Consistancy

I've talked alot with people about being consistant with the project work I involve myself with and I just can't seem to find enough spark in what I work on from a day-to-day basis to stick with just one effort.

I bring this up b/c it seems like Surphaze as suckered me into working on 3d stuff recently. I made a vow a very long (very long) time ago to avoid this part of computing b/c it was really trendy (yeah, I'm just soooo punk) and I also secretly harbored some anxiety about the mathematics involved.

Well, turns out the math isn't so bad for me and I seem to really enjoy the work.

We're tweeking a normal mapping plugin for blender and I've been really impressed with the python integration that's going on in blender.

I cooked up the normal mapping function two nights ago in about 2 hours (most of that time was reading the blender API and hashing out some questions with Surphaze).

Now we're at the point where it's kinda slow for generating maps for complex objects. My math is a bit on the slow side and that's party b/c I ganked the procedure from a really outlandish reference site.

So, Surphaze has made some improvement notes for me (speedup processing time: so cutting out big numeric pieces and writing them in C and then add another vector transform for the structures we're using) - he has added a couple of features that'd make the script "super cool, thanks for asking" (he wrote about 95% of it, I just figured out that he needed to be using tangent space for his mapping technique).

So I have that in the works for now. When all this is complete we'll be able to tackle some more further adventures in 3d rendering - like more real-time rendering stuffs. Oh, I also got some more scripting under my belt with tnl -> I scons'd the build system b/c they were using "old skool" make files and the gnu auto-tooling system is nice but, it's really ugly. I'll stick with my Python + SCons classes thank-you-very-much!

I'm still tooling around with PDFBox and a couple of other projects - just so when I read this later I can remind myself that I do have other obligations to attend to. :-P