On that note; Happy New Year everyone..

I’m still very keen on creating my own custom blogging software as I posted previously and it’s something that I definitely am going to get around to but its slow going.  I’ve been working on it about an hour each night if the time is available.

But, I have to admit I’ve been playing a lot of the new Star Wars game the Old Republic (the new massively multiplayer online awesomeness by Bioware) and it’s really quite a lot of fun. It has problems but it’s addicting and it’s new, if nothing else.  It’s not fantasy which is one of my biggest complaints about all the other games that are out there,  I was so fantasy-ed out that I’m glad I’m finally playing something that’s space related and futuristic.  To be honest, it’s actually quite good.   I have been filing bugs and and making suggestions and hopefully some of them will get listen to but honestly the game is pretty good straight out of the gate and should be a huge win for Bioware.  Blizzard should be concerned.

And also I wanted to talk briefly about Christmas, I got an iPad2 for Christmas I have to admit it’s the greatest piece of hardware I’ve ever had.. It’s actually a lot of fun. I kind of see it as just a toy right now but the more I play with it the more I can see myriads of useful business and social applications for it.  No matter what you say, it has a lot of potential and there’s a lot of really neat stuff you can do with it.   If I were to use  a single word to describe the iPad I would call it “clever”.

I’ve been digging around on the Internet and asking my friends about good apps for the iPad and two of them come immediately to the four as being awesome. One of them is called flipboard which basically turns all of your social media and websites and the Internet in general into a magazine that you can kind of peruse at your leasure and the other one is oddly enough, dragon dictation which does just what you’d expect;  you can just talk at your iPad and it translates everything you’re saying into text (which by the way is how I’m posting this now).  It’s not perfect the Dragon NaturallySpeaking solution though is better than any I’ve ever seen and so I can see a lot more postings coming in the future since now I can just talk to my blog.

It’s definitely not perfect I have to do a little bit of filtering and word replacements but I actually think it’s pretty damn good.   If anything my one complaint is that it’s pretty bad about punctuation.

Click for Example

Final Update:  Okay.. I owe a huge apology to the wordpress folks..  After doing a bunch of digging this isn’t a wordpress bug at all, but rather a server exploit that someone used to edit a good portion of the .php files on my site in order to inject their shitty obfuscated iframe crap.  There were files that were edited completely outside the realm of wordpress, on my server that the wordpress user didn’t even have access too.. So wordpress is completely off the hook!  Sorry guys.

Now having said that I’m still planning on making my own blogging software for funsies.. but I am not feeling as much pressure now since I now know how to purge the iframes off and wordpress isn’t to blame.

Update: Click the image to the right to see the highlighted code that got injected into the site tonight.. I have no clue how it got in there and am actively taking steps to figure it out.. it’s magically there one second then a refresh shows its gone..   I have tested my codebase thoroughly and I can’t find it anywhere, nor can I find it in any of the javascript that is being called..  Either way,  Please don’t install or run anything that you download from my site.  Note: I’m deactivating all extra plugins for the time being until I figure out whats causing this.

As many of you know, I am very much my own special kind of nerd.  I enjoy doing many a’geeky thing that others wouldn’t even dream of.  To be honest, I think all software engineers have to be a bit brain damaged just to do their job.  Recently my own affliction has been leading me down the path of writing my own blogging and content management system.

I have used a lot of different packages over the years from full on CMS systems like Joomla and Mambo to more specific blogging solutions like WordPress and Blogger..  They all have their good points and their bad points..  I have stuck with wordpress the longest as it most fit my need, but the more I dig into programming for wordpress the more I hate it..  I really think that wordpress needs to be rewritten from the ground up, but that’s a post for a different thread..

Long story short, I have decided to begin work on my very own blogging and content management system that is fully featured and professionally developed.    My ultimate goal is to make it a fully featured suite of tools that folks can install and use for their own site that has a very low bar to entry.    It should be easy to install and work seamlessly out of the box..etc..

