Waiting for class

It's about 9:45am and I'm in one of the computer labs at school waiting for my Pure Math class to start. I came to school pretty early today to chat with my Graphics Professor about my ideas for my final Project. He was really awesomely helpful so that was great, and he has an excellent idea about how long some of the objectives should take me which is great because I really have no idea how much time I should need for all of these things. Looks like we narrowed down the list a bit, and he replaced some of the things that were all sort of one objective (modeling in Maya, OBJ importing and the Final Scene) with some things that are not too complicated like Translucent materials and perhaps Glossy Reflections if I have time. Those don't sound super complicated so that should work out better I think. He told me that I can replace the Spatial Subdivision objective with something easier if I don't think I'll have time for it, so that's pretty good too. Should be an exciting project to do and I should learn a lot of stuff so I think it'll be really good once I am done all of this work.

Anyway it's getting closer to class so I better get headed over there soon.

Busy Midterm times

Hey everyone,

Things are super busy lately, after getting back from Toronto I saw off my friend Angie who is heading to New Zealand for a year. It's sad to see her off but I am sure she is going to have a really amazing time on her trip, and it's really a great time for her to be taking time to travel. So that's great!

Otherwise I have been studying an insane amount. I have some big Midterms coming up and I had an easy one tonight (History) which was no worries. There is lots going on and as well as studying a ton (like 12 hours yesterday just for Graphics!!), I also started my Raytracer and was having a bit of a fret about that. I am sure it'll be fine, but it's hard to put in lots of time for that while Midterms are going on. We also have to specify our Final Project for Graphics, so I need to come up with a bunch of Objectives that I am going to do in my Extended Raytracer before I've written my first Raytracer!! Crazy, but my Professor is really awesome and said I should come talk to him during his office hours and we'll talk about some of the details and he can let me know if my list sounds too hard or if it sounds manageable in the time we will have to do this.

My sister is doing her Grad Defense tomorrow which is amazing, so she will be a Masters Graduate very soon!! Cool eh!!

So yes, things are very busy and I've had a couple of kinda stressful days, but I am working through it and I think things should work out pretty well as they always do. :)

Dave Matthews - "Sister"

This may finally be undeniable truth that Dave Matthews is the best musician of all time. This song is AMAZING, and Dave Matthews played it at the concert this week in Toronto.

Dave Matthews - "Sister" Lyrics

Passing time with you in mind
It's another quiet night
Feel the ground against my back
Count the stars against the black

Think about another day
Wishing I was far away
Wherever I dreamed I was
You were there with me

(Chorus)
Sister, I hear you laugh
My heart fills full up
Keep me please
Sister, when you cry
I feel your tears
Running down my face
Sister, sister, keep me

I hope you always know it's true
I would never make it through
You could make the sun go down
Just by walking away

Playing like we used to play
Like it would never go away
I feel you beating in my chest
I’d be dead without

(Chorus)
Sister, I hear you laugh
My heart fills full up
Keep me please
Sister, when you cry
I feel your tears
Running down my face
Sister, sister, you keep me

I hope you always know it’s true
I would never make it through
You could make the heavens fall
Just by walking away

(Chorus)
Sister, I hear you laugh
My heart fills full up
Keep me please
Sister, when you cry
I feel your tears
Running down my face
Sister, sister, you keep me

Chillin' with some graduated homeys

Tonight was cool, I finally did my Canadian taxes and unfortunately it looks like I won't be getting back any of the taxes that I paid in the USA but oh well, not a big deal, it wasn't too much so it's all good.

Then I went out to a bar with some friends who had just graduated today. They were all really excited and said they couldn't really believe they were done, that's awesome.

So yeah awesome times, but also sad times as my friend Angie is going to New Zealand for a year and it is going to be sad that she is going to be away for so long. I think it's going to be really nuts to graduate as everyone is going to move to a different city and stuff and it'll be really sad to move on from all the nice people I've met here. Well thank goodness I've still got a little while yet before I have to get sad about that stuff. :)

Good times tonight and we are having a surprise party for Angie tomorrow, hehe but she said tonight that several people have already given it away so it's not really a surprise anymore. Hehe should be awesome though, and going to hang with some awesome Dons and Don-related homeys tomorrow night, they are always a fun bunch.

