Ive been concentrating on my homework so thati can get it finished in time to be accepted into Uni. I’m one of theose people who have dropped out of school so didnt complete some required subjects(maths)

So the homework material is what you would expect from grades 11 and 12 in Australia; logarithm, exponents, vectors, matrices, polynomials, differentiation, calculus etc. I’ts not really that difficult to do, luckily, since I don’t have more than about 3 weeks to have it all completed and handed in.

I am writing out my work using LaTeX, so that my equations look spiffy, and they do. Seriously, LaTeX takes an afternoon to learn the basic structure then every time you want to deal with something new about 10 minutes on the google oracle. Theres no point in me writing any guides because so many good ones exist out there, so i will share some links to things that have been very helpful to me.

• amsmath
• graphicsx
• polynom
• enumerate

Something else that took a little longer to get right was gnuplot, so that I could show some pretty graphs. I use it in conjunction with psfrags package to get LaTex style equation labels on the graph itself, it looks really cool.

And heres some other links to save you time in google.

• AoPS Wiki
• Random helpful gnuplot+psfrags tutorial
• Comprehensive Tex Archive Network(CTAN)
• LaTeX FAQ
• AMS-LaTeX

Thanks or reading

So haven’t written anything here for a month, how lax of me. When I failed to keep up to date one week I thought that I had better bring something special to the table, and sure there is some special stuff but its not what I had in mind originally.

Yes, well technically its a SGI logo modelled from blocks I modelled using blender.

Thoughts:

• I guess perhaps I should change my target for a model every two weeks.

Firstly the concept is not mine but this fellows so thanks go to him for the inspiration.

Thoughts:

• It was really hard to figure out some of the perspective from the concept i had to wing it a lot
• Took me much longer than I anticipated, probably 10-15 hours
• I wanted to use subsurf for this model to give it more smooth look, but didn’t end up doing so, i think it shows
• this would look 1000 times better with some good textures to give that extra detail

I’m getting used to cmake slowly and I’m writing up some little tutorials I hope to add here later. I want to go and test my build systems on windows too, which I have a laptop with XP installed to help with. but its kind of a pain to have to move desks, copy files etc.

So why not setup a virtual host?

Thanks to Vintage Projects for having the plans on their website

Thoughts:

• Define the level of detail you want at the beginning, going back afterwards isn’t as much fun
• Stamina was flagging at the end, but I got there
• Probably a good 20 hours of work in this piece
• [CTRL + V], [1] = Remove Doubles
• “Skin Faces/Edge-Loops” is a godsend
• I should find a better way to cut a circle out of a rectangle
• Now its time to learn some materials for a cut-away look
• and rig it for animation

Again thanks Freddy for letting me use your image as a reference

Thoughts:

• Sculpt is ridiculously easy to use for touching up your mostly finished model
• I should start using the image as a backdrop to help with the scale

I’ve been trying out cmake and it seemed ok, but because I’m not that good a programmer I ran into trouble with the fact that there is really only a reference manual and no tutorials. I cant afford to purchase a book to see if it will help.

So anyway, perserverance is the thing to making it work.

I’ve been terribly lazy and pretty much copied the example from here. but it gets the point across I think. not that its yet useful.

Seriously I had no time this week, one of my uncle Richard died so i had a funeral sat, it was fathers day sun, all during the week I had things I needed to attend etc. so I quickly extruded a cube performed some bevel and it looked sort of spacey.

Thoughts:

• some thing is better than nothing
• more details would make it look cool like arials, rocket engines, lighting, rails, paneling, windows with visible insides, starry backdrop, docked craft, visible little ppl, and random branding.