...
Its finished! Finally finished!
I am officially done with class! Sure, I don’t technically graduate until December (about which I could care less; mail me the degree and let me celebrate in my own way) but I’m finally finished! Feels like a mountain off my back - it was touch and go for a while, and did it ever turn into a chore… but I think I learned something along the way and overall it was probably a better experience than not.
I don’t think I’ll get my masters any time soon (if ever) - right now the thought of more academia makes me sick.
…
This last week has been _insane_. Perhaps the planets are in alignment, perhaps its just the Friday the thirteenth, but work hit one of the occasional crunch time periods just as the last details of my degree had to be polished off. Which saw a mad rush to figure out an ethical soap dish, make a write up regarding said soap dish, polish off a rather large research paper on the history of CAD, fix up my portfolio and make a user’s guide; all of which got left to the last minute, for one reason or another. The portfolio revision wasn’t as strong as I may have liked (though the solution of mounting it on a mini hard drive worked out rather well indeed) but the rest turned out pretty good; the papers are probably some of my best since at the University (many thanks to Jen with the help on the research) and the little soap dish project was an interesting experiment.
As for work, things have been insane the last few weeks! Tom’s engine is almost ready for full production, and our new website (not quite finished, but functional) just went live: check us out! www.3di.ca
In terms of projects, the Art Gallery is a nifty project; stage one is featured on the website, and turned out fairly well, considering the bastardized Rhino resources. Armand was driving the demo around during the grand opening / groundbreaking event last night; I’m interested to hear how that goes. Stage 2 will feature more details, art, etc.
We also got the green light on BP_Energy’s new big office down in Houston - more of a campus than a building… really neat space, but their architect is stressed and bitchy. We were supposed to have the initial preview (the fitness center) done yesterday; they sent us the second third of the resources and some major architectural changes 5:30 Thursday night… then they have the gall to ask if we can finish the entire project for Tuesday. We have a contract, we will meet the contract, provided they give us what we need - also stipulated in the contract. No more, no less.
After that, we have the green light on the Sheraton revision! Same building, but this time they want to have more details, flesh out suites, the kitchen, etc. I’m looking forward to re-publishing this piece with all the new tricks and technologies we’ve put together over the last year. This will be a _Great_ before / after. (though I pity Andy having to work with the old chaotic max file though… ouch)
Another blast from the past was the second TWOS exhibit - we visualized the potential Children’s cloud gallery last year, and now that they’ve revised the design, they want to visualize the new version. The first version took a couple of weeks and barely came together; it also had some fairly noticeable flaws, as it was the first real project we published with PureLight. TWOS seemed to love it, but I have to say, this new version technically blows the old one out of the water. (from a design perspective, I think I prefer the original, but this new version, despite worse resources, resolved in less than a week and has significantly better lighting)
After that, Lifestyle homes apparently loves us! Our duplex set was presented to the president and sales crew, and they love it, wanting to make this the keystone of their home building business. I have a big list of revisions for those duplexes version 2, and we have 16 more ready to go shortly after.
National homes in Ontario apparently likes us; instead of full homes they want to visualize single rooms; perfect for high res lighting (we did a mock up, and its fun to have 10 times the lighting quality we normally can)
In slightly related news, we got to see our industrial competition Simlog in action! Interesting, but we can totally crush them. No physics, no environment (perfectly flat giant parking lot for the win!), no ability to move your camera (making it really hard to operate) and no training (it’s a skill test only). That and they take 4+ months to add a new machine, which is way to small to sustain their exclusive client; CAT. That combined with the fact that it’s a visually weak engine, is actually relatively good news. Their best asset is the dig-able dirt; I worked up a hack in Unreal, but this one we’ll have to wait until the new engine is ready to implement…. But even here, they have a simulation of perfect sand; no clay, no rocks, no water, etc. Weak.
So why do I mention SimLog? Well, we’re stepping up the pace with out industrial project, and have just, after long last, revised our industrial scene! The industrial scene originally was a proof of concept hurriedly put together, without an understanding of Karma (the physic engine’s) full interaction with the space. Worse, it was completed before a major improvement to PureLight and a major improvement to our publishing; namely the ability to combine lighting and texturing (instead of awesome lighting on solid colors). So, the revision is many of the original assets (the refinery, the garage, etc) combined with some new goodies (a bad-assed interactive construction project, some stadium lighting, a nice new truck, etc) recomposed on a tighter piece of terrain. The layout has been specially designed to work with the physics / show off our strengths compared to SimLog - we have hills, walls, entanglement areas, etc! Visually its night and day (we’ll have something on the site in a week or so) - textures on the objects make everything slightly dirty, gritty, realistic. Special effects make the metal pipes have a sheen, and warning / hazard / info signs have been placed everywhere, adding a lot of life. Combine this with some improved lighting capability and a high res painted terrain by our resident Photoshop guru, and this is a completely different product - I can’t wait to give Stuart his copy on Monday.
