Poo-Poo Platter

My brain isn’t quite functional, so I’m just going to spout a few random bits for tonight.

This Friday is our internal art deadline for Pirates. We’re scheduled to go beta soon, so all art assets need to be finished and ready to be put in the game well before our beta date. As such, most of the art team has been working weekends and/or late nights for the past couple of weeks to make sure everything gets done. I took Saturday off to go to the Seattle Flickr Meetup, but, otherwise, I’ve been at work doing my thing. We’re on the home stretch, but everyone is starting to go batty. I think we need to do a team beer-fest after we’re done.

Apple’s new MacBook Pros started arriving in customers’ hands this week. Early test numbers don’t look too great, but most of the major software people use have not been recompiled as Universal binaries yet, so things can only improve from here. I’d really love to get one – my 800 MHz Powerbook G4 is getting a bit long in the tooth – but I can’t justify spending the money on it just yet. Plus, none of my usual software will run natively on the new Intel Core Duo processors yet, so I won’t really gain any performance benefits. Also, this is the first revision of the new laptops. It’s probably best to wait for the kinks to get worked out of the system.

PMA is coming up, and that means all sorts of new photographic toys will be unleashed upon the world. Of course, a lot of camera manufacturers can’t wait until next week to announce things, so they’ve already started sending out press releases to induce drooling amongst photography pros and enthusiasts. Based on early reports, I’m totally digging the following cameras:

• Canon 30D - Big, bad digital SLR based on the popular and powerful 20D.
• Canon Powershot S3 IS - An upgrade to the already wonderful S2 IS.
• Canon Powershot A700 - The A620 is an amazing camera; the A700 improves on that even more.
• Casio Exilim EX-850 - I was considering getting the EX-750 as my pocket digicam last year. Looks like a new candidate is just around the corner.
• Fujifilm FineFix F30 - This one looks really interesting - ISO 3200 sensitivity (my D70 only goes to 1600!), 6.3 MP, and a suppose 500 shot battery capacity. Could be in my pockets later this year.

Naturally, I can’t afford to get nor do I haven’t any reason to get all of these cameras. It never hurts to look around though.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any tips and tricks, so I’ve been thinking of some good ones that I can work on after we’re done with beta at work. After spending a year doing nothing but character animations in Maya, I’ve picked up a few workflow and productivity tips that I can share with everyone. Naturally, I’ll have some more technical elements to talk about (scripting, button-pushing, options in Maya you might not have learned about, etc.). I’ll also be talking about some more abstract topics like getting weight in character movements, offsetting motions for flexibility, and using exaggeration for readability. It might take a while for me to get these going, but I am definitely working through them in my head. I just need some spare head-space to really get these fleshed out.

Final thing for tonight. Fat Tire Amber Ale is some good sh!t. Get some if you can.