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May 31, 2006
Blade Runner on DVD again / first-time ever
Not so much a review as news: Blade Runner is being released on DVD again.
Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic "Blade Runner," one of the first movies to appear on DVD in 1997, is being restored and remastered for a brief reissue in September.
The DVD, featuring the 1992 "director's cut," will be deleted after four months, and replaced by a 25th anniversary "final cut," which Warner Home Video is billing as Scott's "definitive new version" of the film.
After a limited theatrical release, the newly spruced-up "Runner" will be released in a multidisc special edition DVD that also will include the original theatrical cut, the expanded international theatrical cut and the 1992 director's cut.
This is very exciting news for me because I'm one of those few who actually prefered the original theatrical release with the voice-over narration, but that edition has never been released on DVD.
Reviews by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 30, 2006
Back from Flipside 2006
I'm back from Flipside 2006, and my shower project went over very well with the crowd, even though I'm still looking at it with a critical eye. Fairly soon I intend to post an entry about the design, its merits, and its flaws so that the next person trying to do this at a regional burn or similar event can use it as a resource.
But not today.
Today I sleep.
Burning by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 20, 2006
Raging Storm
This image was a little surprise for me. It was just this vague idea that formed out of a combination of poses I saw in other images, and then the rain came. I didn't really think that much of it, but it got an unusually strong response over at my main gallery. Hence, I'm posting it here.
It's been a while since I did any technical details on one of these images, so I thought I'd just toss out a few thoughts.
- The girl is the same basic model I use in just about all my images with women, but she has a "morph" on her that I bought a few weeks ago for about $10. It makes her look a lot trimmer and a bit more athletic. It's the same one I used in YABP #6.
- Her hair, which you can barely make out in this light, is dynamic strand-based hair. I now use hair props a fair amount, but once you stray outside the normal head/neck positions, those props don't hang well, so I frequently just let physics do the work.
- The rain is a prop I bought last year for about $10. It does fog, snow, rain, etc. It's really just a series of parallel planes that you can put transparency maps or other effects on. Its real value is just in all the presets it already has.
- Dimly in the background, you can make out a wall and some trees. Again, these are props, and I think I paid just a few bucks for each. The wall was a steal since it was part of a larger castle construction set with towers, gatehouses, bridges, etc.
- The platform she's on is just two cubes. I put a procedure tile texture on it with procedural stone and some turbulance to the tile alignment and displacement.
- The little puddles are just a plane I dropped onto the platform. It uses a procedural "spot" texture for transparency and displacement, and I used that to trigger some lighting effects on the water. They don't show strongly, but they made a noticeable difference in my test renders.
- Much of the skin texture is also procedural, setup by a script I paid about $5 for -- one of my best value purchases of all time. It allows me to get anything for extra freckles to rough skin, but in this case I used it to punch up the highlights of wet skin. About the only thing it couldn't do for me here was to put water droplets on her skin.
- The pose itself was my own -- in fact, it was the main purpose of the effort -- but it was pieced together from other saved poses, e.g. a kneeling pose for the legs, an outreaching pose for the arm, etc. Then it was just free-form tweaking and adjusting through the UI. It had started as a meditation pose, but I didn't like what it did with her feet.
- It's lit with four lights: a dim light from above hitting the whole scene, a bright spotlight from above just on the girl and platform, a dim spotlight from the side to give a bit more fill, and a dim ambient fill light for the whole scene. Both the ambient light and the bright spotlight used "occlusion shadows" which give the shadows a better look. It's a cheaper way of faking global radiosity. It's not as good, but it's decent.
- All of this was done in Poser 6, a cheap little rendering system that's really geared towards the hobbyists. As such, it doesn't really get much respect from an industry filled with $3000+ packages, but it's got a shallow learning curve and remarkable power in the nitty-gritty details. The total work time on this (i.e. actual time fiddling with it) was about 90 minutes, maybe less. Most of the test renders took 5-10 minutes, and the final render took about two or three hours -- not sure as I left it running overnight.
But despite all that, I couldn't draw to save my life.
Render by Dan | Permalink | Comments (4)
May 17, 2006
Posner takes on CEO pay
It's a common complaint these days that American CEO's are grossly overpaid, especially since they're all evil traitors bent on destroying the earth. Ok, not everyone adds that last bit, but I hear it enough.
This week Becker and Posner take on this subject of CEO pay, and Becker's analysis was a particularly interesting read. Here a few snippets to suggest the gist of his argument:
Yet competition for top management can explain the rapid rise over time in the pay of the average American CEO. To understand how competition works in the management market, consider the strong and stable relation at any moment between the total compensation of CEOS at publicly traded companies, and the size of the companies they head. For every 10 per cent increase in firm size, measured by the market value of assets, by sales, or by related variables, compensation increases by about 3 per cent. This "30 per cent" law held during the 1930's, and has held for every succeeding decade, including right up to the present.
