WTF?, originally uploaded by Yamil_G.

Okay, I know I’m on blog vacation, but this came across Digg today and I couldn’t resist sharing it. Apparently, some lucky so-and-so who is already playing Halo 3 discovered this terminal within the game, the screens of which display a version of the famed “Blue Screen of Death,” first made popular in the Windows NT operating system.

Self-deprecating geek easter egg humor at its best.

The BloodSpell DVD audio mix is now officially in the home stretch. If all goes according to plan, by this time next week we’ll be doing last minute tailoring / nudging and that will be that!

As such, I’m taking a week off here at the blog and other online activities. Track me on Twitter if you like. I hope to see some of you Friday at Talk the Machinima Talk, the first of the monthly online machinima conferences hosted by Peter Rasmussen and myself. Other than that, I’m going to be MIA.

When I return, I’ll begin prepping some overcast goodness, and should be back to the normal blogging pace.

For now, I leave you with the authorized Portuguese subtitled version of Male Restroom Etiquette. A French one is in the works, though that one likely won’t hit YouTube… I’ll explain that later.

Have a great week!

I’ve heard the sentiment uttered for a couple years now - and if I’m honest, a couple years ago, it wouldn’t have been all that outrageous for the statement to emerge from my own lips - that all characters from The Sims 2 look alike.

And you know what? I know where they’re coming from. Even with a program as versatile as Poser, there are some generally identifiable traits, sometimes hard to quantify, that a keen eye can spot and say, A-ha! Poser! The same can be true for The Sims 2. If you stick to the stuff they give you out of the box, or rely on the game’s own internal “randomizer”… you’re going to end up with characters that do seem to share the same basic bone structure and set of skin tones.

But enter the world of user-designed custom content… color outside the lines a bit… and everything changes. (more…)

ChromeSphere has a very nice overview of optics (the behavior of light), with a particular emphasis on how those concepts translate into the 3D world, working with materials (textures, shaders), and so on. Really good stuff.

Thanks, Renderosity.

Related reading:

• Lighting Techniques by Amaan Akram
• 3D in Depth: Lighting by Nathan Segal
• 3d Lighting Setups: 3 Point Lighting by Jenn Downs

Scott Kirsner at Cinematech recently updated his list of Sites that Pay for Film and Video. It’s a great resource… for those of you who can legally participate, of course.

The project to assemble this list is part of a recently published book by Kirsner, The Future of Web Video: Opportunities for Producers, Entrepreneurs, Media Companies and Advertisers. Could make for interesting reading if you’re one of the people looking to try to earn a living at this thing.

Friedrich Kirshner has been developing his machinima tool for the Unreal Tournament engine for a little over a year now. Called MovieSandbox, this FREE tool has some key distinctions worth noting:

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