The Blog of Glen Moyes

Update: August 2020 I've stopped using Klok and I've switched over to ManicTime . After a few years of use, Klok started to take longer and longer to access certain views within the app. I suspect it was because of the size of the database that was making the app so unresponsive. I also ran into issues with Klok licensing. There's a fixed installation limit that is not advertised or mentioned on their website. I'll probably do a dedicated post on ManicTime at a later date, but I wanted to mention here that I'm recommending different time tracking software now. * * * * * Klok 2 just barely got released! Go download it at getklok.com . Previous articles about Klok: Massively Useful Software (follow up): Klok Massively Useful (Life Changing) Software: Klok

Just so you know, today is Dynamic Range Day . Music is getting louder - and sounding worse. Over the past 20 years, the recording and mastering of recorded music has been increasingly plagued by an industry-wide practice of making recordings as loud as possible, while crushing any dynamics contained in the original performance. The result is music that sounds flat, two-dimensional, distorted, and is exhausting to listen to. This self-defeating race to be "louder" than anyone else has become known as the Loudness Wars. You can read more about it at Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war - or see an example at YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ . Well... March 20th 2010 is Dynamic Range Day ! This is our chance to fight back and raise awareness.

Celtx 2.0 was released this past week. For going from 1.0 to 2.0, Celtx doesn't have a whole lot of new features . The two big changes are Celtx Studio, which is their $50 yearly subscription version of Project Central with a free beta until March 24, and the ability to add Extensions/Add-Ons to Celtx, which I'm really excited about.

Guerrilla CG is finally online. It hosts amazing videos that explain the fundamentals of computer graphics in a fun and easy to understand way. The videos are not software specific either, so you can watch them and take that knowledge to your 3D application of choice. During college I taught Blender workshops for two years, and prior to that I did video tutorials for Blender. I learned that in order to teach people how to use the software I needed to spend quite a bit of time teaching the fundamentals first. So in my later workshops more than half the workshop concisted of myself doing a PowerPoint presentation. It turned out to be more effective, but we only had two hours of class a week, so I continued making video tutorials as part of the class so they could watch them at home. I put those videos on ShowMeDo so other people can watch them as well. I was later contacted by Andrew Silke about a project he was working on called GuerrillaCG. He saw the stuff I did on ShowMeDo and want...

A friend of mine pointed me to this today, and this is something that I definitely want to make an announcement of. Come to think of it, I've been doing a lot of announcing and not a lot of creating. Anyway, it's show written by Joss Whedon—yes, the same guy that did Buffy and Firefly—called Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog . I've watched the first part and it's hilarious. It's an experimental project that Joss wrote during the Writers Guild Strike to show what can be done with very little, released on the web, and get compensated handsomely for it—hopefully anyway, but that's part of the experiment. So check it out. Watch all the episodes as they come out throughout the week; Act 2 comes out Thursday, Act 3 comes out Saturday, and after the 20th it won't be available for free anymore. [Edit: You can now watch it for free on their website. However the video will have a few ads.] If you want to support what they are trying to do—and you should—go buy their...

Celtx 1.0 finally got released today. Go check it out at celtx.com .

You might have noticed that I started using a different service to host my videos on this blog. I've been looking for something better than Google Video and YouTube to host my videos. So I did some research, compared the services, and found a service that I really like. I uploaded the same video to test each of these services, and here are the results. Google Video YouTube quality. This is what I've been using previously. The bitrate is low and the frame size is small. Blip.tv I've heard that these are the best guys to go through for high-quality video hosting. And they are not bad. The quality per frame is the highest out of any of these services that I've tested, and they also change the aspect ratio of the movie player so there's no letter boxing for my widescreen videos. The big problem is they dropped the frame rate to reduce bandwidth. That's a big bummer, and is why I decided not to use their service. You can enable advertising (which is off be default), ...

Following up on my previous post about AudioSurf , the game was officially released on Steam a couple of days ago. It's $10, and a free demo is available. So, go check it out .