Almost finished some Fine Arts work

Today I spent a bunch of time getting together some renders for Fine Arts, this is starting to look pretty good and finally I've got a wood texture for the table directly from a photograph I took, and I think it looks much better and I hope my Prof likes it. :)

Here are some of the older images and then descriptions of what I changed to make it look better. I fixed some finer details like the Pop Can had too much specular highlight, and the depth-of-field was way too much in some of the old images. I think I am getting much closer now with these and hopefully I should have some final images soon!!


Old texture on the table

Fixed now with a decent UV mapping

Old image with too much specular highlight on the Pop Can

Fixed and looking better now

Another shot with pop can up close

Same shot with different depth-of-field

Main table image, with new wood UV mapping

Up close and personal, focused on the bigger glass

Focus on the front glass

Focus on the Pop Can

Toronto is awesome

Having a great time in Toronto, I went to the Eaton Centre today and got a nice shirt from RW & Co., good times. I have been working full-tilt for the last 2 weeks so it was nice to take a good solid break. Now I'm hangin' with Alex for a bit, I went to Alias yesterday to hang out with some old friends too. There is a new Autodesk sign up where the Alias sign used to be, and where the Alias|Wavefront sign used to be before that. :)

I brought my computer with me so I am going to do some Fine Arts this afternoon before meeting up with my buddy Kristjan who is driving us back to Waterloo.

I was going to borrow Alex's Wacom Tablet but it's a serial or PS/2 port, not a USB, and I actually don't have a serial OR a PS/2 port on my new laptop. Crazy!! So I guess I am going to just have to buy one, probably a good excuse to get one anyway. :)

Dave Matthews was freakin' awesome last night, check out the set list that I posted in my post last night. My favourites were probably Bartender cause it was like 20 min long and awesome, and the new song that they debuted last night, which is called Break Away, it rocccccccccckked!! Also Dave Matthews played a song on his own at the end called Sister and it is so amazing and heartfelt and fantastic. Best musician... ever!!!!!!!!!!! So as usual the Dave Matthews Band continues to rock so very, very fierce.

Dave Matthews Band in Toronto

Hi friends,

I'm rockin' out in Toronto for a few days and it is totally sweet!!
I am using Alex's super special keyboard to type this so it's realty hard and taking a while!! Haha this is nuts.

Anyway, tonight I went to my 6th or 7th Dave Matthews concert and as expected, it was totally awesome!! Here is the set list from tonight!!

Tuesday Jun 13 2006
Ontario Place - Molson Amphitheatre

Grey Street *
Pig *
Crash Into Me
Louisiana Bayou *
What Would You Say
Big Eyed Fish *
Bartender *
So Much To Say *
Too Much *
The Idea Of You [New Song] *
Everyday *
Break Free [Live Debut] *
Hunger For The Great Light *
Dreaming Tree *
Tripping Billies *
__________________

Sister [Dave Solo]
Dancing Nancies *
Stay *

Show Notes:
* Rashawn Ross on Trumpet

It was really amazing and they played a brand new song called Break Free that they have never played live before, crazy, eh?! Matisyahu opened and 3/4 of the crowd were Jewish so that was totally sweet too.

Well it's late and I have a serious day of shopping and eating for tomorrow so I better get to sleep! Cheers!!

Trailer for Summer 2007 Disney Pixar film Ratatouille

I went to see Cars again today and again, it was totally awesome. Man I love it. Hehe anyway if you haven't seen it yet, before the movie you get to see the trailer for the next Disney Pixar feature film, which is called Ratatouille, and comes out next Summer (2007).

Some of the tools I wrote at Pixar were used for this movie!!

Check out the trailer here: http://www.ratatouille.com enjoy!!
Check out the knives at the end of the trailer - Jake did those!

Graphics Assignment 3 (OpenGL Puppet) Done!

It was another long day but totally awesome and super successful. It was GREAT!! I was in the lab from about 3pm until about Midnight, and then came home, watched 20 minutes of SNL and then worked on this again for another 2 hours. :)

I got EVERYTHING done that I wanted to do, ohhh baby this was a sweet assignment!! So I now have a working "Puppet" in OpenGL, and you can select many of his joints (leg, knee, foot, shoulder, elbow, wrist, fingers, neck and head) and rotate them with the motion of the mouse.


Word!!

