ice and snow are gone and I have my dropbox files back, now it is back to work. Lately I have only been able to do any work at the office, getting in 3 hours before anyone else and use a stinking 32bit Dell that they call our ‘High-end’ Engineering computers.

Getting the dropbox files back turned out to be just a matter of un-linking the computer from dropbox while online and it set itself up again correctly. I don’t have a clue what went wrong but I am happy they are back.

Snow days were great when I was in grade school and just about as much fun when our factory shuts down but when you loose power because of ice storms you can’t do much of your own ‘fun’ work at home.

Let’s all hope it starts to warm up. 🙂

I was looking into fading out some text for the opening in some training videos for work and found a few that animated the material alpha or transparency for the fade out. Finding this using nodes to set up my materials presented a problem; I couldn’t find the transparency toggles. Well, using nodes I hunted and with a little trial and error found what I needed and this is the results of my experiments.

To start off with, the new computer was the easiest computer I have ever had to download and install all the programs I use on a daily basis. That includes registering setting up outlook. All in all it took approximately 4hrs start to finish.

Now the problem. For some reason all of my files in my dropbox folder are not visible. Nothing is hidden and I can see them when I am in, say MS Word or Excel and open them just fine. When I go to the folder I see nothing. Time to do a little trouble shooting. Incidentally, I am on my little macbook air now and I can see all my files within this computer.

hmmmm curiouser and curiouser.

By this time when I get home I should have a new computer. I purchased a new Alienware M17x R4 with 16gig memory, 1080p monitor, GTX680 Graphics Card, 1T HD and Blue Ray player/DVD burner. This computer is completely void of any software other than the operating system (Windows 7) so the weekend will be spent downloading/installing software. Boy what fun!

🙂