As for Stuart, he just got his new system - ASUS’s answer to the gaming laptop market, which actually beats out mine in a few areas. It runs our project like a dream, which is good, as now he can actually start using it, just in time to present to some Hertz big wigs that are coming up from New York on Monday. (very important presentation).
Immediately after the Hertz presentation, Armand and Kelly are heading up to Ft. MacMurry to present our new Safety training system to OSSA - the Oil Sands Safety Association. Their stamp of certification would be golden, but the real goal to this meeting is to get into Suncor, CRNL, or one of the other operations up there. I’m actually working on the other window on the comprehensive student side training version of our software, complete with vehicle pre-operation and training content. Should be very interesting to see how that goes.
Don has also scheduled a major meeting with CAT in Montréal for the end of May - slightly different presentation, but if we can sufficiently beat SimLog and someone else bidding on the Job, this could be a big project for us. Indeed, if any _one_ of these industrial ventures work out, a single contract has the potential do double our annual revenue - very excited, I can really feel things starting to move and snowball.
On Tuesday in Edmonton, Don and I have a demo with EPCOR - any luck and we’ll be doing training for things like dealing with residential gas leaks… hope I get to crack out the old explosions!
Oh, and in the middle of all that is the ongoing War project; we’ve broken ground on that one, but the client really doesn’t know what they want. Hopefully we should have them all sorted out over the next couple of weeks.
Think that sums it up; and all this has occurred since the last post. It’s kind of humbling; in the past 4 months we’ve done more than in the 2 years previous to that. As I explained to Czarik the other day, the first bit was developing a technology and a methodology; now we’re turning it into a viable workflow and assembly line. We’ve taken over the back space at the office, and hope to be hiring some more people shortly; if you know anyone with professional grade 3D Max experience, send them my way!
I am officially done with class! Sure, I don’t technically graduate until December (about which I could care less; mail me the degree and let me celebrate in my own way) but I’m finally finished! Feels like a mountain off my back - it was touch and go for a while, and did it ever turn into a chore… but I think I learned something along the way and overall it was probably a better experience than not.
I don’t think I’ll get my masters any time soon (if ever) - right now the thought of more academia makes me sick.
…
This last week has been _insane_. Perhaps the planets are in alignment, perhaps its just the Friday the thirteenth, but work hit one of the occasional crunch time periods just as the last details of my degree had to be polished off. Which saw a mad rush to figure out an ethical soap dish, make a write up regarding said soap dish, polish off a rather large research paper on the history of CAD, fix up my portfolio and make a user’s guide; all of which got left to the last minute, for one reason or another. The portfolio revision wasn’t as strong as I may have liked (though the solution of mounting it on a mini hard drive worked out rather well indeed) but the rest turned out pretty good; the papers are probably some of my best since at the University (many thanks to Jen with the help on the research) and the little soap dish project was an interesting experiment.
As for work, things have been insane the last few weeks! Tom’s engine is almost ready for full production, and our new website (not quite finished, but functional) just went live: check us out! www.3di.ca
In terms of projects, the Art Gallery is a nifty project; stage one is featured on the website, and turned out fairly well, considering the bastardized Rhino resources. Armand was driving the demo around during the grand opening / groundbreaking event last night; I’m interested to hear how that goes. Stage 2 will feature more details, art, etc.
We also got the green light on BP_Energy’s new big office down in Houston - more of a campus than a building… really neat space, but their architect is stressed and bitchy. We were supposed to have the initial preview (the fitness center) done yesterday; they sent us the second third of the resources and some major architectural changes 5:30 Thursday night… then they have the gall to ask if we can finish the entire project for Tuesday. We have a contract, we will meet the contract, provided they give us what we need - also stipulated in the contract. No more, no less.