The puppet's arm, leg, neck etc joints turn green when you select them

Today I did a few extra things, I added some cool headphones so he can rock out. Also I named him iPinocchio, cause my Dad said that would be a cool name for an iPod puppet. :) Most importantly, I got the iPod "scroll menu" to work!! I couldn't figure it out for hours tonight, and I was trying to do all this fancy multiple-display list kinda stuff. It was NUTS. So I temporarily gave up on it, and biked home, watched some SNL, ate some food and I was right back to it. I figured out the problems and now I am essentially mapping the x-motion of the mouse to a "fake" puppet joint directly above the iPod primitive geometric object. I then do a bunch of special case stuff like not changing the colour of the iPod when you select this special iPod joint and then also not applying the rotations from this joint since these rotations are used to specify which menu item the user wants to scroll to!! Good times!!!!!!!!!! I also use multiple display lists for this, so I actually have 6 separate iPods which I swap out by loading a different display list.

The reeeeeeally funny/awesome thing is that when you reset the joints in the program to their initial position, the iPod menu returns to it's initially selected menu item too!! This is pretty funny and was unexpected until I realized I just implemented the iPod Scroll Menu selection just like I did the regular iPod joints, so it just works out this way. Awesome!!

Anyway, great times and I love this class. But I gotta hand this in now and get some of my other work done as there is plenty I need to do for other classes as well. Sweeeeeeeet!!


Lower quality with starting camera position

Haha an error I ran into with Display Lists while trying to get the menu items to scroll, haha

Menu 1

Menu 2

Menu 3

Menu 4

Menu 5

Menu 6

Disney/Pixar "Cars" Premieres tonight!!

Tonight it the Premiere of the new Pixar film, "Cars" wahoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I went to see it tonight (of course!!) It was totally awesome and since the trailer ran before the movie I can now mention Pixar's next film! It is called Ratatouille, and watch for the amazing trailer that runs before Cars. My buddy Jake made the deformers for the knives at the end of the trailer!!

It was awesome to see it again with all my friends here and to hear their impressions. Everyone loved the story and the quality of the movie, and it's really really great to hear this from people who are seeing the movie for the first time. I am definitely going to see it again soon and probably again next week. Ohhh I love it.

Anyway it's kinda late, and as you might imagine from my posts, I have been going to bed way too late this past week, so I am going to do some reading and get to bed a bit earlier tonight (hehe it's only 3am, so it's earlier than usual I suppose) hehe good times.

So yes, if you get a chance, check out "Cars" - it'll be worth every penny.

More OpenGL Character Design

This afternoon and evening I spent a bunch of time doing more work on my OpenGL Puppet and I added arms joints, fingers and the character's head with eyes, eye lids, nose, and a cool sideways hat. Haha it's going really well and I am really enjoying this part of the assignment!!

I think I am going to give him some headphones, and I need to make his legs as well. This class is so awesome!!


Hehe, a little iPod menu modifications in Photoshop :)

Texture Mapped iPod menu onto my iPod primitive in OpenGL

Hehe, now come the scary character arms

Added head, eyes, eye lids, nose, sideways hat

Better closeup

Wrote some Geometric Primitives, started OpenGL model

I did so MUCH graphics today, it was AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am mostly done the assignment except for a few details at the end, so instead of finishing those I decided to start doing the modeling on the character itself. For this assignment we have to design a character in OpenGL, using only primitives that we have created and added to the LUA spec for the code. This is totally sweet and fun and awesome, so I went fierce on it tonight.

After finishing the code that does picking and allows the user to select one object at a time to add to a "selection list", I then started coding up some new Geometric Primitives!! I got lots done and this is great as it gives me many more "tools" to work with now that I've started the model itself. I made a sphere, half-sphere, a disk, a partial disk, a cylinder (and therefore a cone), a torus and a half-torus. After building all of these and adding to the LUA spec I then started my OpenGL model!! I am building an iPod-shaped character, and it is going really well so far. Check it out and please let me know what you think so far!! This is sooooooooooo fun to do and soooooooooooooooo awesome, I love this class!!


Sphere drawn with GL_QUAD_STRIPs

Half-sphere

Flat 2D disk

Flat 2D disk with different inner radius

Flat 2D disk with varied sweeping angle

Cylinder

Cylinder with one end radius at 0, so it's a cone

Torus

Torus with more facets, less detail

Half-torus

Half torus with high detail

The start of my iPod character!!!

