Girlyfied

I hardly recovered from Kinder Eggs for girls and pink Lego. Pink Lego! What is wrong with the world?

But girly Nerf guns? Seriously? I first thought those were cosmetics. Maybe the also leave a rainbow trail when you shoot those.

Jurassic World (Spoiler)

First of all, I am a big fan of Jurassic Park. I adored it as a kid and I tried to read everything about it before and after the release. I think it was the time when I started to think that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I was fascinated by visual effects work ILM did at that time. I also got the making of book of the movie and listened to the score by John Williams in repeated loop.
For Jurassic World my expectations were pretty low. Who wonders because the other two parts weren't that great and the director is a nobody. So better have low or no expectations.
From a technical point of view the movie is quite good. The VFX look believable and only a few shots don't really hold up, like the Mosasaurus (big water monster) which is also shown in the trailer.



But the story is a disappointment all way down and that is because the movie tries to hard to build up a complex plot which it totally fails to achieve. First is the completely unmotivated and unnecessary storyline with the younger (Gray, silliest haircut ever by the way) and older brother (Zach). I don't care about the older one and that he has a girlfriend but looks after every hot chick when he arrives in the park. Needless to say that this has no impact on the main storyline.
Next why does Gray suddenly break up in tears and tells Zach that their parents are getting divorced? Not relevant! Please cut it! Then there is this whole "We want to weaponise dinosaurs" thing with the ex army character Hoskins. As soon as he appeared I knew: you gonna be eaten by one of those Velociraptors, dumb ass.
Why should be a Velociraptor be better than a drone? It's not that dinosaurs are bullet proof or shoot lasers with their eyes (only in a Kung Fury universe though). So they wouldn't be better than a Rhinoceros...
Next is how security is handled in this huge park. Honestly you would think that after the major incident on that particular island twenty years ago people would know how to handle a broken out lab enhanced killer dinosaur. If that would happen in my park with over 2000 people in it I would just nuke the hell out of it. The last thing I would want is bad PR and the loss couldn't be that bad. I only would have to re-hatch a new one. Cannot be that expensive looking at all those other specimens in the park. In that regard dinosaurs are pretty much expendable. And only one helicopter on the island? Seriously guys? And of course there is only one fracking pilot there and the other one is the main investor himself who surely will die. Yepp, "Helicopter down" in a cage full of Pteranodon and Dimorphodon. Which of course have nothing else to do than after their huge habitat is broken to fly directly to the park and attack all the visitors. Why is that? They were raised and fed in that dome. This is their home. The only place which is familiar to them. They wouldn't fucking move! And if they were I am sure not attack normal people because they wouldn't see humans as threads and not at all as food.


A little jump back to the two kids. They head of with this Gyros-Sphere. Cool thing btw. I want one of those! Then the park gets shut down because of the wild killer beast. Of course they can't control those spheres remotely to bring them home safely. Why would you do such a thing in a theme park. Sigh. The part where they find the old visitor center of Jurassic Park I don't have any problem. And it fits quite nice into the plot. But I am pretty sure those 20 year old batteries in the night goggles wouldn't work anymore. Otherwise I want a pair of those as well, please.



One thing of the movie I really enjoyed and liked was Owen (Chris Prat) and how he bonded and worked with the Velociraptors. You never have the feeling that they are buddies and this just works and is also relevant for the final of the movie. I even get the icy relationship with Clair and that builds up to a few laughs in the movie.
So, to wrap this rant up: Jurassic World is an ok movie if you don't think to much of it while you're in the theatre.
I wonder how Terminator Genesis will be. Oh wait. I already saw it before Jurassic World. They made a short cut version called a "Trailer".

Layered modo Configs under OS X 10.10 Yosemite and later

Since Apple thinks it is boring to keep thing consistent we once again need a different approach to get the layered configs with modo to work in OS X 10.10

Create a file called envrionment.plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents
The file should have the following content. Remember to change the paths in bold to your own locations.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>my.startup</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>sh</string>
        <string>-c</string>
        <string>
        launchctl setenv NEXUS_LICENSE /path/to/license
        launchctl setenv NEXUS_PREFS /path/to/prefs
        launchctl setenv NEXUS_USER /path/to/user
        </string>

    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

To load the file without a reboot call launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/environment.plist from a Terminal window. After that you are good to go.

Closing One Chapter

For one year I kept my little home base in Munich. Just to give me a bit of safety robe if things didn't work out in Wellington my new home. But now it is time to say good bye to a wonderful place in the center of Munich. So many memories (more good than bad), new friends, loud and weird parties, nice lukewarm summer nights at the Isar or in the Biergarten and most of all a nice home.
And now all furniture is gone (sold, donated or handed to good friends) and personal items found shelter at my brothers place.

