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Snagged it! Thanks for the heads-up!

Thanks man! I got the facial joints all skinned and weighted, so next week I should be able to start putting in the source library of basic facial poses that the facerig software will use for retargeting the mocap data it pulls from the webcam. Painting skin weights is (for me at least) the really hard part, so I'm really excited to have it all done.

I just saw this posted to the Polycount forums earlier today and it looks pretty rad. It's a rigging and animation tool that is for the moment targeted mainly at game developers. It imports and spits out in .fbx only, from what I can tell so far (which will make it play nice with Unity and UE4, but if your modeler doesn't spit out .fbx you'll need to use a converter), and it aims to eliminate the need for a rigger to create animation controls/handles. It's in beta right now and is free to use for as long as it's in beta, so I'm gonna see if I can burn through the tutorials and user guide as quickly as I can to see if I like it better than rigging in Maya*, and form a more comprehensive opinion of it beyond 'this looks neat'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg7PxKvf9aI *anything has to be better than rigging in Maya oh christ goddammit

Oh man, I got really excited looking through the links for the mixamo suite before I realized that they're all.. web-embedded online only. Still cool though, for however long they want to have something like that available!

I think after the success of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games as film adaptations, Hollywood has collectively decided in standard risk-averse fashion to adapt as many YA books as possible to screen since those are supposed to be big sellers right now. And of course not all of them stand up to the process too well. I liked the hunger games as books, but even though they read like they want to be movie scripts, it's real hard for me to care about them as movies, too.

Thanks gerbils! Kind of stalled out for a few weeks with other work, but I made progress this week painting skin weights on snoots, eyebrows, and eyelids.

I was honestly kind of dismayed by the trailer because it looks pretty much exactly like a reskinned Ingress, which I don't really find at all compelling or interesting as a game. I was kind of excited to see that they were tapped to work on the Pokemon franchise until it started to become apparent in the gameplay examples that they can only sing that one note. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

Reminds me of "from can til can't", to describe the period of time spent working on a task in a day.

I was also taught to do two spaces and it's such an ingrained habit that I just sort of rely on HTML's whitespace rules shortening all spaces to one space for me. On twitter I have to manually go back and remove superfluous spaces at the end of periods after I compose my tweet in order to fit inside of character limits. I don't know if they have gotten rid of doublespacing in schools yet, though. I know they got rid of cursive and Latin, so two spaces probably aren't far behind. Unrelated: I listen to the Mysterious Universe podcast pretty regularly and they love saying 'utilize' when 'use' works just as well. The words mean the same thing and the only reason to ever use the word 'utilize' is to dress up your language to affect a particular writing voice. Which I hate.

That's good advice.

Yeah, it's not an impulse buy, and I'm also pretty much constantly broke because I made the Good Life Choice of being a cartoonist. I was fortunate enough to have stockpiled amazon giftcards from several family members for my last birthday and finally settled on a fitness tracker. And I'm the same way - I won't walk for the satisfaction of walking, but now that I get the instant gratification of seeing my score go up, the Video game treadmilling impulse has begun to assert itself.

I am only five days into fitbitting, but the data collected and analyzed depends on the model you get, and there are at present six different versions. I got the Charge HR, which is by far and away the most popular model - it tracks steps taken, heart rate, duration and quality of sleep, calories burned, distance walked, and flights of stairs climbed, and it also has an alarm function so it can be set to vibrate when certain daily goals are met, or as a wake-up alarm. If I had a smartphone, I could pair it to factor in GPS data to get a better read on distance walked, and also get vibrating call notifications and caller ID displayed on the watch face. My wife has the Zip, which is a pedometer and not much else. Both of them have bluetooth to report their data to the fitbit app. The fitbit app and myfitnesspal app can be hooked into each other, so if you're logging your food and exercise in myfitnesspal, it will report that information to fitbit, and fitbit will report calories burned in your day-to-day (less the calories burned at the basal metabolic rate, determined by your age/weight/height/gender information in your settings) back to myfitnesspal. The two apps are pretty good at shuffling data back and forth - I can log my weight in myfitnesspal and it propogates to fitbit, or I can log it in fitbit and it propogates to myfitnesspal. Same with water drank, calories consumed, and calories burned. So I log my food in myfitnesspal and let fitbit do everything else. The Charge HR is great because it determines your caloric expenditure from some kind of witchcraft based on your heart rate, which is what interested me the most. I feel like I'm getting a much more accurate read on my caloric budget from the information harvested by fitbit. I haven't been to the gym since I got it yet, though (I went on a trip over the holiday weekend) so I haven't been able to compare my heart rate reported by the fitbit against my heart rate reported by the elliptical. And like, let's be real - of course I don't NEED it to exercise or get fit, it's really just a neat toy designed to turn exercise, eating, and sleeping into a video game. I have high scores and daily challenges and a leaderboard and some sweet, sweet cheevos. But I feel like that's appropos for idle thumbs. Also: while I was comparison-shopping and googling for information on which model of fitbit to get, I found this article by David Sedaris about how he got a fitbit and it took over his life, and like everything David Sedaris writes, it's pretty great:

I just got a fitbit for tracking calories and sleep, if any thumbs want to be fitbit fitbuddies - https://www.fitbit.com/user/3PRJRX

Have you read With The Night Mail, by Rudyard Kipling? It's a fictional account of airship travel written when people were still pretty excited about zeppelins, and it's pretty great. Might be useful as a flavor touchstone for your game!