Rounded corners

Starting to look SWEET now

Added a screen, I'll texture map this later

Got some decent Graphics stuff done tonight

Tonight I got some sweet Graphics work done, after having a couple of days of frustrating hardware-related programming errors which were totally NUTS!! On Sunday, I wasted most of the day trying to get an image to display in my OpenGL viewport. Nothing was visible, and I must have commented in and out every single line trying to get it to work. :) Haha it was totally crazy. After trying this for hours and my kind roommates reading through all of my code and still not finding any errors, I thought, "Hey, why don't I submit this to the school machine, ssh into there and see if it magically works there for some unknown reason!!" Haha and if I hadn't tried that, I might have continued to comment in and out for another 5 hours, haha. Ohhh man!!!

So the problem turned out to be that there is some difference between the OpenGL implementation on NVIDIA and ATI cards running under Linux. Since I am running Ubuntu, I think I am using some random open source Linux Video Card driver, and I have heard that the ATI drivers can be flaky at times. Turns out that for some reason, when I used the glMultMatrixTransposed(matrix) command, my Ubuntu Linux didn't understand this and draw nothing (or random figures) on the screen. I thought this might be because my camera was inside my objects, or because of a lighting problem but this was the only issue. By switching from glMultiMatrixTranspose to glMultMatrixd(matrix.transpose()) this completely fixed the problem. Crazy!! So it ended up working when I ssh'd into school so I figured it was some issue with my local machine, and it was.

Hehe so you think I might learn from this right??! Hehe well folks again I made the same mistake tonight of assuming that my hardware was correct, and assuming that if it wasn't then ssh'ing into the school would solve my problems. :) I had the image appearing, but when I switched from just drawing the spheres normally to using a glDisplayList, the final sphere I drew did not have a material attached to it! Crazy eh?! So this was a decently big problem as I couldn't figure out why it was missing the last material, and after several hours of trying lots of different things, then I tried to ssh into school and it still looked incorrect.

Turns out that Matt's old assignment also looked like this on my machine at home, so after class tonight I went to the Graphics Lab and it turns out that it WAS my machine acting up AGAIN!! :) It looked just fine on the Graphics Lab machines with and without the glDisplayList, so I uncommented it at home and I was finally past these hardware issues. Crazy!! So tonight I actually finally got some decent work done for Graphics, I did the translation commands for the root node of the hierarchical model that I am going to build, using the mouse motion to map to the translation amount. Good times!!

So it's 3:30 again and tomorrow I meet my Fine Arts Prof again to show him my new stuff. I hope he likes it, and I will post the final images once he decides they are done.


Hierarchical Modeling working in OpenGL

Sweet!! Translation on all 3 axes mapped to mouse motion

One step closer for Fine Arts

Today I spent a whole bunch of time on Graphics trying to track down an issue which ended up being a silly ATI vs. NVIDIA video card issue. I finally got that sorted out this evening and then switched back to Fine Arts. I got 2 of my final images fixed up and I think these are done or close to it, I'll show my Prof these this week. The pop can looks a lot better now that I found a real pop can logo, stretched it a bit to make it fit and mapped it onto the can. Sweeet!


New render of Image 1 with thinner, shiny wood table, coca cola can

Image 3, slightly different angle, coca cola can

Coca Cola image mapping onto can

Wahoo!! Now it finally looks like a real pop can!

Been reading Josh Braff's book, and it ROCKS

Yes, Mike Jutan is actually making time to read a book for fun at University!!!! I usually have so much work to do that this isn't really possible, but this term I have a much nicer balance than usual. It's going really well and I am finding that I actually have some time for the stuff I never have time for... hehe if that makes sense. Either way, I am reading Josh Braff's new book called "The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green" and it is AMAZING. I will post some thoughts about it when I'm actually done it, but wow it sure is fantastically well written. You get so drawn into the book and it's characters that time just flies by and you can read like 50 pages without blinking an eye. (Well not literally, that's probably not good for your, uh, "ocular" fluids or something) Haha "ocular", I like that word. :)

Well I thought I'd give this book some props since it is really excellent and at the moment it really feels like it's about an extreme version of any Jewish family - like a super extreme version. I can relate to some parts very closely (the character Asher in the story got a present for his Bar Mitzvah that is exactly like a present I got for mine, haha it was hilarious, that must be the standard present I suppose) but some parts are just totally wild, and as you are reading it you feel really sorry for the kids and are pretty thankful that your family isn't that nuts. :)

Hehe well anyway it's great and I definitely recommend it after reading the first 3 or 4 chapters. Good times!

