Everything is Illuminated... and UV Mapping

Tonight we went out for sushi to a cool little place in Emeryville which was nice. I didn't even know it was here so it was definitely worth checking out. I got a "Philadelphia Roll" which was a pretty hilarious sushi roll, it was essentially the famous Jewish meal Bagels and Lox (Bagels, Cream Cheese and Smoked Salmon), but in Sushi form?!??! Haha it was so weird, it was a roll of sushi with cream cheese and salmon in it, (don't think it was smoked salmon, but close enough), haha it was hilarious AND tasty.

A bunch of my friends from work came with and after getting food we headed back to watch a movie called "Everything is Illuminated" which was fantastic. It was very good, the music was weird and very well fitting to the story, and it was a very serious story with some really funny sections. I was really impressed and it's kindof interesting, the boy in the film (Elijah Wood) goes to the Ukraine to try to find a lady who helped his Jewish grandfather during the war. It was a very sweet story and some cool twists and unexpected things happened too. The overall story was very interesting and also a bit motivating for my travels too. I googled my last name once and found out that there were some Jutans in Lithuania, which is around the Ukraine area in Eastern Europe. I was actually thinking of adding Lithuania to my travel list to check out the area where some Jutans may have originally been from. Very cool. I think I have a lot of places to go already, but it's a cool possibility anyway!!

Work was sweet today, and I am in the land of UV Mapping. Sorry I can't talk about any of the details, but it's pretty darn cool stuff right now. I wrote the Automatic Mapping for Maya 7.0 when at Alias and I actually needed to use it today!! Haha it was cool because the manipulator for the Automatic Mapping tool is an example of the first OpenGL code I ever wrote. :)

A cool article I found that mentions the Maya 7 Automatic Mapping feature...
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3282&page=2

Maya's Automatic Mapping method is best suited to UV mapping of flat-sided objects is also greatly improved: You can now manipulate the mapping planes used by Maya like other geometric shapes to change the angle or alignment of projections on the various planes of a surface.

Awesome!! So that was pretty exciting and it looks like I'll be working with the Sets Shading team now for a bit doing a whole bunch of UV Mapping, although I am still officially on the Sets Modeling team. This is super awessssoome!!!!!!!!!! Anyhow, sorry I have to be super vague, I can't talk about the details until the movie comes out.

I guess that's about it for tonight, had a great time with my friends from work tonight, they are totally awesome.