Author Archives: Christopher Roe

About Christopher Roe

The Artist Formerly Known As Mel Ebbles. I'm a programmer, 3D modeler, papercraft designer, gamer, and tinkerer. I live in the Republic of Texas with my wife Gin and 4 cats.

Photoshop CS5 Extended first impressions

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Photoshop CS5 Extended and the external hard drive arrived yesterday!
Still waiting for the new computer, but curiosity got the best of me. I installed the CS5 Extended tryout on my old notebook because I didn’t want to waste a product activation on the old hardware. I had a bit of a play around with the new 3D features–as expected, the poor dear doesn’t have the graphics horsepower to make full use of these new features, but it wasn’t completely unusable.

That image above is 100% Photoshop–I didn’t even fire up Carrara or anything like that. I imported the Despoiler as a 3D layer, set it up to use image-based lighting, and then grabbed some cheesy overcast sky background off the Internet and dropped that into a layer below it. I’m actually surprised it turned out okay. I still prefer Carrara 8’s renderer for box art and promos, but Photoshop’s renderer is easily good enough for instructions and Workbench snapshots.

I did another quickie test to see if PSD files with embedded 3D content would still load in OpenOffice.org:

And they do! That’ll simplify instructions quite a bit. It’ll be nice not to have to fire up Carrara just to do instructions.

Speaking of that big project…

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Back in February, I announced that I’d taken on a programming contract for all of March. It takes a lot to get me to agree to do contract work, but this particular contract was an easier sell for me than any of the other requests I’ve received over the years.
It was an opportunity to work with my friend Denny Unger on the new website/storefront for WorldWorks Games. We’ve worked together in the past on other, smaller projects, and he’s a lot of fun to work with. It wasn’t exactly a “You had me at hello” thing at first, I admit, but the offer of up-front payment and the fact that Denny’s easy to work with sweetened the deal enough to break the ice.

So, we’ve been working together since March on WWG’s new home on the Internet. Denny handled the graphic design and artwork, and my job was to turn his static compositions/mockups into living, breathing webpages. Here’s a little teaser that should bring a smile to your face:

Yes, that’s a product page for one of my models.
As for the rest of the project, I can’t really discuss any technical details or anything of the sort yet. That will all come in due time, when WWG begins to post teasers and announcements of their own. What I can tell you, however, is that this is a pretty huge project, and I’m doing the whole codebase from the ground up.
There’s also a second half to this big project: adding my old stuff to the WWG storefront. A bit over half of my catalog didn’t make the cut because it was just too old and stale. Specifically, anything from before 2007 is gone forever. Out of the remaining stuff, about half needs some touch-up work, a bit of a makeover, or reformatting for machine-cutter compatibility. As an example of minor touch-up work, stuff like the Sandmaster V will be getting new store graphics, like the promotional render shown below:

In the case of makeovers and reformats, stuff like the Itoyo 950 are getting new store graphics, a bit of a texture refresh, and reformatting to support machine-cutters:

As one final bit of teasing, I want to show off the catalog thumbnail format that Denny and I put together for my stuff:

Finally, it’s upgrade time!

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I normally schedule major upgrades for my hardware and software every 5 years, and I was overdue for a major upgrade for months. Just didn’t have the money or opportunity to make it happen earlier in the year. The fact that my desktop workstation, which normally handles everything that my convertible notebook didn’t have the graphics horsepower to handle, died a few months ago added a bit of uneasy panic to the equation. 
I wasn’t able to work on any models that had textures larger than 1024x1024px as a result of that hardware failure, and my large paper model output dropped sharply as the amount of time needed to work on models increased. That was a crippling blow to my already weak sales, which really didn’t help matters any when tax time rolled around. It was also another reason I took a programming contract for all of March–there just wasn’t any feasible way for me to crank out enough small paper models to make the bills.
I had resigned myself to not being able to upgrade my toolset for the foreseeable future, and I sort of came to terms with that after closing down all direct sales. Of course, fate has a funny way of going about things. I finally had an opportunity to upgrade my hardware and software the other day. There was a catch, however–the timing really wasn’t good, because of our financial situation, and it was a very limited window of opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.

