The Matrix visual effects tests

Hi all! It's been ages since my last post (again). Can't tell much about my recent life though. Just wanted to share some experiments I've been doing with After Effects lately. I'll most likely post some more videos of my experiments in the future :)

PS: This year is The Matrix's 10th anniversary. Are you planning something about it?

On existence and other philosophical issues

This is something I've felt like writing for quite a long time. Here are some reflections that I've collected and assimilated during my whole life, that I wouldn't like to be lost accidentally someday just for my own laziness. I'm writing them here so they can become buried in the net and hopefully helping others reach their own conclusions.

If you're someone definitely not interested in philosophical issues, then I suggest you not to keep reading. This is just what I think and who I am.


There's one thing sure about existence: We have a mortal body, a part that, as everything physical, someday will die. It's all part of our living nature: Life needs death, and death needs life. There simply can't be one of them alone.

Is consciousness tied to that physical existence? Does our consciousness die when our body does? I don't know, and nobody actually does. Our faiths, our beliefs, we can just speculate about what's beyond death. Many religions, sciences, philosophic currents, and even our own, personal beliefs hands us a possible explanation about what will happen then. But we can't know for sure until we are already dead.

That leads to what I believe the third form of existence. A true form of existence that actually keeps us alive beyond our death. The memories in the people that knew about us. It's undeniable that we exist not only physically, but in the hearts, minds and memories of all the people we've met, we've talked to, or who simply listened about us sometime. Denying this would be just like denying the existence of knowledge or even the existence of this very blog entry, just because it's something intangible.

Can this be considered a separate entity, or part of the originating entity? In other words, are different things these memories and the entities themselves, or are them part of the other? In my opinion, the same we physically grow, we expand our existence by creating such memories in other people.

It's not a matter of barely meeting people. The memories they will have of you will be shallow and easily lost once you lose contact. What really matters is the relevance of what you do. We are what we do. You'll be great if you do great things (read, you don't have to do one great thing for that; small actions that touch a great number of people are equally valid).

Here's where I'll tell you what's the point to live a worthy life. Besides existing beyond death, the way to live a great life is to do such great things; to touch as many people's hearts as possible; to be a good person, and fairly win a place in their minds. It's not about becoming immortal and living forever in the books of history. It's about not wasting your life, and making other's life better. To be proud of what you do, because you do things worth to be proud of.

Along the years, I've known many people trying to convince me that their doctrines are the only true ones, trying to tell me how I should behave to live a worthy life. To me, there's one simple rule to follow: To make happier and better as many lives as possible. Call it good karma if you want. Aikido has been a good guide in my opinion to help people, as well as my experience with some fantastic people I've met. Through those experiences, other people have got a place in my heart and memories, and helped me finding my way to do it so.

That's the truth about our existence in the end. We can't live as individuals. We need others existence to persist, and our actions determine how we will. Be a genocide and you will win your own hell; be a saint and you will win your own heaven.

In the end, transcending life and death, your own existence will be tied to those who remain here to remember you.

Plastic goodness

First, excuse me for the long time without posting here. Life is taking all my time and I'm becoming really busy.

Me and two other friends have got accepted a city generator project proposal, and things are coming along quite nice (a bit time-shifted from the estimated timing, but quite nice after all). Here's a shot of our (to be rejected later) prototype for you all to enjoy :P


What you see there is the parametrisation test for an image-based input, to be used,
for instance, for population density. Nothing really spectacular, but I'm proud of it XD

Now onto the topic. After almost a month of development, I've gathered some knowledge about the usage of PlasticSCM for the software configuration management (guess what SCM means? :P). So without any further talking, I'm presenting my tips:

Workspace-per-task
...and branch-per-task. THE COUPLE -- all caps. I knew Plastic was good managing branches, but this is just a breeze. We gave the branch-per-task pattern a try and I must admit that Plastic is really overwhelming here.

