Moving forward

It has slowly dawned on me that creating a whole demo on my own is unreleastic, so I will be shifting my to a simple demo level that focuses on locomotion of different characters and creatures in different environments  I feel this would be the best use of my time while still being able to display my current ability level in game design/scripting

While I am shifting gears, I will also be working on revamping both my website and my reel.  The website revamp will be simple, and I will be removing a lot of unnecessary pages and links.  The primary focus being that my reel will actually be a banner on my page that rotate between different characters/creature movements.I will have to think of a way to ensure that the rather large .gif files won't be stolen and misrepresented as work belonging to someone else.

On an unrelated-but-still-related-note, I have started learning Python.  It's a fun and easy language.  I believe I will try and learn C# next, possibly followed by Ruby.  The reason I am learning Python is because I know Maya supports it, and I believe I can create some useful scripts for my fellow artists.  I am not sure where I will post these tools on the new website (as I was thinking of doing away with the download and projects sections).

Well, that's the rough game plan. Time to get out there and make it work.

Game Update

The game design process is beginning to stumble forward.  I have successfully managed to script some basic character movement and camera controls in Unity.  I have a simple character avatar that moves, turns, and strafes.  I also have camera orbit controls more or less working.

Next stage is to create a level 1 low poly character mesh to begin rigging and animating.  Prerequisites of course require the dreaded 2D concept art.  I've recently been playing Dungeon Boss and the simple characters definitely give me an idea on where to push my initial character design.

Re:Rig

I have started collecting components for a new PC.  When finished it will be powerful enough for me to game, to do 3D-animation, and game development.  This new rig will also have the perk of being portable. 

The case itself is small and has a handle for ease of moving.  I will be purchasing a portable monitor to go with it so I don't have to lug around full monitors and related cables.  I'm super excited about it.

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In development news, I began fleshing out more details on my dragon game. Additional "engines" and even a follow up game/campaign has been brought up.

Moved in... mostly

Moved in to our new place.  Got most of our stuff unpacked (including yours-truly's computer). We had kind of a major set back in setting up our office/craft room (my office, her craft room): the ceiling caved in about 3 days after moving all our stuff in.  We also had to run ethernet cables to several rooms in order to deliver more-reliable-than-wireless internet access.

Finally got it and the problematic skylight fixed.  Decided to go ahead and unpack the PC and see about getting setup for some long overdue creative processes... also gaming.

Time to get back to work!

Page Revamp

Revamped my page to include both freelance information, a contact page, past projects, and my resumès. Contemplating creating a Technical Resumè.  Not sure what would go into that isn't already in my regular resumè.

Polycule : I've hit a road block on my menu Task.  I am having the darnest time instancing a prefab object the way I want to for my 3D menu.

I'll move on to the database connections instead.  At least this way I can make some progress and maybe wiggle free a tidbit of information that I need to finish the Menu task.

New Web Layout / Projects Update

I'm pretty happy with the new layout of my personal page.  It's a simple layout and the color palette isn't as weird as it was on my last design.

What's coming next?  Moving back into Maya and doing some modeling and rigging for pieces on my technical reel.  First up is a cannon from the Attack of Titan manga.  I started it this past weekend and I'm taking some creative rights as far as some of the design and aesthetics.  I'm trying to make the design actually work mechanically while staying true to the original design idea which is causing me to add pieces and change the shape of the base the cannon sits on a bit.

The farm has been on hold while I waited for our apartment's cooling to settle down.  We're between seasons here in Texas and our apartment's cooling system has been shutdown because it's cool enough to just open windows.  While it sounds great in theory, it makes it hard to cool servers while maintaining a decent decibel level where the cooling fans are concerned.  Once it drops another for or five degrees on a daily average, I will spin up the servers again and begin work on the Deadline/outside-access implementation on the App server.

Rule of Fire (WIP) - Wing Test Rig

I finished rigging and skinning the Wing concept mesh.  The Range of Motion test was successful.

Next on the task list are some animation tests:
Walk, Skulk/Crawl, Climb, Fly, Land, Take-off

Windows SBS

It turns out I didn't need to reformat after all.  I simply swapped the hard drives from one machine to the other, installed new drivers and the OS is working fine.

I'm currently tweaking the firewall and trying to get it so emails will start filtering through again.

I'm hoping to have it done before I get home from work today so I can reinstall Ubuntu Server LTS.  The plan is to install Ubuntu with Samba, LAMP, and a desktop for easy program management.  Once that's done I can begin installing the trial version of the Farm Manager and begin tweaking the interface for portal view.

New Servers - Test Runs

I thought I would end up having to wait a while to get back to work on my render farm because I didn't have the servers I needed.  Low and behold, 2 servers were donated to me by my family.

After scrounging some old disks for testing I now have 3 servers.
Right now, 2 of them are being used as test beds: 1 is now running a test run of NAS4Free for the family's internal backup/media server.  I have some problems copying files but I'm working on it (timeout and permission issues).  I am I am installing a test run of Ubuntu Server on the second new server.  If I can make this work with LAMP (webserver), Samba File Share, and Mail server, I will reformat my 2011 Windows SBS server and reinstall on it because it has 2x the memory and 2x the hard drive space for email storage.

NAS server test

So for the last week I have been experimenting with several free Linux-based NAS solutions: openfiler, nas4free, and freeNAS.  I have unfortunately run into several problems with both: primarily that the server stops responding while copying files. 