The main reason lately that this has become an issue is that I’m tired of having folks hack/inject code into my headers and footers.   I have done everything I know to do to harden my wordpress install, yet I am still constantly fighting random crap showing up in the various theme files on the site.

I hate it!

It’s frustrating and not fun.  More over, if they have the ability to do that then they have the ability to inject all manner of malicious code..

So with that I’m going to begin designing and building something that can do all the work I need and take all the stuff already done (all of my wordpress blog) and convert it.. etc..

Gonna be a lot of work.. design will be huge, but should be good in the long run if for no other reason than something fun to do..  yes.. I see this as fun..

Not with software.  With software once purchased you’re stuck with it.   There is typically a very strict “no return” policy, and this sucks.  It’s to the point now where most stores wont even take back unopened software.  Once the transaction is done, its done.

So if you get that software home and it just plain doesn’t work, you’re hosed.  You’re just out that money, and you have absolutely zero recourse other than to not purchase that companies software any more.  That’s where I’m at with Ubisoft.

The reasoning for having zero recourse, and the reasoning you can’t return software is very simple;  Software piracy.   If you buy a TV at Walmart you can’t take it home and clone it.   But you can with software, so the industry as a whole assumes that everyone is out to clone their software because we are all dishonest, thus this ‘no-return’ shenanigans goes on in the name of loss prevention.

I mean seriously, this is a whole industry that thinks and treats their customers as crooks..   What other industry blatantly dislikes and mistrusts their own customers this much?

The problem is that major software companies like Ubisoft bank on the fact that you can’t return their shit, so they are more than happy to churn out crappy product after crappy product.   More over, since they know you have no recourse they don’t bother to provide any form of support for those crappy products.    So this is yet another example of the software industry screwing the honest consumer.

I purchased Silent Hunter 5 in the hopes of being able to play it, and it doesn’t work.  It crashes every time I run it.  I have installed/reinstalled it a number of times and have followed all the instructions I can find.  I have updated all drivers on my system to include bios and mobo drivers and still have the exact same issue.  No other game has this issue except this one.

It still doesn’t work.

I have posted on the Ubisoft support forums and have gotten zero responses.  I submitted a ticket to Ubisoft about the issue only to have a canned response telling me that my drivers were out of date… which they aren’t.

I honestly and in good faith purchased this product to play it, and for whatever reason it doesn’t work.  As a customer I believe I have a reasonable expectation of getting support for this product, but apparently that’s not the case as zero support has been forthcoming.

So, I should be allowed to return it.   But I can’t and they know it, and this pisses me off.   I’m just stuck with this dead piece of software.

So now my only recourse is to simply never buy anything Ubisoft again.  First you call me a crook by forcing me to use your shitty DRM, and now you call me a crook by refusing to let me return a product that is clearly broken all because you think I’m a pirate.

See.. the irony is, you guys hate your customers so much and fear software piracy so much that you have gone to such extraordinary lengths to stop it only to have succeeded in creating the very environment in which it’s acceptable by even the most honest person..

You obviously hate your honest consumers, well I hate you back.  Fuck you Ubisoft, your dead to me.

I will never buy another Ubisoft product.  You shouldn’t either.

Recently Adobe announced that they would be offering their software at rental subscription prices and I was excited!   What a great idea!!  But did they do it right?  I don’t think so.. but they are so close!

Lets take Adobe Flash Professional as an example of whats going on, and their likely reasons behind it;  If you purchase the full version it costs $799 and the simple fact of the matter is, most individuals wont want to pay that kind of money for a piece of software.  So really the only purchasers of their code were companies that could easily absorb that cost (or the rare individual like myself that is willing to pay).   At $799 even “honest joe” will pirate the software if he really wants it.

At that price point they have completely alienated the casual user.   More over that price point only serves to encourage the casual user to pirate the software because its not even remotely affordable.  I’m not saying its right to pirate by any stretch, but I am saying that even an honest person can rationalize doing so when the price point is so far out of their reach.   Many would say eight hundred or eight million, it makes no matter so screw it.

