MrPingouin's Igloo

Up. The short is upper to avoid skinning problems around the knees. The hands ands calfs have been polished, they still need improvements tough. The proportions have been a little changed (here, the pelvis which is invisible is set upper in the character, making the legs longer).

Ok. Thanks to my friend Billedefoudre who has adviced me to add some wings on the hat. Perfect for the incoming winter.

I'm currently rebuilding the hands. They still need a lot of improvements but are much better than the previous one.

And.. I have already start the research of how to build this cap for real

The previous penguins preview : http://my.opera.com/MrPingouin/blog/2008/11/18/but-who-is-mrpingouin

Okay. For the lucky readers near Paris, here's a play that you shouldn't wait more to see. It's called "Baroufe A Chioggia". Here is a summary (in french), my level isn't good enough to translate it.

Baroufe à Chioggia est une farce : dans cette petite ville italienne, les femmes s’ennuient en attendant le retour de leurs maris ou prétendants partis en mer dix mois par an, alors elles flirtent avec Toffolo, un des rares mâles du coin à ne pas être marin… Seulement, au retour des bateaux, les langues s’agitent, les femmes montent la tête à leur ami respectif pour mieux cacher leurs propres égarements, et de quiproquos en commérages, la zizanie et la soif de représailles se répandent comme le feu aux poudres.

Anyway, just go to this little and charming theater Clavel and enjoy. And for those who aren't near Paris, maybe it's a good reason to take a plane to shake Eiffel's Tower hand

Oh my.

I've spent nine hours long today to solve a problem which solution is really difficult to find on internet (and in fact really simple). I write it down here hoping that it might help someone later (normal people you can skip this article )

Here's the case : it's about Mental Ray Distributed Rendering with 3dsmax (Mental Ray Satellite) with "distributed maps" option enabled + map files hold on a network drive.

The "distributed maps" option indicates Mental Ray that each Rendering Node do have the files on its local drives. But it means that you have multiple copies of those files which is really annoying.

A common way to work with multiple computers on a same 3ds file is to centralize the map files on one server, using then network directories.
In windows, you can mount network drive with a drive letter, like "Z:" for example.

But launching the distributed render, Mental Ray's console might sometimes (always?) reply that it's not able to find a file that does really exist on a network drive (for example Z: pointing to \\AnotherComputer\SharedDirectory\) (screenshot coming soon).

The answer to this problem is : never use a network drive letter in your map paths, that's the only reason why the distributed maps rendering cannot work. You have to use UNC (Universal Naming Convention) filenames.

So, instead of Z:\Maps\Texture.tga, you have to put \\AnotherComputer\SharedDirectory\Maps\Texture.tga

There's anothing step about services permissions (I think there's something like you have to run as user and not "system" (or local), because only the user mode has access to network directories). I'll clarify the situation soon with some screenshots.

Reference (found on softimage documentation ) : http://softimage.wiki.avid.com/index.php/Cant_open_file_for_reading_system_cant_find_the_file

Here they come, the pictures I talked about on the last post.
This session was a real nightmare, I did all the dumbest mistakes you can do with a film camera :
* I let the camera fall on the ground : it opened itself on the crash and the film was exposed, luckily by night in Madrid
* I thought I had rollback the film to change it, but I hadn't : I opened the camera and the film was directly exposed again, at 4pm in Tavira (south of portugal)


Fortunately, the damage was less important than what I was fearing.

All the pictures were taken with the olympus XA and fujifilm superia x-tra 800 film, here you can see the result of my home scanner. This camera is definitely my favorite wandering shooter, I decided to buy it a Manfrotto modopocket, I really don't want to carry a big tripod all the time.

Anyway, here are some pictures of Madrid, a really cute city, but I think I do prefer Barcelona, maybe because of the sea.









And after 1 mid-day road-trip, we were in the south Portugal, in Faro. But the pictures here are all taken in Tavira, one of the best little town you'll find on the south coast.
The train you can see helps you to go from the town to the beach... really cool.

There's a woman at the end of this corridor of the Cathedral of Chartres, she's selling tickets to visit one of the towers of the edifice.

Still this scanner problem, I'm getting mad.