Not being able to copy is going to be a HUGE problem moving forward regarding both replication and storage with the customer's files.  I am unsure if this is a common software issue (if I'm downloading a version too advanced for my hardware) or if this is an inherent problem with my hardware. 

My hardware is rather dated: Opteron 242 1.6GHz with 4GB of RAM.  It's a 64-bit hardware solution running on a x86-64 Linux OS.  I currently do not know enough to effectively solve this.  I will need to seek help from the various OS' communities

1st Server Status :: Operational .. Mostly

OS is finally installed. I'm going through the final configuration.  I need to start picking out the server side programs (anti virus primarily).  I'm going through the whole Exchange nightmare now of making sure that only certain firewall ports are open.  Stuck on the email and RDP ports at the moment.  DNS changes have been made (and will need to be made again when I bring the server home).

final piece (besides email folder setup, rules, etc)will be the customer portal.  I'm hoping to get the intial portal up by the end of this week (as soon as the firewall is done)


I almost have enough cash to buy the second server (initial access storage) where the source files will be uploaded and read from and the render files will be saved to.

First Server - Meh

Putting together this first server is not going as smoothly as I thought it would.  I have yet to get the OS loaded onto the system.  First there was no optical drive bay, then we had problems getting a USB CDROM to be detected, now I'm having issues getting the CDROM to be picked up on the IDE ribbon cable.  It's just one thing after another with the project.

Time to Revamp

Got a dose of cold truth: my reel isn't up to snuff.  After watching it, there's just a lot of really old work on there along with work that isn't my best.  I've decided that it's time to archive it and update my demo reel by starting from scratch.  I will only include work from Black Ops, but nothing further back than that.

The plan is to make 4-6 scenarios and do variations of each, a technical demo reel primarily with rigging and motion capture, and a a short animated sequence (hopefully fully rendered).

I'm at the starting line. Go!

HydraFarm - Server 1

Bought the first server on Thursday of last week (or was it Friday?).  Anyways, the server is a 2x Quadcore, 2.66GHz Xeon , 16GB RAM, and 2 500GB SATA drives.

The plan is to load Windows SBS 2008 and Exchange on this server.  It will act as the customer portal (using Windows 2008's portal configuration) to allow users to upload/download and submit jobs as well as control account information and payment information via  secure connection.

Two draw backs to this: users will have to submit a form for account creation which will have to be hand built (safer and keeps away bots), and files will have to pass through the SBS to their final destination (end user or user's NAS folder).

I'll plan around that for the next hardware migration in a few years.  Regardless, I'm super pysched!

Visual Databases

I had a brainstorm in the shower, where I do all my critical thinking; Are there neat ways to visually represent data in the web?  Webs have connective strings.  Databases have lots of data and have relationships. Families and friends have relationships and connections. Can I show family and friend relationships and connections visually, in 3D, on the Web?  I think so.

I've added a fairly simple project to my to-do-list: create a node-based, 3D representation of a database file.  I've got the visuals in my head: sprites and bursts, glowing connection lines; basic visuals to display a dynamic database.

Already started on the flow, database design, etc.  Looking good.

Forward Progress

Progress is being made despite the lack of updates on this blog. 
Creative: I've got my creaive juices flowing again and have come up with several creative projects ranging from stand alone, one-off character/creatures I'm currently in the middle of creating, to short stories, to game design concepts

Indie: The Indie group I'm working with is chugging along at a nice clip.  3D assets, concept art, code, animation; it's all moving along rather smoothly

Business: I have successfully finalized the interface/experience flow and hardware strategy plan regarding the render farm.  I've decided that I will stick to a purely CPU based farm until I can figure out a charge scheme on the GPU processing the GPU cards would give me.

From Bad to worse...

The trojan/virus/bot/whatever seems to have been taken care of.  However, I may now be dealing with what it did to my computer. 

Any time I now launch a memory or graphics intensive applications, I get a blue screen of death.  I'll try reseating my hardware components tonight in hopes that it was simply knocked loose when my cat knocked my entire tower off the side of my desk (it is now residing safely on the ground).

Disaster Strikes..

I came home to lunch today only to find my computer with a Trend Micro window sitting in the bottom right corner of my right-most monitor.  Since I had turned the machine on that morning, there had been 1400+ blocked URL attempts and 84 blocked security alerts.  This is what I get for leaving my machine on with Remote Access enabled. 

Bad Doug!

HydraHouse - Masbot Beginnings

I did several quick silhouette thumbnails in attempt to come up with a mascot for HydraHouse.  Since I've never really been good at organic modeling, I figured I would revive and revamp my mascot from my original website so many years ago (he looked a lot like Claptrap from Borderlands).  I will be attempting to build a mascot based on the company's name but keep it mechanical to tie back to the original Masbot (and I'm also thinking of some cool ways this can tie into the render farm).  My two primary inspiration pieces/sources are the mechanical arms from Dr. Octopus and the mythic creatures, Hydra (dragons, wyverns, and the like as well).

As a rigging challenge, I will be adding the ability to switch mechanical pieces on the fly via variables.  I'm hoping to have three separate themes: standard industrial, techno, and steampunk.  I look forward the the modeling and texturing challenges as well.

Milestone Updates

I added and updated milestone documentation: checked off some milestones that I've previously hit but forgot to update in the documentation, and added a few UI milestones I need to hit before I'm satisfied with functionality and useability.

I've successfully created the base meshes for the Mouse entity and created a Tower Shrub.  This weekend is hectic with my girlfriend's Masters Graduation ceremony at UTD, but I'm hoping to get one or the other textured and into Unity by the end of the weekend.