After that, we have the green light on the Sheraton revision! Same building, but this time they want to have more details, flesh out suites, the kitchen, etc. I’m looking forward to re-publishing this piece with all the new tricks and technologies we’ve put together over the last year. This will be a _Great_ before / after. (though I pity Andy having to work with the old chaotic max file though… ouch)
Another blast from the past was the second TWOS exhibit - we visualized the potential Children’s cloud gallery last year, and now that they’ve revised the design, they want to visualize the new version. The first version took a couple of weeks and barely came together; it also had some fairly noticeable flaws, as it was the first real project we published with PureLight. TWOS seemed to love it, but I have to say, this new version technically blows the old one out of the water. (from a design perspective, I think I prefer the original, but this new version, despite worse resources, resolved in less than a week and has significantly better lighting)
After that, Lifestyle homes apparently loves us! Our duplex set was presented to the president and sales crew, and they love it, wanting to make this the keystone of their home building business. I have a big list of revisions for those duplexes version 2, and we have 16 more ready to go shortly after.
National homes in Ontario apparently likes us; instead of full homes they want to visualize single rooms; perfect for high res lighting (we did a mock up, and its fun to have 10 times the lighting quality we normally can)
In slightly related news, we got to see our industrial competition Simlog in action! Interesting, but we can totally crush them. No physics, no environment (perfectly flat giant parking lot for the win!), no ability to move your camera (making it really hard to operate) and no training (it’s a skill test only). That and they take 4+ months to add a new machine, which is way to small to sustain their exclusive client; CAT. That combined with the fact that it’s a visually weak engine, is actually relatively good news. Their best asset is the dig-able dirt; I worked up a hack in Unreal, but this one we’ll have to wait until the new engine is ready to implement…. But even here, they have a simulation of perfect sand; no clay, no rocks, no water, etc. Weak.
So why do I mention SimLog? Well, we’re stepping up the pace with out industrial project, and have just, after long last, revised our industrial scene! The industrial scene originally was a proof of concept hurriedly put together, without an understanding of Karma (the physic engine’s) full interaction with the space. Worse, it was completed before a major improvement to PureLight and a major improvement to our publishing; namely the ability to combine lighting and texturing (instead of awesome lighting on solid colors). So, the revision is many of the original assets (the refinery, the garage, etc) combined with some new goodies (a bad-assed interactive construction project, some stadium lighting, a nice new truck, etc) recomposed on a tighter piece of terrain. The layout has been specially designed to work with the physics / show off our strengths compared to SimLog - we have hills, walls, entanglement areas, etc! Visually its night and day (we’ll have something on the site in a week or so) - textures on the objects make everything slightly dirty, gritty, realistic. Special effects make the metal pipes have a sheen, and warning / hazard / info signs have been placed everywhere, adding a lot of life. Combine this with some improved lighting capability and a high res painted terrain by our resident Photoshop guru, and this is a completely different product - I can’t wait to give Stuart his copy on Monday.
As for Stuart, he just got his new system - ASUS’s answer to the gaming laptop market, which actually beats out mine in a few areas. It runs our project like a dream, which is good, as now he can actually start using it, just in time to present to some Hertz big wigs that are coming up from New York on Monday. (very important presentation).
Immediately after the Hertz presentation, Armand and Kelly are heading up to Ft. MacMurry to present our new Safety training system to OSSA - the Oil Sands Safety Association. Their stamp of certification would be golden, but the real goal to this meeting is to get into Suncor, CRNL, or one of the other operations up there. I’m actually working on the other window on the comprehensive student side training version of our software, complete with vehicle pre-operation and training content. Should be very interesting to see how that goes.
Don has also scheduled a major meeting with CAT in Montréal for the end of May - slightly different presentation, but if we can sufficiently beat SimLog and someone else bidding on the Job, this could be a big project for us. Indeed, if any _one_ of these industrial ventures work out, a single contract has the potential do double our annual revenue - very excited, I can really feel things starting to move and snowball.
On Tuesday in Edmonton, Don and I have a demo with EPCOR - any luck and we’ll be doing training for things like dealing with residential gas leaks… hope I get to crack out the old explosions!
Oh, and in the middle of all that is the ongoing War project; we’ve broken ground on that one, but the client really doesn’t know what they want. Hopefully we should have them all sorted out over the next couple of weeks.
Think that sums it up; and all this has occurred since the last post. It’s kind of humbling; in the past 4 months we’ve done more than in the 2 years previous to that. As I explained to Czarik the other day, the first bit was developing a technology and a methodology; now we’re turning it into a viable workflow and assembly line. We’ve taken over the back space at the office, and hope to be hiring some more people shortly; if you know anyone with professional grade 3D Max experience, send them my way!