Now back to the world of Programming. I gotta get some more of my Graphics done today. Now I am learning how to tessellate a sphere! This is essentially the process of breaking down the 3D Spherical equation into pieces of triangles (or rectangles, in this case here), so that it can be drawn using "primitives" in OpenGL, the language I am using. Well, back to work!

Graphics, You @ Waterloo Day, Fine Arts

Lots of stuff going on lately. This afternoon and early evening I was reaaaallly lazy, since I've been working really hard over the past few days, hehe I couldn't get myself to start working on my next assignments. So that was not awesome since I wanted to get started but I just wasn't in the mood. Instead of totally wasting time, instead I watched Simpsons, ate dinner early and then did my laundry and cleaned my room!! Then I installed Skype on Linux and it seems to work well. Hehe I'm nuts - I love that I think I am being lazy if I don't come right home and start my assignments. :) Well either way, I'm glad I finally got something done tonight!!

My roommates downloaded and installed the new Ubuntu Linux yesterday (it's called "Dapper Drake" haha. Even funnier is that the version I have now is called "Breezy Badger"?!?! Random eh!!) :) Hehe gotta love Linux and it's awesomeness. Anyway Matt and Matt seem to like it and we found a bug which was funny, there was a "b" and "/b" tag around a menu tab title in a window. That's funny as those commands are used to bold and unbold text in HTML, so it must have been some sort of error that made the title display incorrectly. Or maybe the programmer got their languages confused and wrote "b" and "/b" around the tab text in an attempt to bold it, but they were writing it in some GUI language and not in HTML so it totally didn't work. Either way, that's hilarious.

Ok let's see what else is up. I met with my Fine Arts Prof today and he gave me some really good advice for my Fine Arts work that I have posted recently. He hates the tabletop, so I am going to change it. The "Jutan Cola" logo doesn't work in a few of those images that I posted, and we discussed why it doesn't work and what I should do about it. I think I am going to scan or find an image of a Sprite logo or something to that effect and use that instead as it'll look more professional and more "real" which is what I am going for.

So after all the room cleaning and Simpsons watching, I started my next Graphics Assignment. It is a puppet in OpenGL with selectable joints which you can perform rotations on and that sort of thing. It should be really cool and fun to do, and there is going to be a lot of setup and stuff before I can design the actual character though. We have pretty limited capabilities as we are creating the objects using LUA and a C++ interpreter for LUA, which is a scripting language. So after reading through some code and stuff I then went to the LUA documentation page and read that for a while to get a feel for the language. It seems a fair bit like Python, what with the total lack of curly braces and brackets around the if statements. Should be sweet. I am not sure exactly what I have decided to do for my character yet but I will post it as I am working on it!!

I might need to buy a Wacom Tablet finally. I have been looking for an excuse for a while, and now my Fine Arts Prof has given me some assignments to do in Photoshop, contour painting and stuff like that. I think it'll be a lot easier with a Wacom Tablet instead of a mouse, plus this gives me a good excuse to finally buy one of these things. :)

Tomorrow I am volunteering at the You @ Waterloo Day, it should be pretty fun and hopefully the weather is decent. I am going to probably walk kids and their parents around, these will be prospective Waterloo students who have already received their offers and are trying to decide if they want to come here for sure. It will be fun to meet these kids and let them know about my experiences here at Waterloo, good times. I will tell them to go into Co-op for sure if they have the choice cause man, Co-op rocks!!!!! :)

Well I guess that's about it. Lots of stuff going on but should be an exciting weekend. Cars premieres next Friday!!!!!!!!!!!

Final Images for Fine Arts, Round 1

Tonight I finished the 5 images for my still-life 3D project that I am going to show my Fine Arts Prof tomorrow. I made a "Jutan Cola" logo for the pop can in Photoshop and then layered it on top of a Mental Ray metal shader, and I think it looks a lot better now. I also figured out how to add Depth-Of-Field to my camera parameters, and I played around with the camera type and lens size. I am quite happy with the final images (see below after the few test images), and after I make any modifications that my Prof requests tomorrow, I'll post the final images before I print them onto Photo paper.


"Jutan Cola" logo attached as a Layered Shader with Mental Ray blue metal shader

Test with new Pop Can logo

Fixed background, fixed carpet floor

Final image #1 with Depth-of-Field, Caustics added

Final image #2

Final image #3

Final image #4

Final image #5