...
The usual explanation given by economists for the positive relation between compensation and firm size is that the largest companies attract the best management. Therefore, bigger companies have to pay their CEOS better in order to discourage them from going to head smaller companies.
...
We need two additional facts to explain the sharp rise in pay over time, and the much higher pay in the United States than other countries. The first is that the average size of large American companies has grown in real terms about six fold during the past twenty-five years, regardless of how "large" is measured, as long as the same measure is used consistently over time. The other important fact is that the largest 50, 100, or 500 American publicly traded companies are much bigger than the largest companies in other countries.
He talks some about the bad apples, i.e. those being paid well while their companies self-destruct, but his argument for the majority seems compelling.
Politics by Dan | Permalink | Comments (10)
May 15, 2006
Monday’s a Bitch: Touchy Feely
My Friday Five group is pretty much dead, and I missed the regular excuse to blog aimlessly. Well, thanks to Red Tanya, I’ve found a new group: Monday’s a Bitch. Instead of asking a question and expecting five answers, they just ask five related questions.
Here we go...
- If you could make $100 a day by avoiding physical contact of any kind with another human being, how much money do you think you’d be able to make before you cracked?
It depends when you caught me. When I go to California, there’s virtually no contact. I’m with coworkers, and I could forego the occasional handshake. It might even come close to covering my hotel bill. But if you caught me in my natural habitat, I’d be doing well to pay for a twelve-pack of Coke.
- How much do the words "I love you" mean to you? Do you throw the word "love" around a lot? For example, if someone made a hilarious comment, might you exclaim "I love you!" while laughing, or are those words more sacred?
It’s strange. The word “love” itself isn’t that sacred to me. I love pasta. I love my new widescreen monitor. I even love watching Battlestar Galactica. However, the phrase “I love you,” is harder. I can say it to MAW and my kids without hesitation, but it gets hard beyond that, even (or perhaps especially) when it is truly felt. It’s even much easier to write than to say. It’s just something about rolling those words out of my mouth that’s hard for me. I have no idea why, so insert Freud here.
- If everyone of your preferred gender suddenly disappeared from the face of the planet, would you prefer to switch teams or become celibate?
I’d probably switch teams mostly because I’d go nuts without the physical contact. I just wouldn’t be happy about it. Instead, I think I’d spend most of my time checking to see if my preferred gender was perhaps hiding on the ass of the planet.
- Would you be willing to donate your sperm/eggs for money, or just to help out couples who are unable to conceive? How would the knowledge that you might have offspring somewhere out there effect you?
I wouldn’t do it in an anonymous way. I have a few genetic abnormalities – nothing earth-shattering – that I would want to tell them about. I also think I’d like to be a part of the kid’s life, but at a minimum, I’d want to make sure that once reaching adulthood, this offspring would have full access to my part of his family medical history.
- Do you think you could be genuinely happy being single for the rest of your life? (This is assuming that you just never meet/met mr./ms. right, not that something awful happened).
There are parts of it that might actually be nice. No, I’m not divorcing MAW, not even close. Mostly it’s that I never got to live alone. I went from my parents’ home to the dorm, and then to an apartment with a roommate, and then straight into marriage. I had a total of about three weeks on my own. Heck, I think I had longer than that when MAW went to help her mother move years later. I never got to have my place, just our place. So, yeah, it would nice to have a place of my own. But, I would go nuts without the regular contact, both physical and emotional. So, I only think I could do it if I had a like-minded female neighbor to be single with. Even then, I think it would get old pretty quickly.
Meme by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 13, 2006
FlickrBabes
Just pointing to a nice site FlickrBabes. This guy (I presume) is scanning through lots and lots of picture feeds on Flickr, looking for hot babes. Mostly these are the kind of eye-candy girls you see in various men's magazines, but overt nudity is actually pretty rare here. And it's all available in a handy RSS feed. Here's one of my recent favorites.
Blog by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 11, 2006
Message on a $10 Bottle
I recently ran across the strangest thing. I was in California, and I got a $10 bill in change. Scrawled across the bottom of the bill was the following warning:
If you can't quite make it out, it reads:
DANGER - GRAPEVINE TX POLICE MOLEST TEEN FEMALE DRIVERS - WARN OTHERS
It's strange to see such a warning on a piece of money. Usually it's something silly like "Help! I'm trapped in the Treasury building!" I know I've been guilty of a number of those. But more strange is that I should get it in California with a warning to carry back to my home state of Texas.
Anyway, MAW thought it was just strange enough to be blog-worthy.
Blog by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 01, 2006
Out West
I'm out in California for a fun-filled week of project planning. I'm hoping to hook up with Cypher and DW for dinner, but otherwise I'm just taking it easy. Can you say Netflix?
Life in General by Dan | Permalink | Comments (0)