Long Weekend Update

While I'm waiting for my health to recharge (I'm playing Mass Effect right now), figured I'd update this thing. I'm starting to get real bad at doing that. Yeah I bought Mass Effect a couple days ago. At first i thought it wasn't going to be much - just wanting to buy it for the sake of it being an RPG and i like that genre of games - final fantasy anyone? Stuck at the Thorian right now, trying to kill that giant bug but that bitch Asari and her entourage of zombie freaks keep killing me with their too much power.

It was an interesting day at work today - got an email from ... I forgot that kid's name, but he's the POC for work orders (and Yavar sent a work order last week since Alex was away, for a mentorship about Ncheck.) and it was answered this week. This guy went to AI and graduated in the Spring of 07 which meant I was in ... Q4 at the time. I knew my mentorship would happen on the Tuesday after the long weekend but I guess I forgot. So I was pleasantly surprised which meant no mindless bug hunting for the rest of the day. As I type this, I just remembered that I was supposed to do a soak before leaving work today, dealing with an NMI. Whatever, I'm tired.

Anyway so after lunch today, i headed straight over to the world wide service section where they had set up a computer for me. turns out it was Shan's computer and up to that point, she had been spending all day moving her workstation over so I could sit there for the rest of the afternoon. I spent the afternoon going over the Ncheck scripts that Donovan and I couldn't finish last week. Fortunately the scripts were already done so we spent some time going over them and what I would do if I were running these scripts for real. And I took some good notes along the way, shared them with Donovan. For some reason, the mentorship didn't include him. My best guess is because he didn't approach Yavar to ask for one - this happened the day he went home sick from that cough.

Tam also emailed me today asking to get our lunch appointment changed to Thursday since he was going to spend wednesday relocating his office to Phase I. So I said yes - not like i had a choice in the matter anyway. I'm still glad an artist is willing to meet with me and give me some tips on getting in on the industry. Sounds like I'm going to need quite abit of luck.

I spent the long weekend finish off the UVs for Tammy. There was quite a bit of optimization to do on her but I really wanted to get onto the normal mapping process. After the UVs were completed, I upped the resolution on her mesh a little bit before taking her into Z brush. That's when I ran into some problems.

When I first tried sculpting a little in Z brush, i saved the Z brush document and not the tool, which was actually the 3D obj of Tammy. So I had to go back and start sculpting her again from scratch. But when I tried to generate a normal map from what I sculpted, it turned out her UVs were fucked. Somewhere along the way while I was sculpting, I must have hit the worng button by accident or something. I'm not sure and I can't even begin to guess what buttion I must have hit since the Z brush interface is probably the least user friendly interface I've ever had the misfortune of stumbling across - and yes, I think this might even beat Flash.