More over, most software companies look at each pirated copy of their software as lost revenue, thus as a general rule they resort to raising the price even higher so that the companies that do make the purchase help to recoup costs and offset the fact that the software is pirated so much.. causing a vicious cycle.  Ubisoft is very guilty of this..

So the question becomes, how do you get the casual user?   What is the price point most people are willing to throw at a piece of software?  And in the subscription model;  How much are people willing to spend monthly on something?

Lowering the cost of the software to something the casual user would be able to afford simply isn’t the answer because then suddenly they lose all the money they were getting when companies were purchasing the software.  So even though it sure would be nice to get Adobe Flash Professional for $50.. it wont happen..heh

So the subscription model really does seem like a good option as it allows those who have the money to purchase the full software to do so, and those who want to try the software out or to keep an active subscription to do so without breaking the bank.

But here is where they are missing a huge opportunity that most MMO game creators have already figured out..  Something I like to refer to as the 10% rule or the 90/10 rule (maybe related to the Pareto Principle?).

And that is simply, if you set the monthly subscription rate at the correct price point a vast majority of people wont bother to ever cancel it because it’s beneath their notice.    According to my sources inside, Blizzard has about 10% of their accounts that remain open and paid for, but they are never played simply because the monthly fee is low enough that it’s below the radar of the consumer.

I really do think that the subscription model is the future of software publishing and purchasing, but I really believe Adobe has missed the mark a tad by setting the price point too high.

In my humble opinion Adobe is a few dollars away from a goldmine..  If they were to set the price point for their new subscription model to $15 with a year contract or $25 (at most!) without, most people would never bother to cancel the subscription.   Then maybe they could also offer a $35 rent to own model or even a variable “choose your own rate” rent to own model as I’m sure there are folks who’d want that too..   But the current $49 month to month is just too high as the first month they don’t use it, they’ll notice and cancel it.

Even so I salute you Adobe for bringing your awesome software to the casual users again.. Thanks for that.   Now if you don’t mind I’m gonna go buy Flash Professional.

Ibanez Mandolin

I have always enjoyed wood working and have done a bit of wood turning in my time.   And as I have mentioned before (more than once), I have always wanted to play an instrument of some kind..   Recently it occurred to me that there was no reason I couldn’t combine these two activities..

To that end, I decided to try my hand at becoming a hobby luthier (a maker of stringed instruments) and make myself something to play..    I went back and forth considering all the options and decided that for my first instrument I’d like to make a Mandolin.  ( Dulcimer was a close second and I’ll likely make one of those in the future, as well as making a Viola if I can manage to do this with any proficiency.  )

So with that I purchased an inexpensive Ibanez Mandolin just to have an instrument to start learning on and use as a guide..  Since I have no experience what so ever, this instrument is what I will use to learn on and as a guide for what my instrument should sound like..  This wasn’t a very expensive instrument, and it sounds fine to me.   I’m sure the really expensive / nice mandolins that are out there sound better but at this point I simply don’t know the difference..   My end goal at this point is to make my home made mandolins sound as good as this one — better would be nice, but I just am not sure what that means yet.

This will be a hobby activity for me and I’ll very likely want to make more than one Mandolin, but first I need to attempt to make something that’s reasonably close just as a learning exercise.   Not the “finished” product by any stretch but rather the first “rough draft” instrument that I can screw up on without fear of anything lost other than my time..

Bluegrass Mandolin Construction Manual

I fished around on the internet for reading / instructional material as well as any kits and came across a very good book put out by Roger Siminoff (a man with “a little bit of experience” on the issue having been doing this forever) on the construction of an f-type bluegrass mandolin.  An excellent manual that basically walks you through the entire process one page at a time, complete with plans!   It’s a good purchase and I can highly recommend it..

Roger offers a really nice kit that seems to go with his book, but it costs over $500 and I just didn’t think that would be a good beginners project.  So I settled on getting an inexpensive Saga AM10 Mandolin Kit to experiment on which I got off ebay for less than $90..