In addition to that, as our codebase is intended to be rather lightweight (that's the purpose of procedurally creating content ;)), we can allow ourselves to have several workspaces/views created at each machine of ours. The deal is that you will have several workspaces placed in directories such as task0002, task0014... (yes, we also have mainline separately ;)). Each of them point to their respective branch, so switching branches is actually a cd ../taskxxxx command ;) I've found this really speed-boosting, so we can avoid the updates that must come along with each branch switching, as well as easing the process of merging.

Alias is not only a TV series
NO, I haven't drunk. Not many people know about the Linux shell command alias. This command lets you bind a non-physical shell script with a shell command. You can read this as having virtual scripts, merged with the environment variables concept. The best deal is that this can be used to save efforts and "record" common tasks such as checking in all the checked out items. Indeed, I've created two aliases for this purpose:

alias unco-all='cm fco --format={4}|cm unco -' alias ci-all='cm fco --format={4}|cm ci -'

The best is that they still accept options for unco and ci, so it's still possible to add comments to the changesets (amongst others!)

Pseudo-integration with Nautilus
Thought about this trick this morning, and after learning how Nautilus scripts work, I've finally got a system to do check outs, check ins, and undoing the check outs from the file browser.

Entering ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts and placing there scripts (any runnable script indeed, be it standard Linux shell scripts, perl, Python or whatever) will add new options to the file browser.

My approach has been to write three scripts, Checkin, Checkout and Undo\ checkout to a subfolder named PlasticSCM. Nautilus defines a number of environment variables when running these scripts, so using NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_CURRENT_PATH and NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS lets you perform those operations on the selected files and folders.

And if you add some error checking and notify-send... Sweeeet.... :D

Lullaby

I guess it's time to make this public. Along the first half of 2007 I was working on a personal project, a psychological thriller game entitled Lullaby.

I took it really seriously, but due to the incredible workload for a one-man-army-like development team, had to indefinitely halt the project. As I guess it's more useful for other people being public, I've decided to open the blog I was using to write down my progress on the project. Hope someone find it useful :)

Lullaby development blog.

Out for a week

So at last they came! My vacation are here, and we are going to a countyside lodge to spend the whole week there.

We have several plans to spend the time there. The one I'm most excited with is to gaze the shooting stars shower on the night of Aug 13th (I'll have to miss the peak one today, 12th). Also some live roleplaying at the midst of the week, and loads of fun watching funny videos and listening good music.

Of course I'll take my time to walk through the prairies/forests/mountains/whatever I find there. Huh, the Man vs wild frenzy I had these last days make me feel like Naked Snake, hohohoho.

And to culminate it, I've got the latest Nightwish videoclip from MTV Finland, that is to be released on Aug 13th (so I though I was going to miss it until we were back!).

So have fun while I'm away and don't miss me :P I'll tell you about when we come back on the 19th. Sayônara!

Caelum news (at last!)

So, many of you are guessing what I'm spending my time after the exams period (which, by the way, went pretty fine, with the exception of a subject...).

Besides unleashing a lot of ideas I had in mind for pictures, I've got back to the Caelum development. The shaders are under a complete overhaul, and so far they look pretty well. Still want to refactor many things, to make it more physically real, but better to go slow but fine, don't you think? ;-)

Here's a shot I took a couple days ago of its current state. Hope you like it!

Art-rage again!

I've lately suffered another art rage. Call me jealous if you want, but watching a couple of classmates draw was the trigger I needed to start again developing an unstoppable urge to draw and paint like never before!

As a start, I had to do a painting I wanted to do for some time now, that is already uploaded to DeviantART, CGSociety, and PixelBrush. I'm reading like mad again the [pb] forums and CGTalk, and practising a lot. Thanks God I also find a lot of time to study for the coming exams :)

So I'll take advantage of this and create a new blog/community so that I (and other contributors, if they want) can post some tutorials, interviews, techniques and experiences. Any suggestions? :)