It has been almost a month since my heart attack and am starting to feel better. The sore throat is just about gone but the pain in my chest because of the compressions still hurts and a sneeze is very painful. It is getting better though.
Category Archives: Michael Miles
Just so everyone knows
I tried to commit to writing at a minimum of Monday, Wednesday and Friday keeping on topic. I obviously missed commitments for Friday and Monday but I do have a reason. The morning of Thursday 10/2/1014 I experienced a massive heart attack and I was specifically told by my attending physician if it were not for the tremendous life saving efforts of the people I work with, I would not be here today.
Thank you:
Scott Edmonson, Rick Fox, Bob Neubauer and Scott Blankenship
I’m still stunned – Robin Williams
Two days after the passing of one of my favorites (Robin Williams) I am still stunned, shaken by disbelief.
Time to get back
I have been away for a bit trying to work through some kidney stones and didn’t really feel up to sitting in front of the computer after I got home. Last week a good friend provide me some home brewed ‘tea’ if you will, something he and his wife use at times. I guess you could call it a sort of homeopathy type of treatment. Well all I can say is I am not quite sure what helped more, the constant hydration I was doing to myself of the addition of his remedy but whatever it was it seemed to have worked and I am feeling much better now. Time to get back in the saddle and start blending and working in Unity/UE4 again.
End of tasks
Looks like we have only 3 months left on our project here at my real job and has been the main time sponge of my life. This has been in progress for 1.5 years and for my part of the project all aspects have gone remarkably well. At the end this team will disband and move back to our respective organizations and life will go on from there. That will be a sad day as we all have become close with the knowledge if anyone of us were asked to complete a task everyone knew it would be done, on time. I will miss this bunch of Engineers.
Google Glass
Received an invite this week to become an ‘Explorer’ for Google Glass. I figured “what the heck”, just got my tax return so I bit the bullet and purchased last night. We shall see what this is all about.
I like new toys! 🙂
Back from Internet Hiatus
I am back from my break from the internet (Christmas break from work as well). Time to start digging in and fixing some problems I was having with Unity prior to the break.
Materials and Textures
It is so much more enjoyable working with materials and textures when you are NOT working with a tutorial. Tutorials point you in the correct direction, all the time with little or no explanation of what is happening when you make ajustements to the multitude of variables. Doing it yourself gives you a much more indepth learning experience, as long as you take notes of what happened when you made your changes. A trick I learned was if you are not sure what a setting will do, make a very drastic change so what you did will be very noticeable. Then back off on the adjustment so you understand exactly what is happening. At least that technique works for me.
My First Tutorial
I have completed recording and editing my first tutorial. Below is a render of the finished tutorial and the photo used in the opening shot.
The tutorial is based on one of the Mugs in the Tea set ‘Still Life’ tutorial I started and completed earlier this morning. I thought this would be a good start for the following reasons:
- Use of many of the tools I am familiar with
- Practice with Cycles and Materials within Cycles
- Easy to complete
I felt the video turned out great for my first. The total time of the video is just over 12 minutes, a little more than 15 minutes prior to editing. Editing of this video itself took a couple of hours.
P.S. I loved doing this.
P.P.S I am getting used to my recorded voice.