Mandolin in Fixture

As kit’s go, I’d say this one is extremely rough, to the point of being bad, as very few of the parts matched up, even a little..  The instructions that came with it were meager at best, and very poor in most cases..  The strings it came with are worthless (the e string broke trying to bring it up to tension, I didn’t even get it close to tuned and it popped)..  The back didn’t fit the body at all, being undersized compared to the top and required a heck of a lot of work.. The neck didn’t fit the main body at all, again a lot of work..etc..

Bottomless Mandolin

I think a beginner woodworker would have had a very difficult time with this kit to be honest.. I have a lot of tools, experience and time with wood so it wasn’t too bad for me but even so I had to make a bunch of jigs and fixtures in order to get things to line up and work correctly.   But even with my best effort just due to how it was cut my neck isn’t correctly centered on the soundboard which will make stringing it interesting..   The tail piece is half an inch off center unfortunately which means the bridge is off center..etc..  I have no idea how that is going to affect the sound of the instrument but in all likelihood it won’t do it justice.

All things considered though, I’m actually happy with my results so far..  It’s taken me just shy of 3 weeks to get it all worked up and to the point of getting strings on it.  (Mostly working on the weekends and an hour or two in the evenings during the week when I could..

One string Mandolin

Today I added the very first string to the instrument and tuned it up just to see what it sounded like..  Shockingly it sounded like a D!  The instrument didn’t have any kind of odd barks or vibrations though it does sound slightly different than the Ibanez I purchased above.

I have added 4 other strings to it at this point and the difference in the sound is still there, but I simply am not articulate enough with sound and instrument theory to describe to you the difference.. it’s just slightly different.. Not better, not worse.. different.

Even so, I’m pretty happy so far with how things are going.

Frozen Synapse

I have always been a huge fan of the turn based tactical isometric games such as Jagged Alliance, JA2, Xcom..etc..  For whatever reason that style of meticulous gameplay always appealed to me, but I had always assumed I was alone in my passion because those games never seemed to last very long in favor of first person shooters or real time strategy games..etc..

In fact, the industry as a whole has completely moved away from turn based game play, which I find to be a shame. Well thank god there are awesome independent developers around to fill the void!

Frozen Synapse is just the turn based top down tactical game that I have been craving for years.  It has a wonderfully fun and even somewhat dark sense of humor and most importantly, awesome gameplay.

There is nothing better than a game with deceptively simple gameplay that provides hours and hours of fun because it’s extremely challenging to master..

Plus it’s multiplayer!!  How awesome is that?!

I can’t tell you the number of times I said that XCom needed to be multiplayer so that I could play against my friends.. And sure as heck they did it here..

The interface is a little confusing at first, as it takes some time to understand what all the different commands do..  Plus as a whole the interface is kinda weak, but other than that I think this is an excellent game.

I wish I could give each character more than the one weapon, but I understand why they did things the way they did and so I wont ding them on that.. All in all I think it’s a very good game guys.. well done.

4.5 out of 5 losing that half for some interface suckery..   Still, if you know me.. 4.5 is an awesome score.

Red Faction: Armageddon

I played Red Faction back in 2001 when it first came out and enjoyed the heck out of it.   It was the very first game to come out with the Geo-Mod game engine which allowed for massive destruction of the game models and levels.   The game itself was otherwise unremarkable, but the fact that you could destroy everything made it awesome.

I find it funny that one little thing like that can make or break a game entirely, and the massively destructable nature of the Red Faction games entirely “makes” these titles.

Red Faction II was one of those games that came out only a year or so later but it managed to skip my notice and the series sorta fell off my radar.

The other day I picked up the latest in the franchise; Red Faction: Armageddon.   And I’m glad to say that it’s up to the original games standards in all ways .. to include the shortcomings..

Let me start by saying that by all standards it’s a good game all things considered, and I did enjoy it.  But there are some cons:

This game is of course plagued by one of my common complaints with all games these days;  The game is too short.. by a long shot..  That’s typical of all games though so I think the industry as a whole is trying to bring our game length expectations down fraction by fraction until we get a 3 hour tour for the same $60.  Oh well.. This game is longer than some, and I realize that for every minute of gameplay it likely takes them months.. but still..  This game clocks in at about 10 hours.

And it also suffers from another common issue with games these days;  Its too easy..   My theory as to why this happens lately is because most of the modern games are first made for consoles, and then ported to PC.. as such the controls on a PC are much easier to use, so the situations you’re in are suddenly that much easier?  This is a wild guess, but it will likely seem logical to anyone who has tried (and failed horribly) to play a game on a console using those crap controllers..  I can see how any game would be difficult if you handicap someone with one of those damn things..

Most games have at least 4 difficulty settings; Easy, Normal, Hard and Expert.. Or some myriad of names that equate to the same thing..  And in just about every game out there, I know that I should start playing it on “Hard” because anything easier would be pointless.   I can’t imagine how simplistic and juvenile “Easy” must be on these games because “Hard” is anything but..  This game suffers badly in this area because even on “Hard” I didn’t find it remotely challenging.  ”Hard” should be difficult.  Make it a challenge so that I will want to play through again..

I think its likely that game makers are afraid of making their games actually difficult because then people might get frustrated and stop playing.. However, I’m of the opinion that making a game like this too easy even when set on “hard” in order to keep the game “fun” is akin to handing the little league losers a trophy for participation..   Reward me for doing well, not for just showing up.  If I set the game to “hard” I believe it’s reasonable to expect the game to actually be difficult.

And finally my major complaint about the game is the weapons they give you.    Within the first minute or two of gameplay they give you the ONLY WEAPON YOU WILL EVER NEED; the gravity gun.   Now, I don’t want to complain about the gravity gun.. there is nothing more fun that hurling a whole building of destructive debris at an enemy.. and you generally have a reasonable expectation of doing fairly well when you use the same gun to hurl an enemy at a far wall only to watch him gib.     But, why do I need the other guns?

They give you a whole slew of other wizbang cool guns and more ammo than you can shake a stick at just lying around but I can honestly say I didn’t even start using ANY of them until near the very end of the game.  Up to that point I just used the gravity gun to do everything..   Either tossing the mobs around or throwing entire structures at them..  The other guns seemed pointless mostly.. and the ludicrous amounts of ammo lying around, doubly so.

This game is also extremely linear, so much so if you get out of the “area” you’re supposed to be in a countdown to your doom will appear.. better boogy back to where you’re supposed to be pronto..  I don’t really want to hold this up as a complaint though, this isn’t a sandbox game and like the original was never meant to be..   Still I can see how some might be put off by the count down thing..

All in all though I enjoyed the game.   There is still something very appealing about being about appease your darker side by waging wanton destruction on the carefully designed levels..  And if you’re not giddily giggling like a school girl over being about to toss mobs around like rag dolls to their ultimate doom, then you don’t know how to have a good time..  it was fun.  Though it’s replayability is pretty much zero.

I give this game 3.5 out of 5. (That’s a good score from me.)

Toiletduck's World of Tanks Contour Icons

So I find that I am still playing quite a lot of World of Tanks.  Great game!  I’m having a lot of fun with it.   However, I think the UI needs a bit of work.  One of the areas where I think it lacks is with regards to the vehicle icons, which are very uninformative.

So with that, I made my own and offer them for download here:

Toiletducks World of Tanks Contour Icons.zip

Game Version: v.0.6.5
File Size: 1,476 KB

For now the armor values only reflect the hull values of the vehicle in question.   In my next iteration I am thinking of showing the lowest value between the hull and turret and giving some indication as to which you should aim for..etc..   Still pondering it.

A couple screenshots below if the icons in action.  Feedback is appreciated.

Icon Installation:

Step 1.  LOCATE YOUR WOT INSTALL
	Locate your World of Tanks Install directory.   For the purposes of
	these instructions we assume your WOT game directory is
	C:\World_of_tanks
	If you're unsure, right click the game icon, choose properties
	and it should tell you there.

Step 2.  OPEN THE ZIP FILE
	Open the downloaded zip file containing the new Icons.
	Don't extract them yet, we can just drag right out of
	the zip archive window to the destination.

