Cowboy Bebop Returns to Adult Swim

July 6, 2014
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Back in October, Adult Swim/Toonami lost the rights to air Cowboy Bebop (my favorite anime). Fortunately, that little problem was only temporary. Toonami announced that Cowboy Bebop will return in July, although they have not said the exact date (DirecTV does not list it next weekend).

Unfortunately, they are still expected to air the old standard definition version of the series (the HD version was released in Japan on Blu-ray last year).  That means they will probably continue to air the show without the regular end credits, which is a shame because the song, The Real Folk Blues, is a fantastic one. And the scenes shown behind the credits add important details about Spike’s past. Maybe one day Toonami will air the HD version and include the end credits again.

Calvin and Hobbes Fan Trailer

June 1, 2014
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I found this cool fan-created movie trailer for a (fake) Calvin and Hobbes movie. I loved Calvin and Hobbes as a kid (still do) and the trailer does a great job of including a lot of small details from the strip, like killer snowmen and attacking food.  The creators also posted some behind-the-scenes videos, so you can get an idea of some of the work that went into the final product.  Enjoy!

Las Vegas Aerial Photos

May 21, 2014
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I went to Las Vegas a few weeks ago for a short vacation and  flew in a helicopter for the first time. I took along my DSLR camera, which I bought a few years ago and rarely use (unfortunately), so I was able to get some pretty nice shots while up in the air. I have a Nikon D90 with a kit lens (AFS Nikkor 18-105mm, 3.5-5.6 aperture). I forced myself to use manual mode during the entire trip to get more familiar with the camera and photography, and I think it payed off with the aerial night shots.

Here are a few of the pictures I took:

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Syfy Adapting Frank Miller’s Ronin

May 7, 2014
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Syfy is adapting Frank Miller’s Ronin comic book story as a series.

I have not read Ronin, but the story sounds pretty interesting. It is about a 13th-century masterless samurai with a magical sword that is suddenly thrown into a dystopian 21st-century future, where he tries to track down and slay the demon that killed his master.

Sound familiar? It should, because it was a big part of the inspiration for Samurai Jack. The show is scheduled to air next year, so I hope I remember to check it out.

CrashPlan Cloud Backups

April 10, 2014
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I just bought a one-year subscription to CrashPlan, a cloud backup service. I am in the process of backing up 145 GB of data to their servers, which the desktop client estimates will take about 2 weeks at my current speeds.

I have used Mozy for years, ever since my brother had a massive hard drive crash and I realized that I didn’t have a good backup plan for my own data. At the time, the only real options for online backup were Mozy and Carbonite, and Mozy was a much better product. Unfortunately, over the years they have changed their plans to make it more expensive without any obvious improvements to the service to justify the price increase. When I first started using Mozy, you could back up an unlimited amount of data to their servers. Now, I have to pay extra for the 125 GB of storage they are willing to give me.

I have been hovering just below the limit for a while, purposely excluding some data so I don’t go over and have to pay even more per month. So I finally decided to look around for an alternative and found two solid options: CrashPlan and BackBlaze.  Both have excellent reviews online and it seems like you could flip a coin between them and end up with a great backup service. Both have unlimited data backups, encrypted transport, encrypted storage, and a bunch of other nice features.  And both are around $5 per month, depending on your payment plan.

My main reason for choosing CrashPlan was because it stores unlimited versions of  your files (BackBlaze only stores versions for 30 days) and some reviews said that the CrashPlan software had more advanced options.

Dan Harmon’s Story Circle

March 18, 2014
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Dan Harmon's story structure diagram, with the one-word plot points at each important step.
Dan Harmon’s story structure diagram, with the one-word plot points at each important step.

A few days ago I had a conversation about Channel101.com and found out that Dan Harmon was one of the creators of the network. I knew about Channel101.com, somehow knew that Rob Schrab was one of the creators, but never knew that Dan Harmon was involved. That conversation sparked a memory of some good articles on story structure on the Channel101.com site and, after a quick search, I found them and realized that Dan Harmon wrote them, which makes it even worse that I had no idea he was involved with the site. Oops.

The articles are a great summary of how to write good story structure. Dan Harmon distills the concepts from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces into a simple diagram. He argues that all good stories follow his diagram, whether they are epic films like The Matrix and Die Hard, television shows (following the diagram within each episode and, hopefully, longer arcs between episodes), sports games, or even simply stories about your day.

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Tim’s Vermeer

March 6, 2014
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This is the painting that Tim Jenison recreated, first by building a copy of the physical scene and then by painting it.
This is the painting that Tim Jenison recreated, first by building a copy of the physical scene and then by painting it.

I found an interesting article about Tim Jenison, the founder of NewTek (owner of the 3D animation software I use, LightWave 3D). The article explains how Tim Jenison spent quite a few years studying the artwork of Johannes Vermeer (a 16th century painter), came to the conclusion that he must have used a “camera obscura” (mirror and lens contraption to project the scene onto his canvas), and then recreated the scene from a Vermeer painting to test his theory.

And now you can watch a movie about the entire process. Working with Penn and Teller (apparently Tim Jenison is a good friend of Penn), they financed and created Tim’s Vermeer, which chronicles his recreation of the scene from a particular Vermeer painting and then using the camera obscura to make his own version. The movie has already been released to theaters — I hope it winds up on Netflix streaming!

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Starburns Industries

February 11, 2014
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Starburns Industries (Logo)I caught a cold late last week, so I spent the weekend sleeping and catching up on television. I finally got around to watching the last few weeks of Rick and Morty, Dan Harmon’s new animated show on Adult Swim. If you have not seen the show, it is a good comedy animated series featuring sci-fi adventures and some dark, witty humor. If you do not know who Dan Harmon is: he created and provided the main creative direction for the NBC show Community. If you have not watched Community, you are missing out on a great comedy series. Now that 30 Rock is finished, it is the only network show I watch.

Anyway, I noticed that the end of Rick and Morty has a closing tag for “Starburns Industries”. For those of you that do not watch  Community (shame on you for not immediately rushing off to watch a season or two!), “Starburns” is a side character in the show, so that name in another Dan Harmon creation immediately grabbed my attention. And that is how I found out about Starburns Industries, an animation studio created by Dan Harmon. Check out their reel, available on the front page of their site. Their About page is interesting, too, especially the bios for co-founders Joseph Russo II (he was an animator on The Simpsons) and Dino Stamatopoulos (from the Chicago area and has some solid comedy writing credits).

They primarily work in 2D animation and stop-motion, and I was surprised that I recognized a fair amount of their work (even though I have not watched much of it — I didn’t see Frankenhole or Beforel Orel, for instance).

 

LightWave 3D Earth Tutorial – Part 3

January 31, 2014
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LightWave 3D model and render of the earth.
LightWave 3D model and render of the earth.

This is the third and final part of my series of tutorials showing how I created a model of the Earth. If you missed part one, I showed you how to create the simple model and add the basic color/bump image maps.  In part two, I showed you how to add shader layers for the ocean, clouds, and the night city lights.

Because LightWave does not have volumetric shading support, we are going to fake an atmosphere glow using a flat, transparent object. Using the node editor, we will control the transparency based on its relation to the light vector.

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