I had a chance to get the full boxed DVD version of Photoshop CS5 Extended at a really steep discount from a software liquidator. My current convertible isn’t up to running CS5 Extended (it can just about keep up with plain old Photoshop CS!), so in order to make the most of that acquisition, I would have had to replace my computer. And wouldn’t you know it, there was a promotion for the kind of laptop I wanted from the hardware supplier that I had a line of credit with. Oh, I was torn. I went out to talk to a singularly unhelpful Mrs E, who was of the same indecisive mind that I was. Sometimes being on the same wavelength 90% of the time isn’t necessarily a good thing!

In the end, I pulled the trigger. If I had let that opportunity slide, I’d never be able to get back on my feet with my existing, aging toolset. On the other hand, going for the opportunity would make an already tenuous financial situation go from bad to worse. Yet, on the third hand, not doing this now could easily mean waiting months or years for a similar opportunity to arise. So, I just took a big leap of faith and did it.
As of this moment, I’m the proud, excited, terrified, and even more broke owner of Photoshop CS5 Extended, a new 1TB external hard drive, and a much more modern laptop with more graphical horsepower than my old desktop workstation and convertible notebook combined. The laptop will ship sometime in the middle of the month after it’s been assembled and tested. Photoshop and the external hard drive are supposed to arrive sometime this week. It was a good bargain, but one that I really wish had come during better financial times.
For you, this means I can actually work on the huge, bill-paying paper models once again, after the big coding project is wrapped up. 

The Lounge is now open

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I added an embedded Nabble forum for those occasional moments when blog comments don’t cut the mustard. Got questions that aren’t relevant to one of my blog posts? Just wanna chat about something random? Got stuff you wanna share? Grab the hot beverage of your choice and pull up a stool in the Lounge!

No registration needed or anything like that–it’s optional, and you can just go straight to the posting bit without any account hassles.

We need to get out more…

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Would you believe that my wife and I completely forgot that today was Easter Sunday?

We were watching The Amazing Race when Mrs E suggested we get a pizza from Papa Murphy’s, the neighborhood take-and-bake chain. It sounded pretty good to me–the prices are good, the ingredients are fresh, and they prepare the thing right there in front of you like a Subway. Except with pizza instead of sandwiches. Anyway, she goes out to score the pizza, and 20 minutes after she left, I get a text message from her saying it’s Easter Sunday and Papa Murphy’s is closed.

Uh-oh. So’s the grocery store. And just about every other place that appealed. Our cupboards are empty because we were too busy to go grocery shopping earlier in the weekend. We’re both starving by this point in time, and we made the semi-desperate decision to hit the local Denny’s for supper, since they were one of the few places that were open.

It was a surprising experience. Now, this is Denny’s, and my expectations for restaurants like that are pretty low. I’m talking “Please, Lord, I hope we don’t get food poisoning” low. I ordered their double cheeseburger because I didn’t believe their menu photo for one minute–I thought it would be a sad little biscuit-sized travesty with 2 vaguely beefy-tasting slices of processed meat product, placed forlornly in a depressing nest of limp, flaccid, and soggy fries. Instead, I actually got a I-shit-thee-not massive double cheeseburger that looked like it needed to be renamed Humongorr the Burgernormous. I had to sort of nibble at it rather than being able to bite into it, even after mashing it down to something that wouldn’t require me to dislocate my jaw to eat.

It wasn’t bad. About a six on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being “microwave burger from vending machine” and 10 being Mighty Fine Burgers. Next time, I get the regular sized burger, because damn. Fries were surprisingly OK as well.

Mrs E picked out the Tsing Tsing Chicken as the appetizer, and she had some sort of BLT sandwich with a really unfortunate name that made me think of whoopee cushions. The Tsing Tsing Chicken is, as the name implies, supposed to be some sort of Chinese-style sweet-and-spicy chicken. I wasn’t expecting much from it either, but I was pleasantly surprised. It actually tasted way better than the typical “meaty lumps in red sauce”, “meaty lumps in brown sauce”, or “meaty lumps in slightly redder sauce with sesame seeds” kind of stuff you get at the local Chinese buffets. I was stunned when the waitress asked us if we wanted ranch dressing with it. Ranch dressing? With Chinese-ish kreplach? The horror.

We were planning to try the bacon maple sundae (they’re running this Baconalia thing for 10 weeks where they add 7 bacon-themed dishes to the menu), but we were much too stuffed to even entertain the thought. Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like: vanilla ice cream, maple syrup, topped with crumbled bacon. We’re gonna try that next time.

I’m about three minutes from a meat coma, so I’m gonna pack it in for the night.