Category: Studio

Full of Renders, Comics, and BBQ

Posted on by Chewbode

I was able to get the final render for SCS047 off to Carl this morning. I found that supporting an alpha channel in the animation required QuickTime using the Animation codec with a depth Millions+ of colors.

Today was Free Comic Book Day. The whole family participated as we visited Emerald City Comics in Pinellas Park and The Comics Club in Brandon. We got a ton of stuff that I’m too tired to list here, but all-in-all, got some fantastic deals and bunch of fun reading material (and games!). We grabbed some food at a BBQ kiosk outside Emerald City and some Mexican at Vallarta’s in Brandon later in the day.

After all of that, since Melissa was back in town for the last day or two, we took her by the new house. Nothing’s changed since the photo’s I posted yesterday, but neither of the girls has been to that neighborhood since January, so it was fun to have them see the progress.

Gonna crawl into bed and try to find some fights on TV.

All Sorts of News

Posted on by Chewbode

A lot has happened since my last post. I’ll start with the more mundane…

I had trouble rendering SCS047 and guessed it was a Windows issue with my main workstation. So, about a week ago, I reformatted the box and re-installed everything. Since this is pretty painful to do, I thought it might be nice to make my C: drive an SSD, so I bought one and installed it. I made my old 1TB HD a secondary drive and installed less-used software to it. I also had a bunch of unused RAM laying around, so I upgraded the machine from 8GB to 16GB. I’ll most likely up it to 32GB in the coming months.

I got everything shiny and new, fired up LightWave and … the application crashed again. So, I decided it was time to upgrade from LightWave 10 to LightWave 2015.3, which ended up curing the problems. SO, I got back into the project again…

Work on SCS047 is moving along. I got approval from Carl on several ideas and changes to the final logo. I rendered it yesterday, but the final Uncompressed AVI file was not playable for some reason. I restarted the render again today with it outputting to the local SSD drive instead of the network share I put it on yesterday. There’s still another 35 minutes left. Fingers crossed.

I got word today that they broke ground on my new house. I’ll be swinging by the lot tomorrow to see where they are and take pictures, which I’ll post up here soon.

I finished upgrading my second ESXi instance. I’ve added a 5TB HD and extended the internal SATA ports to eSATA so I can hook up both an external 2TB HD and an external 3 TB HD. These will be JBODed and used as a local backup disk to compliment the cloud backups I’m doing. This box needs to be upgraded to 32GB of RAM in the next couple of months too.

And lastly, I accepted a position at a new company doing IT. I will be resigning from my current job on Monday, May 9. This has lit a huge fire inside me to start completing projects, etc. Feels good to know there’s a light at the end of that tunnel. More to come…

SCS047 Progress

Posted on by Chewbode

I worked from home today, so I was able to get a few personal things done while working for the office.

I’ve been able to build some vector assets for the project. I bounced a test video off of Carl to make sure he understood a weird asymmetry I found in a log. He gave it his blessing. I’m now in the process of creating a much better high-resolution version of the 3D assets.

I ordered a couple of $5 pizzas from Pizza Hut. I shouldn’t have. Buyer’s remorse. I will do much better tomorrow.

A New Era

Posted on by Chewbode

SunriseYesterday I received an email that all of the paperwork for the new house is finally complete. The process started in earnest on January 28, but it took some time to jump through all of the hoops. I have a meeting coming up soon where I’ll sit with construction team and go over the timeline. The expected completion date is early August. We’re pretty excited.

Even though it’s only been three months since I first started the process going, I’ve been planning out a new studio infrastructure for about a year. I’ve racked all of the equipment, ordered new network switches, and have been building a new server environment. Part of this has been virtualizing and normalizing all of the computers, which has been a challenge. The last piece of that will be completed this coming week, when I receive a new 5TB hard drive for one of the hypervisors. Once it’s installed, I’ll move the file server to it and be done building servers.

There are currently two projects I’m spinning up now: doing some design and animation side-work for Carl, and creating some landing pages on the internal webserver for all sites for all of the domains I own. The latter task is a two-phase project. Phase one will be all about building the sites in the server, dropping CMS systems in place, and getting the sites, most of which have been offline for years, at least responding again. Phase two involves building out internal “dev” versions of the sites, testing them, then rolling them out to the internet-facing production webserver. So, over the next several months, sites should be coming back online.

Well, it’s time to run some errands. I’ll post soon.

Life, Work, and Fun

Posted on by Chewbode

So, a lot has been going on lately. I’ve been working a decent amount (yeah, big surprise there), but I’ve also been getting organized in a lot of ways on the personal front too.

We went through a new logo redesign for Suncoast Studios a few months ago and recently we’ve printed up new business cards as a result. The next step is to do a website redesign, which is (kinda) underway right now. Actually, I’m building a development server, which is a first for SCS. Normally I make changes to the live server, but since this is going to be an entire redesign, I didn’t want to potentially mess up the live box. The dev environment should be complete this week, and the goal is to have the new site live by November 1.

I’ve also been making headway on app development. I’ve recently signed up to be an iOS/OSX developer, and have managed to get a new Mac Mini (i5/2GB RAM/500GB HD) to write XCode on. I’ve created a little app for the iPhone to play around with, and will eventually be working on a real project.

And speaking of projects, I’ve been working on a new lighting system for the fish tank. Arnold and I have been brainstorming on a new LED lighting system that incorporates fiber optics, as well as a micro-controller that contains a web server that allows you to configure the lights. More on this to come.

Oh, and speaking of fish tanks… It’s currently empty. I had a system mishap a few weeks ago where I woke up one morning to find all the fish dead. The water temperature was 110 degrees, and come to find out the heater shorted out and the thermostat never turned off all night. All the fishies died. 🙁 So, I have some work to do to the tank now, including getting new pets.

And lastly, I’ve decided to get healthy. For the next two months, I’m going to be on a juice fast to lose weight, reboot my metabolism, and get a huge amount of energy.

Hello, Los Angeles.

Posted on by Chewbode

A lot has gone on since my last post up here. I’ve made the transition (for the most part) to L.A. on December 21st. I immediately jumped into working on getting the studio built with Carl and have been slammed with getting caught up with work and beating the learning curve ever since. Finally, I think I’m about there. There’s pretty much nothing going on other than work right now, which is fine. For those of you who know me well enough, I’m usually like this the first month or two at a new job (well, actually, I’m like this ALL the time at a job). I think this weekend will be my first “break”, although I’ll be working all weekend shooting footage at NAMM. At least I’ll have a change of scenery and won’t be staring at a computer screen all day.

Well, I need to get started editing today and I also need to finish a new rendering project I’m doing for the studio. Also, as soon as we make it official, I’ll let you all know what the new studio is called and where we’re located. If you’re lucky.

New Server, