Building Cyberworld

Moving Day!

2011-11-15T21:13:00.002-07:00

Since my last post I've been trying to find more stuff to post about, but I've come to the conclusion that lately I've been spending most of my time drawing and rendering, not writing. And while Blogger is very good for writing, it's not as good for posting pictures. So after much thought and deliberation (okay, okay, it took place in the time span of two or three Google searches. But there was at least a little thought and deliberation, I promise!), I'm moving Building Cyberworld to Deviant Art!

You can find me here: http://buildingcyberworld.deviantart.com/. And of course my Twitter isn't going anywhere! Right now I just have one sketch up, but I've got more in the pipeline. Besides that, I'm going to be posting a bunch of the stuff I've made in my blogging hiatus. A blog-style post to my page Journal can be expected now and then, and I'm planning to finish the Designing Armor tutorials there, too. Everything that's on Building Cyberworld right now will stay there, at least until the sad day when Google discontinues Blogspot sites :( Hopefully that won't happen for a very long time, though!

Unplug? Not me!

2011-10-01T09:27:00.009-07:00

Hello Bloggerers! Long time no see! I'm shamefully behind in posting new updates... but I promise I'll try to post more often from now on :)

Today it's time for a long overdue post: why I'll never unplug. This post was inspired by an blog post I found on Twitter: http://kaitnolan.com/2011/08/19/why-ill-never-unplug/ (I believe the blog post was written by @KaitNolan; I found it through a tweet by @GeneLempp.)

I admit that I'm just starting to barely dip my toe into the online writing community, but even in my everyday, non-writing life I've noticed a lot of people talk about how we're "plugged in all the time" like it's a bad thing. I don't really understand the push to "unplug" and I agreed completely with what Ms. Nolan had to say, but I also thought of some other reasons why I'm joined at the hip to my technology and proud of it. So without further ado, here are my own personal reasons why I'll never unplug.

#1: There are interesting people online.

Seriously, if I had no other motivation to surf the web, the shear variety of cool people there would be enough to tempt me. My interests happen to be CG graphics and writing. Just on Twitter I've found an official DisneyPixar feed, some amazing artists, and a whole series of awesome writers who love to share expertise. Give that all up? Are you nuts!?

This is where I agree 100 percent with Ms. Nolan. I'm lucky to have a group of friends and family who are very supportive and interested in my hobbies, but sometimes it's nice to be able to vent about Photoshop and Comic Sans and n-gons with people who've been there, ya know?

#2: Online interaction and non-online interaction are not incompatible.

Honestly, I can't see how online interaction is a direct path to ruined social skills, like some people claim. For decades now, people have been fluent in face-to-face, writing, and telephone interaction. You don't as a rule see letter writing or telephone calls ruining businesspeople's social skills, do you? I don't see a reason why we can't add internet communication to our toolkit. I talk with people in real life, and then I carry on digital conversations with them later. The two are not mutually exclusive.

#3: Technology is not a one-way path to physical problems/mental problems/any other sort of problems.

Yes, if you spend too much time on the computer you'll end up with problems. But if you spend too much time exercising, you'll end up with different problems. Moderation is better for just about everything.

Angela Ackerman said something in the comments for Ms. Nolan's post that I think makes a lot of sense: "Social networking should never run the show…it should not be this giant flying circus that people need to get away from. If it is, then you’re doing it wrong." I couldn't have said it better myself. YOU run the technology. If your technology's running you, then you need to change your approach. No killer robots will emerge from the depths of Twitter to punish you for neglecting them. I promise.

#4: It's fun.

Yes, that's one of my major reasons. In fact, that's my final, all-encompassing reason that I'll never unplug. I happen to enjoy tweeting, chat forums, and video games. I happen to enjoy them very much. 'Nuff said.

I think sometimes people are way too harsh on entertainment. Being 100 percent practical, 100 percent of the time would be very stressful. Sometimes you just need a little pure entertainment, and I think that's okay.

And on a completely unrelated note, Twitter is down and it's driving me NUTS because there's something that I really want to tweet about. Normally I would vent such a minor irritation on Twitter. But I kind of can't do that, because Twitter is kind of... not working. Oh dear.

Designing Armor, Part 1: The Overall Suit

2011-08-12T16:26:00.009-07:00

First off, welcome to the first post of the Designing Armor tutorial series!

Whether they're illustrating sci-fi, historical fiction, or fantasy, a lot of artists need to make armor designs eventually. If they're not armor experts, then designing armor that is original and effective-looking can be tricky. Of course, I NEVER experienced any of that myself *shifty eyes*

Who am I kidding? Of course I have trouble with armor, because I admit to not knowing a thing about it. I'm an artist, after all, not a historian. Fortunately, I have a resident assistant in the form of Bricklayer, who is a military history buff as well as a Lego Mindstorm enthusiast. I tell him the look/function I'm going for, he tells me what that armor has to do, what kind of armor I need, and shows me some pictures for examples. (If you can make friends with a military history buff, I highly recommend it if only for the sake of your armor drawings.)

But not everyone is able to keep someone like Bricklayer around, and so for that, I'm writing this tutorial with his assistance. I'm not going to dwell too much on drawing specific styles of armor, since the goal of this tutorial is to give ideas for designing your own armor, but I will use 2D sketches as illustrations. This tutorial would work for 3D modeling too—it doesn't matter how you create, the design process is still the same.

Here's a quick numbered diagram of the parts of a full suit of heavy armor. Yes, I know that it's a pretty sloppy drawing, and I know that this armor would never be viable in real life. Think of this as a map of zones or areas, rather than a drawing of a suit of armor.

1: Helmet
2: Neck guard
3: Chest plate, backplate (not shown because it's well, behind the figure)
4: Shoulder guards
5: Upper armguards
6: Elbow guards
7: Lower armguards
8: Gauntlets
9: Stomach guard
10: Hip guard
11: Thigh guards
12: Knee guards
13: Shin guards
14: Boots

Your absolute lightest-weight armor will be just a helmet or just a chestplate, maybe with a backplate. The heaviest suit of armor will have all the parts. More armor generally equals more protection for your character in combat. However, more armor also slows your character down and makes them bulkier. (And protective armor is bulky. Remember, your character has to wear clothing of some sort underneath it, along with the size of the armor itself!)

Besides moving slowly, the character underneath heavier armor will have to be stronger, unless you are making a sci-fi or fantasy story with some kind of augmented armor. Armor is heavy, and the more you pile on, the heavier it gets unless you have a magic spell or a sci-fi hydraulic system helping you hold it up. Finally, the more armor your character gets, the less expressive they tend to be. Think about it—you're basically sealing up your character in an opaque tin can! There's a reason that heavily armored characters tend to be portrayed as emotionless walking tanks, at least when they're wearing their armor.

Okay, so your character needs a bit more protection than just a helmet or chestplate, but the full suit of heavy armor is looking like overkill. How do you make middle-weight armor? The general concept is to armor your character's core (i.e. vital organs) first, and then work your way out. Take a helmet and chestplate/backplate together; add shoulder guards and a stomach guard and/or hip guard, then a neck guard, then work your way down the limbs to gauntlets and boots.

Of course, sometimes the conditions of your character's battle will require different armor. For instance, a swordsman who uses a shield will want to armor the leg he places forward in his fighting stance and the arm that he holds his sword with (the arm not behind his shield) pretty early in his journey from light to heavy armor. Characters expecting hand-to-hand combat with short bladed weapons will want their forearms, hands, shins, and feet armored, maybe even before they armor their core. (In some fighting styles, it might be more effective to block stabs with an armored gauntlet than it would be to wear a heavy and bulky chestplate.)

Finally, you have to consider looks. We are, after all, designing armor for art and not for actual fighting! Feel free to give your heroine shin guards to go with her ultra-lightweight armor because they look cool, or use a slightly lighter suit of armor than the situation calls for so we can see your knight's body language. There are, in my opinion, some types of armor that abuse artistic license, but I'm going to save a discussion on those for a later tutorial segment.

Well, that concludes Part 1 of the Designing Armor tutorial! In the upcoming segments, we take a closer look at the different parts of armor, starting with helmet and neck guards in Part 2.

Jump break.

2011-08-12T16:12:00.003-07:00

I am making this post solely to see if Google's advice on making jump breaks in a blog post will work.

If all goes well, you'll have to click to see this part.

Tuesday Tweetcast

2011-08-09T13:47:00.004-07:00

Nothing fancy, just my favorite tip/wise advice/fun stuff from my Twitter feed.

Photo: Horse cheat sheet. When people ask how to draw horses, this is what I jot down. http://tumblr.com/xtr3z9ibu9less than a minute ago via Tumblr Favorite Retweet ReplyEmma
lawnrocket

App of the Week: My Favorite Live Wallpapers

2011-07-27T10:26:00.005-07:00

Okay, this is going to be a group review: my favorite live wallpapers for Android! All of these are fairly dark (I like to check my phone in the middle of the night and I don't like to get blinded, plus I have heard that dark wallpapers use less battery), and they all run well, and they're all interesting--at least to me. Looking over this list I see that I have a distinct taste for scifi wallpapers, especially those that show spacescapes rushing by... Hmm. I like spacescapes, okay?

Shadow Galaxy: If you love the scenes in Star Trek that show an exterior shot of the ship plunging into a mass of swirling iridescent nebula, and you love those scenes not because of the ship but because of all that beautiful nebula, then you'll probably like this wallpaper. I had tried a couple of this developer's other "Galaxy" wallpapers and, while tolerable, they didn't knock my socks off or were too bright; I really like this one, though. Seems to run very stable.

Hyperspace 3D (free version): This one leans more to the "fiction" side of "science fiction" by superimposing a glowing "tunnel through space" on top of a vivid spacescape. (You can turn the tunnel off if you want to just have the spacescape, but what would be the fun in that?!) Some lagging issues on my Droid 2, but works well the majority of the time.

Solar Wind: By far my favorite live wallpaper, period. 5 patterns plus a "customize" mode mean that you can have pretty swirly dots swirl around your screen in several different ways. (The only pattern I really don't like is "Jiggly", because I find it vaguely nausea-inducing, but that might just be me.) Runs well.

3D Fireflies (free version): Same idea as Solar Wind but a bit different aesthetic; glowing trails behind little arrowheads rather than dots in lines. Lags a bit, although very rarely.

Starfield: "Set a course to take us around the nebula. Warp 2. Engage!" "Aye-aye, Captain!" And as the ship lurches into motion, a handy lieutenant videotapes the view out the front window to be included in this app. As a lover of the warp-speed visual effect, this was the second live wallpaper I downloaded after getting my phone (the first was Solar Wind). My only gripe is that the animation is centered on the home screen of my phone and doesn't move with scrolling; scrolling to the screens on the right or left causes the starfield to streak across the screen rather than from the center of it.

The Rules for Writing

2011-07-15T12:51:00.002-07:00

The following rules have been hanging on the wall of my family's book room for the past several years, at least, and I wanted to share them. Unfortunately I don't know who the original author is (my copy of the Rules is an uncredited computer print-out, which I rather think was brought home after circulating around someone's office). Nonetheless, I think this is valuable advice for authors everywhere!

1: Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
2: Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3: And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
4: Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
5: Also, always avoid anything alliteration.
6: Be more or less specific.
7: Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
8: Also, too, never ever use repetitive redundancies.
9: No sentence fragments.
10: Contractions aren't necessary and shouldn't be used.
11: Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
12: Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary--it's highly superfluous.
13: One should NEVER generalize.
14: Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
15: Don't use no double negatives.
16: Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
17: One-word sentences? Eliminate.
18: Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
19: The passive voice is to be ignored.
20: Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
21: Never use a big word when a diminutive one will suffice.
22: Kill all exclamation points!!
23: Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
24: Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth-shaking ideas.
25: Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed. (Note: it's and its are not the same thing! Look it up.)
26: Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
27: If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand time: resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
28: Puns are for children, not groan readers.
29: Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
30: Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
31: Who needs rhetorical questions?
32: Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
And finally,
33: Proofread VERY carefully to see if you any words out.

DISCLAIMER: Building Cyberworld is not responsible for any failure, disappointment, rejection, ridicule, or loss of money or reputation that may result from the use of these rules.

UV mapping: not such a pain anymore, maybe?

2011-06-19T10:03:00.003-07:00

I hate UV mapping.

No, let me rephrase that. I really hate UV mapping. It's tedious, annoying, and (in my opinion) really hard. I've tried using UVMapper, but I never could figure out how to use it properly. So I do my UV mapping in Wings 3d. It takes as long or longer than the modeling process does.

Well, English Bob over at Morphography discovered a program that seems to work much better. (I don't know a lot about UV mapping programs, but at any rate it works much better than Wings.) It's called... wait for it...

Roadkill. Fitting name, in my opinion. Your mesh will be flattened like it had the misfortune to wander in front of a semi truck. I had spent almost a week of intermittent work on the UV mapping in Wings of a new content item I'm working on. Roadkill had the job done in one afternoon with wayyyyy less manual adjustment than Wings demanded.

Of course, Roadkill isn't perfect. The camera pan function in the 3D view demands a 3-button mouse, which is fine until you consider that I'm on a laptop with only two buttons. (By the way, Toshiba, you know I love you, but would it kill you to throw an extra button on there?!?) On a fairly simple model I was able to get the UV mapping done without panning the camera, but I've purchased a small mouse to help with larger and more complex models. The save function is somewhat lacking in functionality (e.g. if you use "Save As" to save your file as something other than the file you loaded it from, it doesn't remember the new name. You have to hit "Save As" and retype your new name every time, instead of using "Save As" once to rename the file and "Save" every time after.) Finally, it is Windows only. (Not a problem for me as I don't own any Macs, but a lot of people do and they won't be able to use Roadkill.)

That being said, the bottom line is that Roadkill makes UV mapping much easier. I wouldn't say it makes it "fun" (I;m not sure any utility could ever do that for me), but I'd definitely agree with "much less painful".

App of the Week: Missing

2011-06-15T09:43:00.001-07:00

The App: Missing, http://market.android.com/details?id=jp.co.sic.missing

The Good: Missing is an ostensibly straightforward puzzle game. You are trapped in a room, and the goal of the game is to find objects in the room and use them to escape, like finding a key and using it to open a cabinet door to find pliers, which make a coat hanger into a hook that can be used to grab inaccessable objects. Challenging, and works well with a few exceptions (see section below).

The Bad: The graphics are fairly primitive. (For most of the game it's tolerable, but there's one point where a gap [I think] in a drain channel looks like a chunk of concrete wedged in the channel. Not a problem until you consider that the procedures to fill a gap and break out a chunk of concrete are very different.) Some puzzles must be solved in a certain order or you will be unable to progress, but there is no mechanism to prevent you from accidentally solving puzzles in the wrong order. Some of the puzzles are very hard and there are no hints whatsoever. There is nothing to indicate which places you can take closer looks at, so in the widest view you are left tapping randomly on the screen hoping to hit something important. The English captions of cut scenes, help pages, etc. is awkward although understandable (it looks to me like it was written by someone who does not speak English as a first language).

The Bottom Line: For free, it's a very entertaining little game that ought to be entertaining to fans of puzzle/RPG games like the Nancy Drew series. I wouldn't pay for it, and I would thoroughly try out the free demos of the sequels before paying money for them, though.

The Sci-Fi Survivor's Pledge

2011-05-02T20:45:00.003-07:00

As a sci-fi character who cares about surviving my designated story more than I care about furthering the writers' plots, I do solemnly swear:

That if my telepath, psion, insanity sufferer, or other crew member with abnormal sensory abilities displays feelings of disturbance or unrest, I will promptly evacuate them, myself, and the rest of my crew from the area.

That if I develop unusual feelings of pain or emotional unrest, I will not shrug them off or use a cup of hot beverage/painkillers to try and make them go away. I will leave my quarters immediately, have my belongings searched for mysterious objects that are not mine, and keep a close eye on any people or objects that have arrived on the ship around the time my pain or emotional disturbances started.

That I will not take any artifacts or other objects on board my ship unless I am personally able to identify the object, its creators, and its function beyond doubt.

That I will not touch, stare at, approach, talk to, or otherwise interact with any object that glows or moves without clearly visible application of power (for instance, by light bulbs or motors).

That I will not take any alien creature onto my ship who is not able to fully communicate with me, no matter how cute or harmless it may seem and no matter how much my zoologist wants to study it.

That I will not show all the inner workings of my ship, shields, and weaponry to newly discovered alien beings, no matter how friendly and intelligent they seem.

That I will not investigate the source of mysterious noises with less than two armed comrades, especially when the aforementioned noises emanate from a rarely trafficked area of the ship.

That I will not investigate the source of mysterious shadows on the wall, nor call out to the crewmembers that I believe are making the shadows. Instead, I will walk away and return with a fully armed security force.

That whenever any equipment malfunctions, I will reverse the polarity before I try anything else.

That if I should encounter a new character who is both extremely attractive and extremely intelligent, I will avoid a romantic relationship with him/her until his/her trustworthiness has been thoroughly verified.

That when an important member of my crew appears to have been killed, I will not leave the area until I have verified beyond doubt that the crewmember has in fact been killed, and is not being held captive.

That I will not take any apparently “freak” accident at face value and assume that it is indeed an accident.

That I will not threaten to destroy an object the villain wants in exchange for a hostage, because I know that the villain does not hold the hostage in the same high regard I do and will not hesitate to kill or injure them slowly and painfully.

That I will never, ever go on a dangerous mission while wearing a red shirt.

That whenever I am faced by legions of incredibly powerful robots, androids, or other machines, I will pose a simple paradoxical problem to them before I waste my time and energy in combat.

That if my mount, pet, or other animal in the vicinity goes berserk without warning, I will not attempt to soothe it or shrug and say “What's up with that?” Instead, I will leave the area immediately and scan thoroughly for any vicious predators, forces of nature, or hostile troops before returning.

That I will order a copy of the complete laws, rules, and traditions of any alien society and read it in its entirety before I allow my crew to visit the society.

That before we leave the ship to visit the aforementioned alien society, my crew will be briefed thoroughly on any crimes or taboos of the society, particularly if they carry the death penalty.

That any holodeck or other virtual-reality device will have its power supplied by a single cable that can be easily physically cut in an emergency.

That before exploiting a natural power source, I will examine it carefully to make sure it is not a sentient being, a trap, or anything else that I do not want to tangle with.

That, above all, I will use my common sense, avoid reckless behavior, and ALWAYS CHECK THE SHADOWY SPOTS before I walk past them.

Let's write a novel in 80 days!

2011-04-30T11:28:00.001-07:00

Seriously, check it out: May - You Write Your Novel

The idea is very simple: write 80 thousand words in 80 days, starting May 1st. A lot of people have heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), the challenge to write 50 thousand words in the month of November. Well, this is the spring/summer alternative.

I suppose I could just write every day for most of the year. But what would be the fun in that? There's something about a challenge and a race against time that's kind of fun. (Don't get me wrong, I detest deadlines. But they're fun when there's nothing important riding on them!)

App of the Week frequency change!

2011-04-09T18:45:00.001-07:00

I'm moving the App of the Week column to every other Saturday instead of every Saturday. This will give me more time to explore new apps before reviewing them, so I can find all their little ins and outs. Don't worry, it's not disappearing completely!

App of the Week: The Days Left Widget

2011-04-02T21:20:00.001-07:00

The App: http://market.android.com/details?id=de.leihwelt.android.daysleft

The Good: I'm going to break the mold for this week's review with the review of a widget, not an app itself. (The difference being that you have to open an app, while a widget sits on your phone's desktop. [And I have no idea if "desktop" is the appropriate technical term, but I don't care, so there! *winks*])The Days Left Widget is a simple widget that displays a countdown to a date. You enter the date, and the widget shows how many days are left. No frills, but easy to set up.

The Bad: Doesn't sync with calendar events. No fancy graphics or special features (although personally, I think that's more good than bad).

The Bottom Line: No bells and whistles, but it does its job and does it well.

App Of The Week: The Brickening

2011-03-26T20:21:00.001-07:00

The App: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.vigasotech.thebrickening

The Good: The Brickening is a classic brick-breaker game (bounce the ball off a paddle at the bottom of your screen, and try to hit all the bricks on screen without dropping the ball). Lots of power-ups change gameplay by doing things like giving extra balls or changing the size of your paddle, and a generous number of multi-ball power-ups means that you get to watch twenty or more balls ricochet across your screen surprisingly often. 100 levels means you won't play all the way through it any time soon.

The Bad: Often lags on my Droid 2, which has cost me more than a few games. The 1/2-size-paddle power-up makes the paddle so small that the game is virtually unplayable; not a big deal, but frustrating. Sticky-pad (the ball sticks to the paddle when it hits) is not compatible with multi-ball play, so you can't release a "shotgun blast" by picking up multiple balls and releasing them all at once. (When a single ball hits the sticky paddle, all other balls disappear.) This makes sticky-pad useless for anything except slowing your game wayyyy down. EDIT 3-27-2011: I had suspicions of this, but I'm just now certain that it has this issue. If you leave the program alone for a certain amount of time, it defaults to Level 15 with two lives (one life lost from the default 3) , no matter what level you were on or how many extra lives you pick up.

The Bottom Line: Lots of issues mean that this game wouldn't be worth paying for, but it's a fun free way to kill time. (Or procrastinate, depending on what you are/are not doing)

Killing Characters Without Making Your Audience Hate You

2011-03-20T22:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this isn't exactly a technology-related post, and it's extremely long. But if you're an animator like me, then at some point you might find yourself creating a storyline, at which point you're going to need this post. All of it, even though it's extremely long.

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for the Alex Rider series, Artemis Fowl series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Wars. If you are not familiar with any of these, and you plan on familiarizing yourself with these, and you want to be surprised by them, then stop reading now.

The title for this post was almost "Why, Anthony Horowitz? Why?" Because that's where it all started: a display of his Alex Rider novels in my local bookstore. I read several of the Alex Rider novels a while back; while I didn't think they were literary genius by any stretch of the imagination, I like action stories and they were entertaining. However, Eagle Strike completely killed my enjoyment of the novels, with its melodramatic way of separating Alex from his girlfriend. I admit to being a believer in happy endings, or at least hope for the future, in fiction. If you're going to end a book on a sad note, then it better be a really awesome book to get me to love it. Not being that impressed with the Alex Rider novels, I stopped reading them after Eagle Strike.

But there was this shelf in my bookstore, with all the Alex Rider novels lovingly displayed--with cool new iridescent-printed covers, even. I was curious. I picked up Scorpia, the last Alex Rider book that has come out for a while, and flipped to the last few pages. Although I didn't like the direction the novels were going, I liked the character, and I wanted to see how Horowitz had Alex deal with his inner demons. I should have known better.

In the final pages of his novel, Anthony Horowitz kills. Alex Rider. Off. Or at least he goes to great lengths to make it seem like that's what happens. Seriously? We spend several books getting to know, love, and cheer for this character, and he can't get a happy ending? Instead he gets shot by a sniper, and it's not even a compelling death scene? You have got to be kidding me.

So in honor of Anthony Horowitz, Eoin Colfer, and the other authors and scriptwriters who have killed off characters they shouldn't have, here is the guide to killing off characters without making your audience hate you forever. (I am aware that many thrilling tales break these rules right and left. This is for the benefit of the stories that are good, but not good enough to compensate for an ill-placed death.) I have distilled the Killing-Off-Of-Characters (KOOC) principals into an exception and three basic rules. Story creators, ignore at your peril.

KOOC Exception for Evil: None of these rules apply to evil characters.

If a character is on the side of the bad guys or has been at some point in the story, they may be killed without a second thought, because chances are they had it coming. In fact, sometimes you should kill them to avoid conflicts between your desire for a happy ending and your desire for justice. (And as a creator of a story, you do have both, right? Right?)

To put it in terms of the most popular action tale, Star Wars: It's okay to kill off Governer Tarkin (the guy of the "foul stench") and the Emperor and dozens of little officers and Stormtroopers. They deserve it. Darth Vader's death is also justified by this rule. (Do you really think that it would be acceptable to have him choke and zap Rebels right and left, mind-probe Princess Leia, use Leia/Han/Chewie as Luke Bait, and then have Luke say "Hey, Dad! It's me!" and have everything be fine and dandy? Something's gotta give, and Vader is easier to remove than the viewers' sense of morality.)

KOOC Rule #1: The death of the character must further a plot element.

In other words, no pointless deaths. The death of the character should create difficulties for the hero(s) to overcome. Television shows who must remove an actor from the cast are a common offender (like the Star Trek TNG episode "Skin of Evil", where there was absolutely no reason Tasha Yar needed to get killed. While the crew reacted to her death in various ways, her death could have been removed and the plot would be basically the same.) On a related note, the death of the character should not come at the end of the story when there is no time for the hero(s) to overcome difficulties caused by the character's death, forcing the story to end on a note of mourning.

Star Wars analogy: It's okay to kill off the entire Gold Squadron, because they have to be out of the way so that our heroic fighter pilot is forced to act as a bomber pilot. It wouldn't be okay to have an X-wing and it's named-in-dialog pilot get blown up so that the hero has six TIE fighters on his tail now, instead of five. (At that point he'd be in enough trouble that another TIE or two wouldn't make a difference.) It's okay to kill Darth Vader, and then have Luke hang out with his spirit for a bit before joining a victory celebration with Leia and Han and all his other friends who love him and care about him. It wouldn't be okay for Darth Vader to die three seconds from the end of Return of the Jedi, giving Luke just enough time for a horrified "Noooooo!" before the credits start rolling.

KOOC Rule #2: The character should not welcome death or perceive it as a moment of peace, calming, etc.

Because that is freaky. I'm looking at you, Anthony Horowitz! You escort your character through situations he shouldn't have to deal with as a teenager, show him having to endure the emotional backlash of those incidents--and then you kill him and he seems to enjoy it?!? I know that is probably a realistic response for someone in Alex Rider's position. But when I read a novel, I don't want reality. (I've got more than enough reality in my real life, thank you very much.) I want fantasy and people who solve their problems and live happily ever after, or at least happily for the moment. Having your hero get killed and welcome the experience is mildy disturbing, to say the least.

Star Wars analogy: Star Wars actually has probably the best-executed violations of this rule that I've ever seen, most notably in the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi. The freakiness-factor is blunted by Obi-Wan's calm, philosophical attitude to everything as demonstrated in the rest of the movie, and the fact that we aren't actually told what's going through his mind as he dies. If Obi-Wan hadn't taken everything else calmly in stride, and if we had been viewing his calm reaction to getting slashed with a lightsaber in first-person perspective, then it would have been disturbing.

KOOC Rule #3: The character should be defined by their function in the story, not by their personality.

Eoin Colfer (author of the Artemis Fowl novels) is guilty of violating this rule, big time. He spends three stories letting us get to know and love Commander Root as not just the grouchy commander, but a truly smart elf with a heart of gold if you look for it in the right place, and then in the fourth story he kills him off?!? (That's the main reason I no longer read the Artemis Fowl novels.) If the character is defined by their function, e.g. "the wise mentor" or "the hired henchman" or "the enthusiastic but inexperienced officer [in a red shirt]", they can be killed off with minimal fear of reader backlash. If the character is someone your audience has grown to understand inside and out as a person, rather than a role in the plot, then you'll have major problems if you kill them.

Star Wars analogy: It's okay to kill Obi-Wan in A New Hope, where he has played the role of "wise mentor" to a T, and we don't know anything about his personality other than the fact that he is a wise mentor. (In fact, getting killed so the hero must work on his own is almost a prerequisite for the position of Wise Mentor. [see Rule #1]) It wouldn't be okay to kill Han Solo in Return of the Jedi, after we've spent three movies learning what makes him tick.

So that concludes the KOOC rules for killing off characters without making your audience hate you forever. Uphold them stringently and disobey them only when necessary!*

*Hint: Most of the "disobediences" you will think of are covered under the second part of the Exemption for Evil. If you have one of those delightfully complex characters who drifted to the Dark Side at some point (metaphorically or literally) because they, like all humans, are neither pure good nor pure evil, then you may kill them to bring karma, absolve their guilt, or release a happiness/justice deadlock. Go for it.

App of the Week: Hearing Saver

2011-03-19T10:02:00.001-07:00

The App: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.jakebasile.android.hearingsaver

The Good: Hearing Saver lets you set separate default media volumes for headphones plugged and headphones unplugged, e.g. muted when headphones unplugged, 25% when headphones are plugged. You unplug your headphones, and the volume drops to 0. The app markets itself as a way to control volume so you don't turn it up really high using the phone speakers, and then plug headphones in to find that the volume is now wayyyy too loud. I use it so that I can plug in headphones and listen to music, but then if I take my headphones out and forget to turn down the volume, I'm not greeted by "Congratulations! You are today's winner!" from an ad on a website in my mobile browser. You know that cool headphone volume/non-headphone volume control on the iPod touch? Well, now you have it for Android.

The Bad: Nothing that I've encountered.

The Bottom Line: Very useful and it works great.

Ignore this post, AKA testing, testing, 123...

2011-03-18T14:05:00.007-07:00

This post has nothing of interest in it.

[I'm simply making it to test out a method of "spoilering"]

EDIT: It worked perfectly! Highlight between the brackets to see why I made this post.

EDIT (3-19-11): It works in the browser view, but not in my moblie site. Never mind...

App of the Week: Twidroyd (Twidroid)

2011-03-12T08:11:00.001-07:00

The App: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.twidroid

The Good: Twidroyd is a Twitter client for Android. It covers the basics of sending tweets, viewing tweets from your followed users, and searching for topics. Works better for me than Seesmic, another popular Twitter client, did. (Seesmic wouldn't follow tweets from users I followed after getting the app.) Has an option to turn off the "live preview" feature, which is good if it annoys you (like it did me). Edit: You can install themes, basically different color schemes, to change the look to something other than Twitter Blue.

The Bad: Interface is a little counter-intuitive, but that doesn't bother me much because my counter-intuitive can be another person's perfect. Doesn't seem to want to show my retweets in my Twitter feed, but Seesmic didn't either so maybe that's standard. Except that I can't find my retweets ANYWHERE, and that's a problem. Won't download themes or show trending topics, for reasons unknown to me. Edit: I tried downloading a theme this morning and it worked. Weird. There is a bug in its menu that lets you scroll up past the top items into an area of white space, and then when you scroll back down the menu items have disappeared and you have to exit the menu and re-open it. Doesn't hurt anything that I can see, but it's annoying.

The Bottom Line: Meh. It works, but not perfectly. I'd recommend trying a different client. (The only reason I'm not switching is that I've already been through two and I don't feel like taking on another one right now.)

App of the week: MyBookDroid

2011-03-05T09:05:00.001-07:00

The App: MyBookDroid, http://market.android.com/details?id=org.zezula.bookdiary

The Good: MyBookDroid is an app devoted to organizing and categorizing the titles of books. Which might not seem very important, but in a family of voracious readers like mine, it answers the question we ask at least once every time we shop for books: "This looks cool, do we have it already?" You can scan books into the system (or check them against the books already there) by using the phone's camera to scan the barcodes on the back, or you can search for them by title, keywords, or ISBN number. Should you come across a really old book that isn't listed, you can make a custom entry.

Once the books are in the app, you can sort them by all sorts of useful categories like "Read", "To read", "Want to own", and more. You can also group them into "shelves", which are basically custom categories. I have a shelf for books specifically belonging to my brother, a shelf for books belonging to me, a shelf for nonfiction that doesn't specifically belong to either of us, and a shelf for fiction that doesn't specifically belong to us, either. Inside the app you can choose to view only books that belong to a certain category.

It runs quite nicely on my Droid 2; I've never had it freeze up or force close.

The Bad: The barcode scanner works poorly in low-light conditions; works fine in the bookstore, but not so well in the dark recesses of my bedroom in the evening. The barcode scanner also sometimes fails to read an ISBN (Puffin Books and their imprints are particularly problematic for me), although it will look up the ISBN from the copyright page just fine. To sort by shelves, you have to go through a different process than to sort by the built-in labels. It's not a big deal, it was just a little confusing the first time I started the app.

The Bottom Line: Very useful for readers who have more books than they can remember the titles of. Sometimes you will have to type in an ISBN rather than scanning it, which is a pain, but other than that it works well.

Cyberwoman, now on Twitter!

2011-03-04T23:25:00.002-07:00

The title says it all... I am now on Twitter, under the username buildcyberworld. (Unfortunately, character limits prevent me from putting the "ing" at the end of the first word.) You can see my latest updates in the Twitter widget on the right of the screen, underneath my profile and the post archive. Follow me. I command you to do it ;-)

App of the Week: Androidify

2011-02-26T15:33:00.001-07:00

Every Saturday I'm going to be reviewing a different Android app from the Google App Market. Right now they are all free apps, but I can't guarantee that I won't review paid ones in the future.

The App: Androidify, http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.androidify

The Good: Basically, Androidify lets you dress the Google Android (you know, the little green robot) in the clothes and hair of your choice. I used it to make the Android version of myself that is set as my profile picture right now. I love the little guy, so I think it's really funny to dress it up. It works very smoothly on my Droid 2, without freezing or lagging.

The Bad: You change the proportions of your Android (e.g. make it taller or fatter) by swiping on the screen, which is awesome until you touch the screen and swipe accidentally and change your tall skinny Android into a short squatty one--and there's no undo button as far as I can see. Tapping an item of clothing changes it to the next item available, which again happens accidentally far too easily. The vast majority of the shoes are drawn in side view, which means your Android looks like it has its heels together and its toes way to far apart. (Some people may think this looks whimsical and charming, I think it just looks weird.)

The Bottom Line: Works well. If you don't love the little Android guy, you won't have a use for it, but I think it's super cute and great for playing around. I probably wouldn't pay for it, but it's free, so have fun!

To the Idiot who Tried to Put a Virus on My Computer

2011-02-19T16:03:00.001-07:00

Dear Idiot,

I commend your ingenuity in planting a virus amid the pop-up ads on one of my favorite sites. The phony claim that my machine had a virus and the fake virus-scan window were very well-made. (You must fool a lot of people!)

However, your clever program thoughtfully informed me that there was a virus on my D drive. Unfortunately, I am running an older laptop. I know it inside and out, and I am well aware that I have no D drive to get a virus on.

I must respectfully point out that the score stands at: Cyberwoman, 1; Idiot Wannabe Hacker, 0.

Very truly not your victim,

Cyberwoman

On Being Beat by Watson

2011-02-18T13:58:00.002-07:00

Ken Jennings, one of the Jeopardy champions who was beat by the supercomputer Watson, wrote an article about the experience. You can read it here, and I think its quite impressive.

If you read the comments below the article, you'll see a lot of opinions on whether the competition was "fair" or not. Really, I don't think that a "fair" human-vs.-machine competition was the point of the Jeopardy match. The match was a demonstration of a machine that has the ability to take sentences like "Keanu Reeves' character owned a Nokia, but you needed a landline to enter this, the name of a popular sci-fi flick" and pick out the important parts--Keanu Reeves, sci-fi movie, plot point involving a telephone line--and combine them to return a correct answer: "What is The Matrix?" If you really think about it, that's hard, especially if you haven't been speaking a language for years and years.

Okay, so playing Jeopardy is a pretty stupid thing for a machine to do. Taking a sick person's description of their symptoms, picking out the important ones and forming a diagnosis, and sending the person to the appropriate department in a large hospital is not such a stupid thing. A machine taking lists of clues and answers (or symtoms and diagnoses) and teaching itself which parts of the clues tell it what the answer should be? Really not such a stupid thing. I forsee useful accomplishments by Watson-like machines in the future.

Jeopardy Computer scores big...

2011-02-16T18:41:00.001-07:00

Watson, the Jeopardy-playing computer, is in the lead after the most recent round of the game show, despite bombing the Final Jeopardy question: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41610403/?gt1=43001

Way to go, Watson!

My Android Eats Apples For Breakfast

2011-02-15T09:23:00.001-07:00

This little guy now resides on the back windshield of my car. 'Nuff said.

Edit: Blogaway squashed my photo. Waah. At any rate, you get the idea.

Humans, Your Status as Trivia Masters is in... Jeopardy!

2011-02-14T22:09:00.001-07:00

Watson, a computer, is tied for first place with a human contestant after the first round of the game show Jeopardy. Check it out on MSN.

Good luck, Watson!

Posted via Blogaway

Layers in Poser: Getting My Feet Wet

2011-02-13T20:05:00.001-07:00

For a commissioned animation I'm working on, I needed to use Poser's Walk Designer. (By the way, the P6 Run setting works quite well with Victoria 2 Low-Res.) Normally I tell the Walk Designer to create its walk animation in the Base Layer, but for this animation I thought I'd try letting Poser create a new animation layer. Although this is a pretty quick clip so I don't have time to really explore the Layers function, I have discovered one very important principal, which I shall call PLPN1 (Poser Layers Principal Number 1):

PLPN1: The layer on top takes precedence over everything. Period.

I'm not joking on this one. If you are trying to position something, say, a figure's Head, and it's not moving, check the animation layers. Chances are that a higher layer already has an animation for the object you want to move, and the higher layer is overiding the lower layer you're trying to animate in. Solution: delete the animated frames from the higher layer, and then make your animation in the lower layer you wanted to use. You could probably make your animation in the higher layer, or make an even higher layer for your animation, but I haven't tried that yet.

RAM'd, a.k.a. NOT GOOD.

2011-02-10T13:00:00.001-07:00

So back in late December-ish, I put new RAM in my laptop, doubling the amount I had before. Awesome, right?

Well, as it turns out, not really. My computer didn't seem to want to recognize one gigabyte of the RAM (there should have been 4 gigs, but my computer said it only had 3). NOT GOOD. We sent it back to the company and got a new set of chips. My computer didn't want to recognize one gigabyte of those either, but we researched the issue and eventually decided it was probably okay. Now since then the screen has randomly shut off and the computer has become unresponsive a couple of times. NOT GOOD, but I thought it was just random lock-ups like Mac users usually complain about Windows having.

(Now as a dedicated Windows user for my entire life with few to no problems, I should have known better. But we'll get to that in a bit.)

So flash forward to yesterday, and every time I try to render a Poser animation, the screen goes blank and the computer becomes unresponsive. NOT GOOD. I look up the issue online, and multiple places say to take out the battery, press the power button and hold for ~30 seconds, and restart the computer. I try, and it doesn't work. Really NOT GOOD. I take out the battery. Now the computer renders five frames before shutting down instead of three. NOT GOOD times infinity.

So this morning I got the old RAM chips back in the computer. It runs perfectly now. What on Earth?

Public Service Announcement of the Day: Consider Your Aspect Ratios!

2011-02-07T11:32:00.001-07:00

Poser's "Make Movie" video resolutions have nothing to do with the industry aspect-ratio standards of 4:3 or 16:9. Nothing at all. That lovely animation you made and rendered over two nights and a day? It will turn out squashed in every video editor you try to use, and there will be nothing you can do to fix it. You will have to re-render the WHOLE. DARN. THING. Please, for the sake of your computer, your electricity bill, and your sanity, don't trust Poser's built-in aspect ratios.

We now conclude this public service announcement.

App testing

2011-01-30T20:12:00.001-07:00

I downloaded the Blogaway app for my Android phone (Droid 2, to be specific), so I wanted to make a post to test it out. Yes, I know I just made a post a little bit ago. I don't care.

I've only been playing with the app for a few minutes, but so far it looks quite straightforward. The only thing that has given me any pause was realizing that I had to press the "Save" button after logging into my blog account, before hitting the back arrow. Figured that out pretty quickly, though. If you are reading this, then it means the app posts new blog posts just fine. If you're not... then wait, how are you even aware of what I'm saying?!?

The blog grows...

2011-01-30T17:30:00.003-07:00

I'm expanding the scope of this blog to technology in general. Why? Well, one, I don't have any graphics projects with monumental events to blog about at the moment, and two, I'm bored. So instead of just graphics, now you'll get my thoughts on iPods, Android phones, computer viruses, and who knows what else. Have fun. Or even if you don't have fun, I'll have fun.

The Great Debate: How "Lossy" is JPEG, Really?

2010-11-25T15:07:00.002-07:00

I was reading this thread on Renderosity (membership required to view the link, I think), and it piqued my curiosity. (And a curious Cyberwoman is a dangerous creature.) The thread started with a basic question: should the JPEG format be avoided because it causes loss of quality in photos after a while? After seeing several conflicting experiments on the thread, I decided to run my own JPEG data loss experiment. There are heaps of pictures, but they're all links to pictures on Picasa (Google's image-hosting site) so that I don't overload this post with photos.

I started by making a test image. (I'm using Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0; I know that it is sadly outdated but it's all I've got.) I used a close-up face render of a Poser person, a full-body render, some Celtic knotwork for an intricate but fairly low-detail design (compared with the person), and a gradient (because someone on the RR thread had encountered some problems with saving gradients as JPEGs. I don't have the original PSD image online, because PSDs are huge, but when saved as a lossless PNG file, it looks like this.

The first thing I learned is that JPEGs can vary wildly in quality. This, this, and this are all saved from the same PSD that spawned the PNG I just showed you. The difference? Quality settings. The first (lowest-quality) JPEG was saved with a quality setting of 2 (a setting of 12 being the highest quality). The second was saved with a setting of 6, and the third with a quality of 12.

Then, I took the highest-quality JPEG and started saving and resaving it. But that's not all; I edited something on the image every time. I needed the final image to look the same as the starting image, so I edited out each change the next time I saved the image; however, I never used the undo button. If I increased the blue before saving the image one time, then before the next save I decreased the blue with Photoshop's tools (no undo button!) I resaved the image as a JPEG a total of fifteen times using the same high-quality setting, and this is what it looks like after the last save. (Links to the other fourteen saves are at the bottom of this post.)

Not bad, huh? To test it more closely than I can see, I put the 15-save image on a layer over top of the original image, and then changed that layer's blending mode to "Difference". This subtracts one layer from the other, basically turning all pixels that are identical in the two layers black. Here is what I got. If you can't see anything, here is the same image, but with contrast increased by a setting of 90 out of 100 (100 being the most possible contrast Photoshop can provide). My verdict: saving as a high-quality JPEG does reduce quality a little, but not by much.

And, for a quick side track, I also saved some images from the "Save for Web" exporter, which I have heard produces higher-quality JPEGs than the "Save as..." option: low quality, medium quality, and high quality. In my particular edition of Photoshop, I found that the low-quality image was better than the "Save as..." low-quality image, the medium-quality image was slightly better, and there was no visible difference between the high-quality "Save for Web" and high-quality "Save as..." images. However, the "Save for Web" option automatically bumped my 100-dpi images down to 72 dpi, and the images saved by it look slightly different colors in my web browser than the standard-saved images.

And as promised, here are the intermediate saves in my 15-save-JPEG series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

Unlocking an iPod Touch, without removing data

2010-11-09T15:02:00.004-07:00

Okay, so this isn't a graphics-related post. However, my crazy little incarnation of the aforementioned gadget completely went ballistic on me last week, and refused to remember its lock code. There are lots of tutorials online about how to reset your iPod (a rebooting process that doesn't affect the lock code), and lots of tutorials about how to wipe the lock code off your iPod, along with all your music, photos, apps, and other data. What no one actually tells you, though, is how to unlock the iPod without deleting everything. Well, I thought it deserved to be written in one place on the web for all the people who forget their lock code, have it accedentally changed, etc., so this is how. (NOTE: this requires access to both the iPod and the computer it is primarily synched with [in other words, the computer that its owner plugs it into to load music, etc. onto it]. If you're trying to open someone else's iPod in the comfort of your own room, you're out of luck.) This should work for an iPhone too, but I don't know for sure.

Plug the iPod into the computer that you normally use to load music, apps, and other things onto it. Open iTunes. The iPod should be listed under "Devices" in the window on the left side of the iTunes screen. Right-click the iPod icon in the window and click, "Back Up". Let iTunes do its thing.

Now right-click the icon again, and this time click, "Restore from Backup". Again, let iTunes do its thing. Try to open your iPod. It shouldn't ask for a lock code! I did this to my iPod, and it saved all my e-mails, photos, saved notes, saved voice memos, and saved documents in a word-processing app. Good luck!

New Content!

2010-10-28T13:59:00.004-07:00

My Drops & Dangles earring set has debuted in my Content Paradise and Renderosity stores, and I strongly encourage everyone to check it out ;-) Here is an image of it in action, courtesy of English Bob from Morphograpy:

Seven Life Lessons I Learned From Poser

2010-10-02T21:12:00.002-07:00

Who says computers are dehumanizing? Here's seven life lessons I learned from Poser. (Some of these are specific to my personal pet peeves.)

Perserverance: You might have to check twelve different websites, but you WILL find that perfect freebie texture set eventually.

Self-Reliance: Renderosity doesn't carry it, neither does DAZ or Content Paradise, and Google is no help at all. Guess who's got to make it?

Acceptance: DAZ's installers are wacky and their file structures are a mess. They can't help it, it's just the way they are.

Time Management: That weekend project will turn into a full month. (But it will look darn awesome when it gets finished.)

Tradition: MAT poses and DAZ figures are the industry standard. Deal with it.

Patience: That render will finish when it finishes, and staring at the progress bar will not make it render faster.

Prioritizing: Your figure's skin might be textured down to the pores on her face, but she'll still look like a robot if you neglect to fix her dead-fish eyes.

And this wasn't exactly a life lesson, but I thought it was useful nontheless:

Poser Operator's Prayer:

God grant me the skills to make the content I can,

The cash to purchase the content I can't,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

New: Links and Resources

2010-09-19T20:09:00.002-07:00

Underneath the banner at the top of my blog, there's now two tabs: "Home", and "Links and Resources". Links and Resources is exactly what it sounds like--a page of links and resources, with a short review for each of them. It's very small right now, but I plan to add to it as I come across useful sites. I don't intend for the Links and Resources page to be a comprehensive directory, but more a list of my most often-used sites (so I don't have to fish for them in my favorites list ;-D ). Enjoy!

"Requisition"

2010-05-18T20:36:00.003-07:00

For a larger picture and content credits, go to http://www.sharecg.com/v/41561/3D-and-2D-Art/Requisition This is my first Poser art render. Boy, was it a mess! This was one of those projects that took on a life of its own.

It all started when I found the Shadow Dancer outfit (the clothing worn by the blue alien lady) for free download on DAZ. It practically screamed "sci-fi space pirate" to me, so I made an alien with V4 to wear it. I photoshopped a V4 texture blue (and added the shoulder tatoo) and gave her red hair just for fun. She also has a custom face shape, although it's not visible in this photo.

So I had Alien Lady, and then I got the bright idea to give her a spaceport. And then I decided I needed to put a mechanic or two in the spaceport. And then I decided to have Alien Lady intimidating a terrified little green man*. And then I decided to add an angry but helpless spaceport owner into the mix... When all was said and done I had five characters in what's probably my largest Poser scene yet. I learned that five high-res characters and a set provided about as many polygons as the dinky little CyberComputer could handle.

Posing the scene was only half the battle. Once I had everyone where I needed them, I had to render it. My first render attempt rotated the shadows by 90 degrees. My next render attempt had strange black spaces all over the scene. The attempt after that took so long I had to cancel it and go to bed (yes, Cyberwoman sleeps, believe it or not). Finally, I let the CyberComputer sit undisturbed for four hours today and it spit out the above image. I'm pretty happy with it!

*More about the aliens: I was going for something that, given a sighting by a hysterical half-asleep human, could have been mistaken for the traditional teardrop-headed, big-eyed "little green man". I used Aiko 3 and Hiro 3 with their included textures, and simply set the diffuse color of the Poser material to green. I modeled the antennae in Wings 3d.

New content, coming soon!

2010-05-12T21:12:00.003-07:00

Title says it all--I'm starting work on a cocktail attire package for Victoria 4. I thought that maybe I'd be motivated to finish it faster if I logged my progress here :-D I'll be posting pictures as I finish each part of the package, too!

Right now I'm planning to include a dress, a pair of shoes, a purse, and a necklace/earrings set. (Maybe I'll add a bracelet if I'm not sick of modeling by the time I finish everything else.) The actual modeling on the dress is halfway finished. Of course, once I finish the modeling, I still have to UV map it (more on that when I actually do it) and rig it. And then I have to make up all the other items. I'm optimistically hoping to have it on Content Paradise by the end of the month, but who knows when it will actually get finished:-D

It's me again (with content!)

2010-05-09T19:52:00.003-07:00

Yes, I've posted twice today. Because my CyberComputer and I are just that awesome ;-D I have one more content item, this one free: http://www.sharecg.com/v/41330/Poser/Morphs-for-G2F-Tank-Leotard. It's an injection pose to load Endomorph, Ectomorph, and Mesomorph morphs into my Tank Leotard (part of my Workout Wear collection) so the leotard has morphs to match the G2 body morphs.

Why did I sit down and make this morph pack all of a sudden? Well, I downloaded the Morphing Clothing software by Dimension 3d off Content Paradise today. It is so easy--I spent a few minutes looking for the buttons and menus I needed, but once I found everything, it automatically created the leotard morphs in less than two seconds. I'm not kidding. If you have clothing that you want to put morphs in (like me), and/or you hate modeling morphs (like me), and/or you have an issue with wasting time on tedious tasks that could be better done by computers (like me), then you need this plugin!

Hairy Situation, part II

2010-05-09T17:11:00.004-07:00

New Poser hair! New Poser hair! CYBERWOMAN HAS CREATED A NEW POSER HAIR!!!

Okay, sorry for the over-enthusiastic announcement. My Hairstick Bun for Victoria 4 is live on Content Paradise, and I can't help but be proud of myself :-D http://www.contentparadise.com/productdetails.aspx?id=13898 When I first got Victoria, I swore that I would never make content for her because she had enough already. Money talks, I guess ;) Really, though, there's not much like this hair available(at least, available through CP). DAZ has lots of nice hair for Victoria, but it tends to be kind of expensive.

I'm hoping to make alternate textures and hairsticks for this hair periodically; you'll find them on ShareCG and the Content Paradise freebies, and listed here of course.

Cyberwoman is on Content Paradise!

2010-04-28T19:11:00.002-07:00

Today I uploaded my first ever for-sale content onto the internet: http://www.contentparadise.com/productDetails.aspx?id=13789 It's kind of scary to send something out for people to buy! I know I've uploaded my freebies, but I feel like selling content is on a completely different level from throwing freebies across the net. If I'm selling content, I actually have to worry about providing a good value for my price :-D Here's to good sales! Actually, I ought to rephrase that, seeing as how right now I'm happy if I sell anything at all: here's to sales, period!

Sydney and Victoria are friends now!

2010-04-27T19:18:00.002-07:00

Sydney and Vicky have finally gotten over the bickering that's been dividing my runtime. After finding English Bob's render of Posette and an earlier model Victoria burying the hatchet (http://www.morphography.uk.vu/show.php?pic=PosettevVictoria.jpg), they thought that a similar ritual would be the perfect way to honor their new friendship. This was the result: http://www.sharecg.com/v/41104/3D-and-2D-Art/Sydney-and-Victoria-4-Bury-the-Hatchet

Okay, so maybe that didn't go as well as they (and I) hoped it would. But, hey, at least it's a first step, right?

A hairy situation!

2010-04-25T14:14:00.003-07:00

Cyberwoman's freebie portfolio grows by one item! I made this ballet bun hairstyle in my trusty Hair Designer plugin this morning, and uploaded it to ShareCG: http://www.sharecg.com/v/41049/Poser/Ballet-Bun-hair-for-Aiko-3 It's a touched-up version of the hair Aiko 3 has on in my avatar (find me on ShareCG or the philc.net forums to see it). I threw that bun together for a 80x80 icon; it served its purpose but the head was shaped a little strangely. On this one I took the time to make a custom morph for it so it looks more realistic.

And in my other hairy situation, my hair inspired by the Content Paradise preview image (see my last post) is coming along... not exactly smooth sailing, but it's coming along. It should be on ShareCG in... well, I'd say a couple of weeks, but who knows when I'll actually get it done. So I'll rephrase that: It will get done when it gets done :D

Inactive websites: a rant.

2010-04-20T21:45:00.002-07:00

So I'm browsing Content Paradise and I come across a Poser scene of a graphic design studio. Yeah, okay, it's a cool set. Maybe the sort of place I'd like to purchase some day for my Poser people to work in--actually, I wouldn't mind working in it myself. But really what caught my attention was the hair on the figure in the promotional images. It's perfect for a render I want to make! Only problem is, I don't know where it comes from. The images credited the creator of the hair, but didn't tell you where to download it. So, like any smart woman of the new millenium, I get on Google to find out where to get it.

I search. And I search. I find five or six pictures rendered with it, but no download link. I keep searching. I wade through 24 pages of Google results, and finally figure out that it's no longer available. Which brings me to a major frustration in my search for content: broken links.

From my searches, the heyday of free content appears to have been in the time of Poser 3/4 (sadly, I was not yet working with computer graphics at this time). Most of the small content sites are really, really old. (Well, relatively speaking. I am well aware that the Internet itself is a fairly new phenomenon.) Google turns up lots of old resource lists, which provide tempting links to content sites... which are no longer on the web. That's right, I think "This sounds like what I'm looking for!" and then click on the link, only to be greeted with my Internet provider's cheerful "Http://ALL The Poser Content You NeedDOT COM cannot be found." Yeah, awesome.

When faced with a problem, I like to do something about it. So I'm considering having a links list of my own. It would be all places that I've downloaded from, and all links that are active as of the past couple of months. Do I actually have time to do this? I'm not sure, but it's worth a thought.

Oh, and that hair I wanted? I've finally accepted that I'm going to have to model it myself. Look for it on ShareCG (and posted here, of course) in the next couple of weeks.

Another Poser freebie!

2010-04-02T16:40:00.003-07:00

Sydney wanted some new workout clothes for her digital-yoga class. I said, "Why not?" A few days of modeling later, and this is what I came up with: http://www.sharecg.com/v/40605/Poser/Workout-Wear-for-the-G2-Females (modeled by Sydney below). Just a basic leotard and capri pants set, perfect for dance, yoga, jogging, biking, playing tennis, or any other exercise that she feels like doing.

Cyberwoman's the proud creator of a Poser freebie!

2010-03-17T16:18:00.003-07:00

Poor Sydney. I just passed her over for a potential illustration series I'm casually planning (i.e. maybe I'll get it done eventually) in favor of Victoria, since Victoria fits in the free clothing I want to use. Although Sydney understood my reasoning, she was naturally quite disappointed. Now she keeps bringing me thumbnails of clothing for her from Content Paradise. Finally I told her that those clothes cost money I don't have, and if she wanted them she would have to make a Content Paradise or Renderosity store and sell some of her other clothes. She said she had to think about that a while. In the meantime, though, she agreed that I could offer some of her old clothes as a freebie so that other Sydney figures wouldn't be in the same situation she was. This was the result: http://www.sharecg.com/v/40324/Poser/Spellcaster-Outfit-for-the-G2-Females

This outfit was probably the first presentable-looking item of clothing I made. (While I would love to claim that it was my first Poser clothing ever [that's just how talented I am! :D] I actually struggled through several disasters before I figured out how to do this.) Sadly, I just don't do a lot of fantasy/medieval-styled renders (I'm more of a sci-fi/action girl) so it hasn't been used since I made it. Before I could share it with someone else, I had to tweak the modeling a bit and re-rig it; this was originally made when I was still trying to find my way around Wings 3D and the OBJ2CR2 plugin and there were some tolerable but pesky flaws.

See you around, Spellcaster outfit. You were a lot of fun to make, and I hope someone will have as much fun using you!