Step 3.  BACK UP OLD ICONS!
	In Explorer go to C:\World_of_Tanks\res\gui\maps\icons\vehicle and
	right click over the "contour" directory and select "RENAME".  Rename
	this directory to "contour-bak".  This will save our current icons.

Step 4.  DRAG AND DROP
	Drag the "contour" directory from the zip file, to the explorer window
	vehicle directory. You should now see 3 directories in that folder and
	a lot of TGA files.  Those three directories are; contour, contour-bak,
	and small.  

	This installs the icons, but not the flash files.  If you ever don't
	want to use the icons any longer simply delete/rename the contour
	directory and then rename contour-bak to contour.

Step 5.  BACK UP OLD FLASH!
	In Explorer go to c:\World_of_Tanks\res\gui\flash and right click and
	rename each of the following files;

	battleloading.swf
	PlayersPanel.swf
	StatisticForm.swf

Step 6.  DRAG AND DROP, Again
	Once those are all named -bak or whatever, drag the 3 .swf files
	from the zip file, to the explorer window flash directory.

	This installs the flash files required to take advantage of the
	new icons.
	Note this step is NOT 100% necessary but if you don't do it, the
	enemy icons will be backwards.  Again if you ever want to uninstall
	these icons simply remove and rename the old files and you're good
	to go.

Hostgator Sucks

I have moved my hosting off Hostgator because frankly, they suck.     My site was suffering repeated down times, crashes, database disconnects, SSH daemon crashes/hangups, ..etc..

The big pisser for me though was the SSH restricted access that they had given me, combined with the more recent downtime..

For whatever reason I’d try to SSH into my account and it would fail acting as if there was no SSH daemon running..  I’d have to contact them via their live chat system, wait in queue forever for some support monkey to help me, only to have them either tell me that;  A) nothings wrong.  B) I don’t have an account with them or best of all C) “Oh yeah we changed the SSH port to ### now.. use that.. ”

Seriously?  You just up and changed the SSH port?  Why?!  It’s been 22 for ever.. Now suddenly its 2222? … WHY?!

Apparently their support team is filled with more assholes than a donkey in an iron maiden..

Okay that probably wasn’t fair, but it was funny =)..  But I mean seriously, If I can’t SSH/SCP into my box then there is a serious issue here..  They also have it setup apparently so that you can’t have more than 2 SSH connections at a time, and each time you SCP a file to/from the box it creates a new connection, thus that’s the reason for the failure of the third connection attempt and the reason you have to wait for 3 minutes for those connections to time out.  (Or so their tech support drone said.. )  What a crock of shit..

And when I did finally manage to SSH in they had me stuck in a jail shell so I can’t do dick anyway.. I just wanted to use screen people.. that’s all!!

It wasn’t so bad 2 years ago when I first got the account, but it’s been getting worse and recently my site was down for nearly 48 hours.. Done.. Stick a fork in me..

I’m kicking them to the curb..  Their shit stinks and if they continue they are going to be hurting for business..

EDIT:  Okay so I did talk to them at length over the phone about the service I was getting and they didn’t make a lot of excuses or try to be shady about it, but rather owned up to the issues and apologized.    While I am unhappy with their service, I am impressed at how they handled the whole thing..  They were very professional and courteous..   So with that I’m still moving on, but I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they are still a good company, if maybe just not the right ones for me.

SU 152 -- Current Render

I have been playing a lot of World of Tanks lately — more specifically, I have been playing the Soviet Tank Destroyers and I finally got into the tier 7 vehicle;  The SU-152.   I liked the look of the vehicle enough that I thought it would be fun to model one up.

I also thought I would twist this project up a bit and do two things I haven’t done before;

1. I will be creating this model in 1 hour increments, and will only spend a grand total of 10 hours on it.
2. At the end of 10 hours, I will release this model to the wild for free.