So the last five days were pretty packed and exhausting and without the help of my friends it would not have been possible to clear the apartment. But besides all the stress I managed to get a little christmas flare in Munich, spend some time with dear friends and enjoyed a lovely Christmas with my family. And now the chapter Munich is closed and I will only drop by for a visit once in a while.

Making japanese food samples

When I was in Japan and saw all the fake food in restaurants and in Kappabashi Street (which is an absolute must visit if you ever be in Tokyo) I always wondered how it was made. And here you see how a guy makes it out of wax. Really, really cool.

Affinity Designer

Finally there is one alternative to Adobe Illustrator on the marked. It is called Affinity Designer and after four year of development it is available for OS X (only). It looks very promising and I am very tempted to give it a shot as long as it is 20% of. But for $65 it is a real bargain compared to the Adobe alternative.

On their webpage they also announced a competitor to Photoshop which is even more interesting. I am curious if they manage to really make the big P obsolete for my workflow. Until now I did not found anything which comes close to the default functionality of Photoshop. And please don't start with GIMP. Never liked it, never will. GIMP is just a tool from nerds for nerds and I am an artist and I want to work efficiently without a steep learning curve. That being said if Affinity Photo does that for me I say bye, bye to Adobe Photoshop.

German Kübelwagen with Bling Bling

Just saw this German Kübelwagen here in Miramar with bling bling chrome rims and lowered body. 

Gives it a nice contrast don't you think?

Burger No. 4

Honestly I was a bit skeptical about the goat burger from the Coco at the Roxy because their normal burger is nothing special and ok. But the "Here's looking at you, kid" was a pleasant surprise.  I really liked the greekish/ turkish bread which combined very well with the goat feta paddy.

It had a nice strong flavour but was well balanced and tasted almost like a falafel. Sadly they ran out of the pannelle so it came with normal fries. It was Sunday night and the place was pretty crowded so I don't blame them for that. With that little downside I give it a 9 out of 10 because this was the first burger of the four I tried which tasted really special and held up to the description and they really should put it on their regular menu.

Sometimes you really amaze me

I already have seen some pretty impressive sunsets here in Wellington but still there are some which leave me breathless. Like yesterday when the sun went behind the hill and made this wonderful glow in the haze. The color shift was just amazing. From yellow to purple and then deep blue. Keep it coming I say =)

Burger No. 3

The Home Of The Waipiti from The Larder follows one motto: keep it simple.

The only thing that stands out is the minced elk (wapiti) meat. Simply combined with a good sauce, salat, pickles and tomatoes so that you really can enjoy the tasty paddy. To be honest if I didn't knew that it was elk I wouldn't noticed it. Anyhow the best burger so far and with the tasy simple fries I give it an 8 because the buns looked a bit of the shelf and not very special and elk meat sounded great but it also could have been good beef mince. Nonetheless a very tasty burger.

Burger No. 2

Today it was the "Just Plum Decadent" from the Plum. Presented on a wooden plate with chunks of chips it looked very tasty.

The bun was fluffy and ciabatta like and really great. The pork paddy sounded very good on the menu but could not keep up to the description. I missed the slow cooked pork taste and I didn't catch the Pinot juice sauce either. The mayonnaise for the chips was good but again there was something missing. The kick where you say: "This is a tasty burger." Overall I would give it a 5. Well made good burger with fresh ingredients but nothing special. 

The Burger Battle has begun

Wellington On A Plate just started today and that means that the only thing that matters for the next two weeks is food. The best of all is the side competition of several restaurants in the Welly area: Best Burger.

The first was Cafe Polos Blackbull Spicy Slammer. The homemade spicy sauce was great and went really well with the smoky cheese and paddy. The big chunks of chips were good as well but would have been much better without Cajun spice which detracted from the burger a bit too much. A minus was also that the Blackbull was hard to keep between the nice buns and almost resulted in disintegration of the piece. Overall it would be a 7 on a scale from 0 to 10. 

MARI Tool Kit v1.6 for MODO

It is time for a new update of my MARI Tool Kit. I refined the UI and gave it a couple of nice icons. Besides that I have rewritten the image import which is now faster and now able to sort all the imported files into mask groups. So each UDIM has then its own mask group and its textures. If the user defines an entity as well all UDIM groups are nested under their entity. This makes working with all textures in modo very easy.
Besides that the user has various tools for integrating manually imported textures like set the UV offset or shader effect, gamma correction and create UDIM selection sets.

Currently it is supported for MODO 701 and 801. It doesn't utilise the UDIM features of the new MODO version but I am working on it and there will soon be an update to v1.6.1
So if you are a modonaut and have MARI in the pipeline you might want to give it a try. Download it from my github.

