Posts Tagged ‘rant’

Escaping gasses

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

I have spent the last hour trying to embed a three second flv video into wordpress and its not even that good.

[flv:http://www.kirkd.co.uk/blogimages/heattest1.flv 480 360]

Its just a test to see if my hot gasses do actually distort the way I wanted them to and, thankfully, they do.

Its an AE comp of the fire particles and the cone from the previous post simply done as two passes, one for the fire, one for the cone. Then in AE i’ve started with the sexy photo of myself (muuuuah), the cone pass, a fire pass with a brightness/contrast effect with the saturation right down and lightness up to 50% and the layers opacity turned down to 15% (this layer provides a whitish haze), another fire layer, an adjustment layer with a displacement map set to red and green to give the distortion. Above that is a pair of cone layers to provide masks for the haze.

I rendered it out as a flv file to upload only for wordpress to tell me its not secure! Bloody flash security.

It took longer to get a plugin up and working than it took to make the damn clip in AE.

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Posted in 3d, After Effects, Annoyed | 3 Comments »

T’s & C’s

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

With this hot weather the need for a few windows open is a must. Only, you tend to get a few flies loitering with intent (flying jerky patterns, like snowflakes in the air) so after swimming on Saturday morning I picked up two fly zappers for the price of one in Maplins. Got home. Tried one. Didn’t work. The damn blue bulb kept flickering so back it went with the other (that actually worked) and changed them. Only they didn’t have the same ones in stock so I stumped out another fiver for two more and guess what?
Yup, one of them didn’t work. I figured my luck can’t be that bad for such a high failure rate so i did something daft and dismantled the non-working one. Testing a few of the bits i came to the conclusion that it was the bulb which was shot not the actually zapper bit. I left the working one in the nippers room to see if i could catch any of the lazy suckers but none of them seemed interested. Obviously British flies are somewhat smarter than the ones in the pixar film (i forget which one but there is a scene with two flies and one is drifting towards the zapper and the other is screaming about not going into the light) as none of them seemed to be interested in being electrocuted.

So back i went with these two on Sunday and got a refund. I’m now going to employ a little WW1 tactics and use a can of Raid as chemical warfare would work better than technological trickery. I just don’t fancy clearing the corpses up at the end.

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Posted in home life | No Comments »

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