FFE Blog

I just wanted to remind everyone that there is a Fan Film Engine mailing list.

I'll e-mail everyone on the list periodically, to notify the users about new tutorials, fetaures, etc.

You can sign up at: http://www.FanFilmEngine.com/list

I'll probably start using it this summer.

- artofwot
tutorials@fanfilmengine.com

This is just a rambling post about everything and nothing in particular.

I have exactly 14 days of school left - I can't wait for Summer vacation. I have a lot of projects I want to start (and finish), including a lot of work on this site. So stay tuned.

I downloaded Nexuiz (for Windows - couldn't get it to work on Linux), and I am really impressed. Nexuiz is a multiplayer FPS, that's free. You can find it at Nexuiz.com. I haven't really played many multiplayer FPSs, and unfortunately, my school internet connection is waaaay too laggy to actually be able to run the game smoothly. However, you can also play against bots, whcih is what I've been doing mostly. Anyawys - I highly recommend that you check it out.

I tried to get the drivers on my videocard (ATI Radeon 9200 128 MB - Yeah, it's a bit dated) working in Fedora Core 5, and only ended up going from a beautiful framerate and being able to run most games, to only being able to run a few games at less than a frame per second. You guessed it - I'm not very good at Linux. Hopefully I'll get this remedied. I now understand how Linux geeks can spend hours and hour tweaking their system.

I watched Elephants Dream a couple more times, and actually have some idea of what's going on throughout most the movie. However, I agree with the general opinion - they could have made the plot a bit more clear.

The Blender foundation announced the Blender Summer of Documentation a little while ago. It's basically the Google Summer of Code, but with Documentation. You can find more information at the blender website, or at www.blendernation.com. They said they're not accepting video tutorials - I'm betting that they'll create a seperate thing for that later. Imagine how great professional training DVDs on Blender would be!

It's 11:50 here. I'm tired and I should be getting off to bed. So good night.

- artofwot
tutorials@fanfilmengine.com

Elephants Dream, the first ever "open" movie project has finally been released. You can choose from a variety of file sizes and formats to download at www.elephantsdream.org.

The site is extremely slow right now because of the traffic it has been receiving, so I recommend using one of the torrents to download the movie. You can also download all of the files they used in production at elephantsdream.org.

They created the movie using only open source software (except for the software they used to create the music was not open source), which is extremely impressive. And, of course, Blender 3D was used for modeling, animating, texturing, etc.

Overall I really enjoyed the movie. It's confusing - a little too confusing, but it really is a neat movie. The overall technical aspect is a little rough around the edges. Most of the environments they used were impressive, but I was disappointed with some of the character animation. It looks like they could have used another couple of weeks to finish everything off.

I highly recommend checking it out.

Another thing to note is that the Blender Foundation released their texture disk online for free. It contains tons of royalty free images and materials to use in any of your 3D projects - Blender or otherwise. You used to be able to buy it online from their e-store, but they finally released it for free. More information is available at: http://www.blender.org/cms/Newsitem.607+M536c0cdbe0c.0.html.

That's all for now.

- artofwot
tutorials@fanfilmengine.com

I had to disable comments again. We had more spamming. This time they'll proably be off for good until I can find a system to stop spamming.

- artofwot
tutorials@fanfilmengine.com

I've re-enabled comments in Nucleus. If there are any more spamming problems (I was having trouble with bots for a while), I'll disable them again.

- artofwot
tutorials@fanfilmengine.com

So, Windows Media Player 11 isn't officially out yet, but I was able to find a copy of it online (do a Google search, you'll find it). It should be officially released fairly soon.

I just wanted to share my first thoughts on the program.

It really is an amazing program. Perfect? No. But good, none the less. First of all, the GUI is gorgeous, and if it looks this good no XP, I can't wait to get my hands on Vista. Everything's nice and glossy.

I have always found Windows Media Player to be more stable than iTunes (on Windows, that is), and that remains true in that release. I haven't actually had WMP crash yet.

