AaronButler.com

via Akihabaranews.com.

Gear used:

Canon 5D Mark II
14mm f2.8L II
17-40mm f4L
50mm f1.4
90mm TS-E f2.8
135mm F2.0L

Tokyo Reality (Canon 5D MarkII) from utsuru on Vimeo.

Seems YouTube has put forth a contest for users to submit videos that are actually watchable.

YouTube Contest Challenges Users To Make A ‘Good’ Video

I beat it in around 12 hours, what a great and memorable experience. One of these days I’ll get around to playing Round 2.

I loved every minute of it and with the message and video logs I’m even having System Shock 2 flash backs, which is one of my favorite games of all time. The HUD system/integration is incredible, the sound effects are fabulous, especially in 5.1, the control schemes feel nice and intuitive, though I tend to over shoot targets at times when spooked. I also really enjoyed the little details put into the various levels, while linear, the level design was very good.

More writing after the jump, beware of spoilers though!

Read the rest of this entry »

Finally starting to model again, last time I really modeled anything was back in college sadly. Below is a current render of one of the various models I’m working on, mostly for practice. It’s been a lot of fun so far and I’m really happy with the progress, though the treds are a little stiff, heh.

Not sure if I’m going to make it a high poly model or keep the tris under control. Going high poly would provide some normal mapping practice, which I currently have no experience doing at all.

Related Link:

M1A1 Abrams under the 3D W.I.P. section.

Joe Alterio created a charitable effort of drawing Robots and Monsters for $50 with most of the fee going to a charitable organization. $50 gets you the original work of art created by either Joe Alterio or one of the other talented artists he’s enlisted who help out in their spare time.

The charity as of this blog entry is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Below is just one of many from the gallery of completed works.

“Robot: Death, Magnet, 110101010″

Related Links:

Robots And Monsters!

Who is Jay Walker and why should you care about his library? He’s the guy behind Priceline.com and he made lots of money, lost lots of money, but still has lots of money…and a breath taking library that you could spend many years of your life in reading its contents.

WIRED.com has an article up with some tasty niblits of the informative type on some of the many wonderful things Mr. Walker has in his collection. Very geeky and very worth the read.

Related Links:

WIRED: Jay Walker’s personal library

Here’s something which falls into the category of “Rad!”, software that’s being developed at the University of Toronto, called “ILoveSketch”, allows you to sketch on a touch screen in 3D. If you can follow along and understand the linguistic cavalcade of terms then more power to you. I just want to try it out and see how intuitive it really is.

ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

The options available to the end user via the level design tool set of Little Big Planet, currently in Beta as of this writing, is yielding some amazing creations. 1up has a bunch of videos but two that have really made me go, “Holy shit…” are the ones I’ve posted below. The first is a working calculator someone built which is simply incredible to say the least. The second is a level that plays the theme song from Final Fantasy X.

Empowering the Player, such a wonderful concept

Google’s open source web browser, Chrome, is neato and all, but two things are missing that are kill’n it for me.

1. Foxmarks or something like it gets released so I can keep my bookmarks organized across multiple computers. Seriously, this kind of thing should be standard now!

2. Having my bookmarks in a side bar like FireFox (ctrl-b).

When these two items become a reality, Chrome will become my new standard browser.

Every year on October 3rd Leiden celebrates the end of the year long siege by Spain by turning the city in one big crazy festival.

Rock on.