MacPass - finally a nice OS X version of KeePass

It is not easy to find a keepass program for OS X. There is KeePassX which is oaky but looks like a bad port from windows and still lacks functionality. Then there is KyPass Companion which I also bought. And my honest advice is to stay away from it.
For its seven bucks it costs it doesn't give you more than a better looking UI but it still feels cheaply made and also lacks basic features. Why did I bought it? The beta phase ended (well at least for the developer) and I couldn't open the database anymore in KeePassX. So I bit the bullet and bought it to still be able to access my keys.
And now I found MacPass and it is awesome. It is still not finished and still has some UI flaws but it is freeware, open source and really looks like a OS X app. And the developers care about its functionality and the design.

MacPass

So if you are a Mac and keepass user give it a try.

What Is The Resolution Of The Eye?

Looks like our eyes are actually not that good (see minute 3:51). It's the processing power which does the trick. Thanks brain.

BJs ToolBox v1.6 - CameraMatch

After a lot of work the last couple of weeks I finally pushed out a new release of my KIT for MODO. All the time I spent for it was a new tool for matching a camera to a still image and so the name is quite obviously CameraMatch.
I had the idea for quite a while now but I wasn't really sure if I had the programming skills to do this. But after I had a look at an article from fxguide (actually two) I was sure I could do it.
At first it seemed pretty easy and it was going well. At least I thought it would. But after the solving of the two vanishing points it was pretty difficult for me. The math I did for the orientation of the camera didn't work or would only work for some images. Especially the yaw rotation made me headaches. Then I found BLAM a plugin for blender and it was based on Using Vanishing Points for Camera Calibration and Coarse 3D Reconstruction from a Single Image. And this was just what I have been looking for. I then spent about one week to get my vector math skills back on track which have been collecting dust since school. Would I had known that I really could use these I would have paid more attention back then.
Thanks to the modo community I could takle down some major bugs and here is the next version of BJs ToolBox.

Besides CameraMatch, BJ's ToolBox has several other features:

Modelling:
Tools:

• Rotate Element: hover over an element and rotate it through its local axis

Thread Tools:
Inspired by the modelling techniques of Peter Stammbach.

• create inner or outer thread
• define diameter, sides and the number of steps
• the thread itself is currently hard coded and best use in the range of millimetres and centimetres

Animation:

• Cameras To Animation: create an animation from a bunch of cameras

Shader Tree:

• Create Materials in Shader Tree: creates material groups for material tags
• Create Material per Element
•  Create Material per Mesh

Her

Last saturday I saw the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson. The short summary of it is: A man falls in love with his OS an artificial intelligence.

This film is already one of my highlights in 2014. The story was thoroughly researched and very well laid out. Besides the story and brilliant playing of Joaquin (and Scarlett who is only present with her voice) the surrounding impressed me the most.

Little details like it is totally normal and actually appreciated that you are first "staking" someones life before dating them, programs and games that interact with you or that everything works flawlessly with voice recognition. Mouse and keyboard are banned input devices.

The art design was in general superb. The wardrobe had a very realistic look and feel and was absolutley plausible. Same goes for the environment. The city (I think in the movie should be future Los Angeles) didn't look highly clean or a total waste dump. It looked real. I never thought about visual effects (and I am sure there very a bunch of them) and was absolutely sucked into the story and their characters.

Her is a very intense and thrilling love story and I highly recommend watching it.

Dragon Boat Fun

Last weekend the dragon boat crews did a fun training day here in Wellington. The final event will be on 8th & 9th of March.

As you can see in the images the number of girls in the teams is quite high and seems to be the new girl sport here.

Sadly it was very windy and so they only could practice in the small area at the boat houses. But still they got up to pretty decent speed at this short range. I am really looking forward to the final event with hopefully better weather conditions.

Originally the dragon boats and racing comes from china and dates back to 400BC. It is based on a legend where Qu Yuan a Chinese statesman drowned him self as a protest. Fishermen rushed to him with their boats to rescue him.
Today it is a world wide sport and the different festivals are still associated to the  traditional Chinese Duen Ng Festival in Hong Kong.

As always you find some more pictures on my flickr site

modo - Camera Projections For Modelling

For a little side project I started a test how to create environment based on scan data. One thing that I missed in modo was a proper overscan feature in the 3D model view. It is possible with the preview renderer but using it for modelling is really not an option.

But I found a really good workaround by using camera projections. And I really prefer this method because it allows you to stay in the perspective view and you can really build up your environment in a fast way.

I am planing a little tutorial series about the whole workflow which will also cover the steps in photoscan. So stay tuned.