The new way of sorting your songs is fabulous. It's kind of dificult to explain, so check out some screenshots at winsupersite.com.

My favorite new feature by far is the enhanced search feature. iTunes has had a "live" search for a whlie. (that's not the official term). Rather than typing in keywords, hitting the search button, and waiting a couple of seconds, WMP now allows you to type in a few keywords, and it will instantly display songs, albums, etc. related to your search.

So, what's missing? RSS support. That means nooooo Podcasts. What is Microsoft thinking?

Overall, Windows Media Player 11 is a nice, solid multimedia player, that has become my main media player.

- artofwot
tutorials@fanfilmengine.com

It's wet here in New England. Very wet. In fact, school was canceled here for the first time in around 30 years or so. The river near to our campus has flooded, and the athletic fields are under a couple feet of water.

Fun times.

19 days of school left for me - I can't wait to get out of here. I plan to do a lot of work on the website over the summer - I'm planning on starting a podcast/vidcast with another filmmaker, it would be a neat summer project. I'm also finalizing a script for a web-episode that I plan to shoot this summer, and do post-production on throughout the fall (and probably winter).

Hopefully the last few weeks of school will pass quickly.

- artofwot
tutorials@fanfilmengine.com

This is just a quick post, I know I haven't made one in a while, but I'll try to update the blog more regularly.

You can see what songs I've been listening to most recently below. It's just kind of neat.



- artofwot
tutorials@fanfilmengine.com

Sorry, it's been quite a long time since I last posted.

I have a couple of updates and announcements.

First of all, I reformatted my computer, and am now running both Windows XP and Fedora Core 5 (Linux). I've found that Linux is actually pretty cool, and because I haven't reinstalled most of my software yet (After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop, Games, etc. - I'll do that this weekend), I'm spending most of my time in the Linux OS.

You can definetly tell that Linux has a lot more power, especially when it comes to programming.
Also, I rendered out the Blender test scene (with the cube, raytracing, and threads on), for both Windows and Linux. Linux was faster by 16 hundredths of a second. While that may not seem like much, when you're working with hundreds of thousands of polygons, Linux will render a lot more quickly.

I've been thinking about what I'm going to do over the summer (related to the website). I'm planning a complete redesign (I seem to do that almost every summer), I'm changing the way I create the video tutorials so they'll be more organized, and polished, and will have an introduction. I'll post more n this later (including previews). I feel pretty guilty for not having posted any new video tutorials for quite a while, so I'll try to make it up to everyone over the summer.

That's about it for now. I'll try to update my blog more regularly from now on.

- artofwot
tutorials@fanfilmengine.com

It's exam week here, and that means we hook up the X-Box and play Halo all weekend (for some of the dorm occupants, studying is secondary to killing each other).

It also means a heck of a lot of free time in which to do absolutely nothing.

So... what have I been doing?

Figuring out how to read e-books on my iPod. That's right, on my iPod. It's not overly complicated or anything. Simply download a .txt format e-book, download a program that will split the file into smaller files, enable your iPod for disk use, and voila!

OK... those instructions were horrible, so I would like to point you in the directiion of the following website for more information: http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/06/make_ebooks_for_1.html

Overall, it's a pretty cool experience to be able to read a book on your iPod, it just drains the battery because you need to have the backlight on in order to read it.

You can download free and LEGAL e-books at: http://www.gutenberg.org/
All of the books there are legal, and most of them are fairly old.

So far I've made it through:
- The Phantom of the Opera (English Translation)
- Tom Swift and the Secret of Phantom Mountain
(used to read Tom Swift as a kid, used to read the Hardy Boys too...)

I'm currently working on Dr. Jekyll nad Mr. Hyde.

Live.com has done a complete redesign of their site, it looks great now.
Microsoft has also relased a cool portable computer called the "Origami" (Google it, you'll find mroe information than I could tell you).

So, that 's a fairly long update. Vacation starts on Saturday, and boy am I looking forward to it!

- artofwot
tutorials@fanfilmengine.com