Another rendering

This was the third and final submission for this model. This was my first project using a renderer that does global illumination, and was complicated by the fact that it had to be presentation board size, at print resolution. I simplified the process by breaking up the image into light groups. I used Blender for modeling, the GIMP for compositing and texture synthesis, and Inkscape for a few patterns. It was rendered with Yafaray.

A high resolution version and some process images are in this Picasa album.

New Broadcast

Gratuitous Space Battles

Brutal Legend Gameplay

Edit: Here's a short vid about the game's art-direction.

Americana

Such a parade of people makes me wonder aloud about Bush voters. Perhaps it's true that they were made up of the top five-percent of income and the bottom fifty-percent of intelligence. What does that mean for my deeply held egalitarian beliefs? Why is it safe to assume that this man does not support health care reform?
Link. (NSFW)

Jason Scott on Mario 64 & Life

I apologize for my absence. I was up against a deadline through August and early September. I have a few posts queued up, but first something I saw last night that amused me greatly. I've been enjoying computer historian Jason Scott's BBS documentary because of the fascinating cross-section of the population it shows. Here he is giving a impassioned talk about a game that I am certainly nostalgic about. Link, via the Internet Archive.

Charles Manson says sep 11 was an inside job

TRON legacy

oh yeah, they made it alright.



EDIT: Cleaned that up a bit for you. - Mr. Alex

The First World War

This is the most comprehensive and insightful documentary about World War I I've ever been exposed to, and it's left me in a emotional and conceptual storm. I watched it while I was also listening to an unabridged audio book of version of The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History. I can't help but think that in the confluence of these two works there are a number of deadly important lessons for all of us; I just can't put to words what those lessons are.

It's Always Morning in America, Except When it's Not...

"The US economy is now dying a slow and painful death because it had become based on activities that had nothing to do with producing real wealth. Instead, it became dependent on rackets, that is, behavior geared to getting something for nothing. These rackets are often summarized under the acronym FIRE (for finance, insurance and real estate), a system set up to strip-mine profits from the wish commonly labeled "the American Dream" -- itself largely a product of televised advertising and propaganda. The end product of all that was the doomed economy of suburban sprawl, an infrastructure for daily life with no future in a world defined by fossil fuel scarcity. The unraveling of debt at every level now is directly related to the mis-investments made in that way of life..."