And Sydney, are you happy now?!?

Cyberwoman's first tutorial!

2010-03-08T21:04:00.001-07:00

That's right--I've written my first tutorial! It's instructions for modeling a pair of basic yoga pants in Wings 3D for a Poser figure: http://www.sharecg.com/v/40119/PDF-Tutorial/Modeling-for-Poser-in-Wings-3D:-Basic-Pants

I've never been able to find very many good Wings tutorials for clothing. (Why, I ask, must most of the promising links be broken?!? *shouts dramatically* Why?!) Most of what I know about modeling clothing in Wings, I've figured out by myself. And yes, I've had some spectacular failures along the way. But after my recent successes with modeling Aiko's wardrobe, I realized two things: one, I can no longer call myself a "newbie modeler". Two, now that I'm no longer a "newbie modeler", I ought to be doing my part to provide the tutorials I keep complaining about the absence of :-D I hope this tutorial is just the first of many to come!

There's a green-eyed monster lurking in Cyberwoman's runtime!

2010-03-04T20:48:00.006-07:00

Sydney: Can you believe it, Kelvin? The new girl's got heaps of free content, and realistic pose presets, and her secret agent suit is cooler than mine! This is just not fair.

Victoria: Cyberwoman! I need my makeup texture, but Sydney won't give me the directions to the Materials folder.

Cyberwoman: *groan* Can't the two of you just get along?!?

I downloaded the Victoria 4.2 figure from DAZ (http://www.daz3d.com/) a few weeks ago, played with her a bit, and then decided I didn't want to use her. To start with, she's insanely complicated. (DAZ, hasn't anyone ever told you to KISS?) I've heard that she crashes Poser systems sometimes; I haven't experienced this but I'll make a note of saving her projects frequently.

But really, I'm willing to jump through a lot of hoops to use a figure I like. My main problem with the base V4.2 figure is that she's not very attractive. In my opinion, her base body shape is not as realistic as the shapes of other figures (such as the Smith Micro G2 series). I also don't care for her default texture--isn't her skin a little dark for auburn eyebrows? And what is up with that faux bikini? A blog I read said it looked like Victoria was allergic to her laundry detergent and developed a rash; I agree wholehartedly.

So I ignored the Victoria figure for a few more weeks. But eventually I couldn't ignore the content--much of it free--that is made for her. I wanted to use those clothes, darn it! I'd also seen some renders of Victoria that I really liked, so I started to look for ways to make my model more attractive. Eventually I figured out that to really use Victoria, you need the morph pack and seperate textures.

Perhaps I've been spoiled by Smith Micro's figure series. I expect a figure to come pre-loaded with morphs, a nice texture, and maybe an outfit or two if the creators are feeling generous. Victoria is posted as "free" but then I've discovered that I need to purchase morphs and textures if I want to do anything impressive with her. I grudgingly bought the morph pack and I found a really nice character (texture and morph) free at http://www.sharecg.com/. (By the way, if you're looking for freebies, Share CG is an awesome site.) I don't intend to mess with Victoria's Aiko 4 add-on since I have Aiko 3, which I love, but I think for a second realistic character Victoria will be worth the effort.

Or will she?

Sydney: Why does Victoria get the cool headset microphone prop?

Victoria: Sydney! I saw you messing around in my wardrobe folder. Mind telling me where the geometry file for my handgun holster is?

Cyberwoman: Will the two of you cut it out?! We have renders to make!

Aiko holds a conference with two of her very closest friends...

2010-02-28T21:13:00.008-07:00

Or perhaps they're a set of non-identical triplets? On second thought, maybe it's just one Aiko and a couple of clones.

I've been on a modeling rampage for the past week or so, and my Aiko 3 figure has reaped the benefits. In this picture, all shoes, the black top, the dress, the updo hairstyle, and the tiara are my creations. I also made a pair of earrings (not visible in this rendering) and set the materials for the unitards worn by the left and center ladies.

All the shoes were made with PhilC's Shoe Designer plugin. It is so easy to use, I don't know how I ever made shoes without it. Actually, come to think of it, I didn't. I never could get shoes to look right when I modeled them from scratch. I'm not entirely satisfied with the backs of the silver flats, but they're mostly hidden under the skirt. The toes look great and that's all that matters ;-)

The top and the dress were both modeled in Wings 3D and made into conforming clothing with the OBJ2CR2 plugin. I started with a cylinder primitive for both of them--that's a little unusual for me because I usually start with a cube. After making these, I think that the cylinder is easier for objects roughly shaped like a single tube (i.e. corset-inspired tops and sleeveless dresses) but a cube is easier for objects that have protruding parts like pants or anything with sleeves. I modeled and rigged the dress in a single evening; that is my fastest item of clothing yet and yes, I am very proud of myself :-D It has an extra bone in the skirt to allow the dress to bend in the knee area. I'm still not sure how to make it bend on one side only--for example if Aiko kicked a foot up, bending one knee--but she can sit in it without incident.

For the hair, I used the Hair Designer plugin. (Yes, I use the plugins a lot. Really, I just love it when I can get computers to do my dirty work for me :-D) It can use the Hair Designer texture maps or maps from Aiko 3's Mitsu hair (worn in this image by the brunette). I'm planning to use both hairstyles in a video, where I want a single character to have her hair down in some scenes but up in others, so I needed to make sure I could make them match.

The tiara is another Wings product. I started with a torus, from which I chopped out a segment in the back. It has a blue stone in the front, which is not easily visible in the image. The earrings are a construction of primitives (ball and toruses [tori?]) from Poser. I tried to make them in Wings, but I couldn't figure out how to make the torus prop as thin as I wanted it to be. Then I tried to export them as an obj from Poser and open them in Wings for fine-tuning, but Wings wouldn't load them. Maybe they're too small? I don't know, and in the end I just did them in Poser.

Sydney went to the salon!

2010-01-26T20:41:00.009-07:00

After a few days of playing around, my Sydney G2 figure recieved two new hairstyles: a basic ponytail, and a short-ish style that is labeled on my computer, appropriately enough, "Sydney short-ish hair":). Both these styles were made with the PhilC Hair Designer plugin. The plugin no longer crashes Poser when I try to export the hair file, but now I'm having trouble with it tacking the base figure onto the exported hair. Not what it's supposed to do! However, since I'm just making simple prop hair, I've been able to delete the base figure and export the hair prop just fine.

While making the short style, it took me some time to get used to manipulating the plugin's hair pieces. By the time I was finished, I think I was getting pretty good at it, though! The trickiest part was near the back of the head, where I had to get four or five hair pieces to taper smoothly and fit together. (The hair pieces I was using are pretty wide, and seeing as how Sydney doesn't have a square head, they have to taper to fit around her [very round] head.)

The ponytail was perhaps the easiest thing I have ever made in Poser. It took me less than an hour to arrange everything, export the final hair prop, and apply the materials.

And Cyberwoman's most recent project is a...

2010-01-06T15:49:00.003-07:00

...success! Two days ago I purchased the Hair Designer plugin for Poser from www.philc.net. After two days of experimenting with it obsessively, I created the hair you see here for the Poser 6 Jessica figure. (No, the picture is not me :-D)

The hair creation process was easy enough once I got the hang of working with the program. I did have some trouble getting the plugin to make the final hair figure, though. Poser crashed every time I tried to export prop or conforming-figure hair through the plugin, and I ended up using Poser to export a .obj file of the hair, reloading it, and using the OBJ2CR2 plugin (also from PhilC) to make conforming-figure hair. Parts of it get a little screwy when the figure moves, but I'm quite satisfied with it for my first attempt!

Next projects: shoes for P6 Jessica, hair for DAZ Aiko 3

So I might as well introduce myself...

2010-01-04T20:16:00.003-07:00

Hello. I'm Cyberwoman, a computer-generated graphics enthusiast. As the blog description says, this blog contains records of my graphics projects, probably both the successes and the failures. Along the way, I'm going to have plenty of pictures, spin-off ideas, and the occasional tutorial. Enjoy!

My animating/rendering engine: Poser 7
My 3D modeler: Wings3D
My photo editor/paint shop program: Adobe Photoshop Elements