I came across this little gem of a game called Audiosurf a couple of weeks ago. It's a finalist at this year's Independent Games Festival. Today I participated in the beta weekend so I was able to play it for the first time. The thing that drew me to Audiosurf, aside from it being an independent title, is that it's a puzzle game where each stage is generated from music files on your computer, and the same songs become the soundtrack for the stage. The speed and difficulty change with the intensity of the music you provided, and the blocks appear to the beat of the music. This works really well when you play songs that have a strong beat and lots of dynamics. The way the puzzle works is you have to run over a block to put in on the board. The block falls in the corresponding lane (column) on the grid. To remove blocks and to get points you need 3 blocks of the same color touching each other in any configuration. Red blocks are worth the most points while the cooler-colored ...

It's 1:57 a.m. and I just finished making some last minute changes to the Computer Medical Center ad. The last frame has been rendered; it is finished. The ad is awesome. The visuals are awesome. Even the original soundtrack is awesome. I'll do a postmortem on the project as well as post links to the ad because it's awesome. But for now I can sleep and life can return to normal—wait, I have to move day after tomorrow. Crap.

I just checked one of my junk mail accounts, and received a pleasant announcement from Wacom. They just released something called the Cintiq 12WX . It's a smaller, and much cheaper model of in the Cintiq family. Now, it's been my illustrator fantasy to own a Cintiq, or at least be able to play with one. Fortunately at Siggraph 2007 I got that opportunity. The Cintiq 21UX I played around with was a US$2499 piece of equipment. That's a lot of value for the bastard child of an LCD screen and a tablet to live up to. After I used it for about an hour, it almost lived up to my expectations. Yes, drawing with it is much easier, is way more natural, and the pen tilt is easier to visualize (which is really handy because I use a lot of calligraphy brushes). However, I'm not used to having my arm cover the image I'm working on. This makes right-clicking unusual at first because the menu appears directly underneath your hand. Also, when I'm using something that resembles pe...

Wow. The Peach Project has done some amazing work adding features to Blender in just about every area: Python constraints, mesh deform modifiers, and fur simulation. This morning before I went to the gym, Adam (our lead Blender guy) showed me an SVN build he compiled that had the new hair/fur rendering and grooming features in Blender. The grooming features were pretty cool, but I was most impressed over sheer speed that the hair strands were rendered. Later this morning I checked the Peach blog and they showed their work-in-progress of the new hair simulation for their characters. I was floored. This is Pixar quality stuff! This image is a screenshot from a test video (OGG Theora) they put together showing the character in motion with the fur simulation. The Peach team reported that Blender can now "render 2 million hairs in HD resolution in about one minute." Gamera, the chinchilla character shown in the image, has 1.5 million hairs. I can't wait to get my hands on t...

Speaking of video games, This is proof that I need more free time. This is entirely due to a television ad that I'm working on. The visuals should be done tomorrow and I'll get the audio done a couple of days after that. It's been neat taking part in the entire process of creating an ad, and being able to see a design project of this magnitude from beginning to end. I've had a lot of help from the rest of us in our little 5-man studio: critiquing, concept art, and animation (lots of animation). I'll likely post the ad up here when it's done. I wish that's all I had to do before Christmas, but I have to move and job hunt too. Oh well. Until then, I miss you Team Fortress 2. Here's the link to my Steam profile so you can see what dirty rotten games I've been playing and for how long. There's also a picture of a scary possessed evil satanic squirrel there too (the spawn of a graphic designer when he did have too much time on his hands). So that...

I've been making video tutorials for Blender since August 2004, and in those years I've found TechSmith's Camtasia Studio to be the best solution, simply because of the quality of the TechSmith Capture Codec (TSCC). The other alternative is CamStudio, an open source app that works really well, but the CamStudio Codec is not as fast as TSCC. On my new system I get 22 fps with CamStudio in a 1024x576 region, whereas with TSCC I can get a solid 30 fps, and it's easier to get the audio and video to sync up properly. After using their 30-day trial, experiencing the performance boost was enough to convince myself to buy Camtasia Studio, until I realized it cost US$300. To my joy, I read today that TechSmith is doing a promotion where you can download their old Camtasia 3, get a software key for free, and later upgrade to Camtasia 5 for US$150 (this is for a limited time). Just download the software: http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe Then fill...