Now I may work on the model more than 10 hours once things are all said and done, but my goal is to get the model mostly done in that 10 hour period and release it.  Anything I do beyond the 10 hour period is mine =)

Also, I will say that as far as WoT goes, the SU-85 is much more fun to play and will likely also get a model from me once I get this 152 bug out of my system.

So with that here we go.

SU 152 -- Hour 1

Hour 1 — Setup and Initial shape

The first hour I spent setting up my backdrop images that I would be using to model this sucker as well as creating the basic lighting rig, and render settings.

Once I got all that crap out of the way (and I’m not sure it was fully fair of me to count that as part of the 10 hours.. but I did..) I started on the basic shape of the vehicle and had hoped to get a lot farther along than I did.

SU 152 -- Hour 2

Hour 2 — Refine basic shape

The second hour I spent getting the main body to match up with the backdrops and to get all the curvy bits to curve, and the straight bits to be straight.   The body you see is still synchronous along the x axis, but wont be for long.  Again I had hoped and planned to get more done in the second hour.

These hours are going by fast!  I wrote out a plan of what I thought I could get done in each hour and I’m failing to make the mark.

SU 152 -- Hour 3

Hour 3 — Rear end work and beginnings of road wheel

While I added a lot of rear end basic shape, the majority of the work in this hour was on the beginnings of that roadwheel.

The reason I spent so much time on it is because its a 100% subpatch, where as the main body of the tank isn’t at all.   This means the road wheel once done, is done.  Wont need to revisit it to get the detail out of it.  Even so again this hour flew by.

SU 152 -- Hour 4

Hour 4 — Making the body 100% subdividable

Okay so the subdivision thing had to be resolved as it’s unacceptable to me to model up something that can’t be subdivided.  So with that, this hour was spent converting the entire tank body to sub-d.   This pretty much ends the synchronous body work as the details I start to add are all going to be off center one way or another.

This was an ugly sub-d conversion as I really was pressed for time, but it works and renders out nicely as you can see.

SU 152 -- Hour 5

Hour 5 — More Roadwheel work

I spent this hour working on the road wheels.  The tracks are going to take the longest amount of time for sure, but I had hoped to have all of the road wheels done by this hour.  I had hour six set aside as the hour in which I would make the single track, and then in hour seven I’d get it correctly arrayed around the road wheels.

Well at this point I don’t have all the road wheels done.  I still have the six main road wheels, their spring assemblies, and the three return wheels to do.. =(

It’s becoming increasingly evident that 10 hours will not be enough time at my skill level to get this thing done.   I’ll likely release the 10hour model, then continue on with it and release more as I get more done.

SU 152 -- Hour 6

Hour 6 — Even More Road Wheels!

I spent this hour adding the six primary road wheels to the model.  Thankfully, its the same road wheel cloned a bunch of times so not a lot of extra work was needed.. I just had to create one wheel.    Even so it took a long time to get it looking the way my plans show.. its actually a very detailed wheel..

I still need to model up the linkages that go between the backs of the wheels and the hull, create the three return wheels and if I have time, add some of the details that are missing.

Once that’s done.. Track!

SU 152 -- Hour 7

Hour 7 — Road Wheel details and return wheels etc..

This hour (which in all honesty was closer to an hour and a half) was spent getting all the road wheel details in place.. The wheel pistons, spring assemblies, and return wheels are all in now.

Again thankfully I only had to do each one time, then clone them over and over.   I also skimped a little on some of the details just due to time.  Like for example, none of the wheels are actually connected to anything.. They just kinda float there.. I’ll get to that eventually, but so long as it doesn’t show up in a render…

In hour 8 I hope to get the track done, leaving hour 9 and 10 for the body details and gun.

No way in hell I’m making it in 10 hours..

Modo CTD

Hour 8 — Crash To Desktop

I love Modo.  I really think its easily one of the best modeling packages out there, but its instability pisses me off..

The application just randomly crashes to desktop sometimes for no apparent reason.   In 301 I used to avoid certain tools cause they just about always caused a CTD, but in 401 its mind bogglingly random.  You can use the same tool a 100 times on the exact same model, and on the 101′st time it will crash.