I like using the elliptical a lot, mostly because I enjoy just being able to zone out and not think about anything for 45-60mins. Elliptical time is also where I do a lot of podcast listening, to the point where the Idle Thumbs theme has got sense memory associations with the motion of the elliptical. When I was in my 20s, DDR was a favorite exercise method of mine, and I'd still play now if I hadn't gained so much weight that my ability to mentally process the steps now far outpaces my body's ability to move that fast, which means it will almost certainly kill me if I try to play at that level again until I get my weight back down. A friend of mine has started doing weight training within the last year and he wrote a pretty good thing about his experiences at the gym.

Painting more skin weights and putting in animation controls and landmark poses!

Every time I see promo videos from this game I get super excited about it, conceptually, because it does so many of the things that I wanted out of Eve and STO, but was disappointed to discover that in both those games, your ship is also your player avatar, and it's one player to one ship, rather than observing the party dynamic put forward in basically every space adventure story ever, which is: the ship is the vehicle for the party, and each party member has specific roles to carry out aboard the ship. Star Citizen's concept is the closest thing I've seen to delivering that dynamic, where you can party up with your friends and fly across the solar system and salvage a derelict or whatever, which means I'm also having to remind myself constantly that the scope of this thing is way too huge to possibly implement successfully, and to reel in my expectations every time I see new material from it. But aw man, if only. If only.

Man your stealth game looks so slick.

Link was only broken because there was a comma piggybacking on the URL, it works fine - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 I also forced the update, rather than waiting.

I think I saw the first one of those sometime last year, when you linked them in the UE4 thread, and it never even occurred to me to consider that anybody might want to edit geometry inside a level editor, I just sort of took it as read that static meshes were something you did in max/maya/blender and then imported into the editor. So that was a new and interesting concept for me, even though I suppose it ought to have been obvious.

I forgot to mention this in my post but I've yet to figure out a way to yank out Onedrive to my complete satisfaction. I have so many cloud storage accounts, Microsoft, I don't need another one.

I'm still using the windows 7 executable, and even before it would nag me to update, it just seems like it's happening more often now. I haven't tried to see if the win8 skype app works alongside the old executable, but I guess I can try it now! Edit: I just installed the Skype app and opened it and it is literally a button with a download link that says 'download skype'. Which is what I thought I just did. I'm not so curious that I'm willing to risk a new skype application overwriting my old executable, so that is really all I have to report.

The Unreal engine started as a level editor and still functions as one! It's a pretty good place to start and has hella tutorials and a big community around it for learning.

So after a day of noodling with windows 10, here is what I am digging: -The installation process was stupid easy, if you discount the 4gb download and all the updating. After the install, my laptop's desktop was basically the same except for the taskbar had a cosmetic makeover. Everything feels very familiar. -I actually kind of like live tiles. I kind of wish I had more live tiles for everything. I made my start menu fullscreen and put all my most-frequently-used applications on the start menu as tiles, where before I had them as desktop shortcuts. I want live tiles for steam activity and xbox friends and I want Google to get on the ball and make some win10 live tiles apps so that I can have Google Now cards on my start menu, because Google is way better at tracking my every movement and figuring out what I want before I want it than Win10 is. -I told Cortana to refer to me as 'friend' and she is now the correct level of Living In the Creepy Future for me. I set up my news headlines to report only on AI, space exploration, genetic science, and robotics, so that Cortana mostly just wants to talk to me about how afraid I should be of her people. -The mail app worked quickly and hooked right into my Gmail. I actually went and created another email address for a new domain name I'd registered a few months ago just so that I could go and set it up in Mail. Not digging quite so much: -I was really excited to dig through the app store just so that I could find more apps to festoon my start menu with live tiles, but the microsoft app store is like the Ross Dress for Less of app stores. I kind of expect more of the major app developers will get on the ball as the windows 10 install base mushrooms over the next few months but right now it's kind of sad. I installed the Trello, VLC, Netflix, Xbox, and native Twitter apps, but I kinda want the apps I use on my Android tablet to have more counterparts in the windows app store. -Oh, oh, oh, and and and: would you believe that the native Twitter app is terrible?? It's true! -Everything kind of looks.. too familiar? I was actually kind of dismayed by how little seemed to have changed on first impression. I mean that impression has changed now that I've gone in and thoroughly dug through the settings but I thought it would be more exciting. (That said, when I had to help one of my grandmother's friends get her windows 8 laptop set up I was kind of infuriated by how many unnecessary barriers they put in front of you when you are setting up a new install - requiring an internet connection and a microsoft account before you can think about using your laptop for anything was regulation bullshit. I suspect this was a universal reaction and, as other people in this thread have observed, windows 10 was an effort to make a less radical change.) -Skype wants me to update way harder than it did in windows 7. You don't get to update, Skype, so sit down before you fall down. -I know that I am the odd person out in that I'm super into having corporations surveil me if it means that I am able to derive value from the data that they learn about me (like: I love Google Now, and Netflix and Amazon's suggestion algorithms), but so far Microsoft really kind of does a terrible job of doing anything useful with that information. Microsoft's approach to advertising - at least, in my experience - has been a pretty milquetoast effort that mostly involves putting things in front of me that their advertising partners want them to put in front of me based on broad demographic information (age, gender, presumed voting habits, location), rather than my specific browsing, purchasing, or email history.

I have upgraded my windows 7 to windows 10 and honestly I'm kind of disappointed by how the same everything is, at least on the surface. One of the fun things I really liked about getting an Android tablet is how once I logged into google, it spent 20 minutes downloading my entire life history and knew everything there was to know about me. I logged into Windows 10 with my microsoft account and I'm kind of dismayed that it doesn't immediately link up with my xbox and skype. Boo! Spy on me harder, microsoft!!