So I've been working on my ray tracer a lot lately, and I've finally made some reasonable progress. Here is a sample image which exploits everything I've implemented so far:

Ray Tracer sample scene version one

Today is apparently National Chocolate Ice Cream day, so in celebration we bought a Dairy Queen ice cream cake, mmmmmmmm.

Ice Cream Cake

Ok, last time for real. I can't afford to spend any more time tinkering with Homer. So here is what should be the final version. I even made the tessellation a bit finer so that the image is nicer.

Homer version 3

I did some more work on my puppet. Added a torus primitive which allowed me to give him cuffs on his pants and more definition around his eyes. I also gave in to the painful desire to give him fingers with proper joints. I'm much happier with his hands now in general. Other change include the hair on the top of his head, his ears, the definition of his torso and the size of his arms. Finally I fixed a mistake at the bottom of his right leg. Not sure if I will work any more on it, but if I do I would like to give him a collar on his shirt. I don't think that is very likely though, I really should move on to my other school work. Here is the latest:

Homer version 2

Well, graphics is keeping me really busy, so in addition to not having enough time to post, I'm not doing a whole lot that is worth posting about.

Until now...

I just finished my puppet for Graphics assignment three. The assignment is to create a system for hierarchial modelling and then make a puppet using the system. There are all kinds of requirements, like joint range limiting, rotations, translations, etc, etc, so there was lots of work to do before even starting to model the puppet.

I chose to model Homer from The Simpsons because I have this 2x2x2 Rubric's cube of Homer's head which is useful for figuring out how things should look in 3D. I also have a giant Simpsons poster with most of the characters on it, so if it wasn't Homer it would have likely been someone else from the poster.

Here is Homer after rotating the view and "posing" him by manipulating his joints.

Puppet Homer Running or Something

Puppet Homer Standing

Back it Waterloo...the stream of posts shall almost certainly decrease, but maybe I will get around to making selectable themes.

One more day of work left and then it's back to Waterloo for me. This term has some potential to be good. Summer is always fun and Graphics will be neat. Plus my other courses require very little effort.

I just finished reading "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson (author of Neuromancer - a very Matrix-esque book that existed before the movies). It was really cool because I was able to identify with a lot of the stuff in it. It is set in the present and since it was written in 2003, it actually is the present (more or less). The characters are heavily into the Internet, and the word "Google" is used multiple times as a verb in the book. I just liked how real some of the aspects of the book felt. Like the use of the Internet and the attitudes of the people. Not quite sure how to explain what I mean.

On a mildly related note, my communication skills continue to decline.

I forgot to mention something neat that happened yesterday (well, not neat, but Jen will appreciate it at least). I had to get new peanut butter because I ran out, but when I went to the store I noticed that the packaging of my favourite type (Kraft Extra Creamy) had changed. So I took a quick look at the nutritional information and guess what? Zero trans fat!

Kim came to visit this weekend and we did a few fun things. I really love how you can just get people to come to Toronto and then figure out what to do later because there is always stuff to do.

On Friday night we went out for supper at The Marche which is now known as Richtree or something. It is market style so you go around picking out food from places and they record it on a card you carry around with you. When you are done you give your card to the people and that tells them how much to charge you. I had fajitas and fresh squeezed strawberry lemonade (yum!). Also a big piece of chocolate mousse cake that was really good.

On Saturday we went shopping a bit, I picked up one last book at BMV (see my booklist) and then we decided to do something a bit more cultural. Kim saw a poster for a double bill of operas playing at the Elgin Theatre on Yonge, "Acteon" and "Dido and Aeneas." Kim's really into ancient Greek and Roman history and mythology (she's even minoring in it) so she was really keen to go (since both were based on Greek/Roman mythology). We went to the theatre and found that we could get tickets for that evening for just $15 since we were students. The seats were really good too; they let students buy any available tickets for only $15 regardless of the section. The actual performances were both pretty good; niether of us had been to a real opera before so it was quite an experience. The stories tend to be fairly simple so it was easy to follow even though it is sometimes hard to understand the actual words. Acteon was in French with translations projected above the stage. Dido and Aeneas was in English. The company was extremely talented and the production was quite well done. Also neat was the orchestra which was apparently using antique, priceless instruments, like 200-300 year old violins. Really amazing sound.

Today I dropped Kim off at the bus station and then went with Matt and Adrienne to Pacific Mall, which is always an experience. Got some precious precious Pocky and also had a Lychee fruit ice cream waffle. Sweet!

Earlier this week another nice thing happened, I got an offer to return to Alias in the Fall! So sweet! It's been a great place to work and I'm looking forward to returning. Not sure where I will live yet though since I can't return to my sweet downtown condo. I'll probably end up back in North York which is far but still on the subway line so it will do.

On an unrelated note, my good friend Mike Jutan has begun his California work term adventure at Pixar! Check out the link to his blog if you're interested. It will definitely be full of neat stuff.

I am investigating ANOTHER new feature for my website, I'm quite industrious lately. I want to make it so that users can create custom themes for the site so that it can be whatever colours they like. This is pretty easy to do with CSS, but the fact that I have an image makes things a bit trickier.

I looked into dynamic image generation with PHP and found that I could do a good enough job. So, I made this little tester page that lets you enter choices for the four main colours on my site and then you get to see the image that is generated by those choices. Feel free to play with it, and if you create something that looks nice you can copy the address in the browser and send it to me. I may add it to a list of predefined themes if I like it.

At some point I will need to make code that writes cookies for user themes and also lets you switch themes and stuff, but that stuff isn't as interesting as the image creation so it might not happen right away.

I wish the school would change how PHP is compiled on its servers just a little bit. If they would link in the FreeType libraries I could have anti-aliased text in my dynamic images. That would be very sweet indeed.