I end up saving my models quite often for fear that this will happen, cause I know it will.. I hate it..

SU 152 -- Hour 8

Hour 8 — The real thing..

Okay so after storming away from the computer in a fit of pique I came back and got back to working on what I was doing.  I was working on the roof doors and spring hatch assemblies.

Not much for an hours worth of work I know.. The crash really took it out of me..

Hour 9 will be my finishing off the roof and rear nurnies/greebles and then save hour 10 for the main gun.

I have accepted that there is no way I’m going to get the track on the tank within the 10 hours, so that will have to come at a later time. *sigh* sorry.

Either way, at hour 10 I’ll release a link to this model.

SU 152 -- Hour 9

Hour 9 — Roof Nurnies and Greebles

I went as fast as I could to get all the little roof details in and it still took me an age.   Most likely, for a 10 hour project I am employing way too much detail.. I just don’t know how else to do it..  The more I think about it the more I think that making extremely low poly models (for games and the like) is an art form that I’m not sure I’ll ever master.  (Modo says I’m up to 2.6 million polygons.. The WOT game version probably has only a couple hundred.. )

The rear end of the vehicles is still entirely unfinished and that sucks.  I’ll get to it, I wont let this one go unfinished as I am enjoying it but it wont happen in the 10 hours

I will be using hour 10 to work on the gun.

SU 152 -- Hour 10

Hour 10 — Gun!

Well I got as much done as I could in the short period of time that I had left for the main gun.. A lot is missing, and I’ll have to get to it as I can.

All in all this has been a very good experience.. 10 hours is no where near enough time to do anything remotely close to a fully finished project.

Plus, with the 2 CTD’s that happened, setup, odd breaks and overages.. this 10 hours was likely more like 13 and that just wasn’t enough..

My plan is to continue updating this guy and post the results here.

But as I promised above — Here’s the model – SU152 at 10 hours in Modo format:   SU152.zip

I would ask that you please not directly link to that file on your sites, but rather host it yourself.  If too many people start linking it I’ll be forced to remove it.

Usage;  You’re free to use this model in anyway you see fit so long as you please give credit where credit is due by mentioning my name {Jason ”Palamedes” Ellis} and give me a link back to this page so that others can use the model too.

Any and all comments are welcome..  Feel free to email me at;  

SU 152 -- Hour 11

And so it continues!

Hour 11 — Chin!

So I have gotten over my disappointment at not being able to finish the model in the alloted time period and continued to work on it.  During this hour I added the “chin” stuff that sits under the gun mantle.

I wont be updating the downloadable model on the site every time I do work.. But I will update it every couple of hours or as I see fit.

Also I might stretch the hours in to two or three hour sessions instead of a single hour in an attempt to get more done.  One hour is a very short amount of time and passes very quickly.

SU 152 -- Tracks

Hour 12 through 16 — Tracks!

Okay here you see the rear sprocket with 4 tracks wrapping around it..  I’m embarrassed at how many hours I have spent on not only modeling up a single track foot but also getting it correctly sized such that it can  actually articulate around the road wheels and sprockets.

I’m still no where near done.  There is no thickness to the tracks right now at all and I don’t have any pictures of the inside of the tracks, so I’m going to have to kind of make up some of that.

This is also a really bad render.. sorry about that..   Either way I’ll get it done and on the model so that it looks good eventually.. I like where I am headed with it finally, its just taking a long time..  Each track tread (foot? shoe?) has a lot of curves to it for traction that I want to get right.. More tomorrow.

SU 152 -- Hour 17/18

Hour 17 – 18 — Rear details

I stepped away from the tracks for a bit in order to do some rear details..  There is still a lot of work to be done back there and I need to get to it sooner or later.

I also changed the render light rig a tad bit by removing the directional light in favor of an area light.  The directional light was behaving oddly..

Also, the more I look at it the more I think my gas tanks aren’t large enough.  I’m looking at some research photos and in all photos they are clearly bigger than in my plans.. I’m going to scale them up a tad I think..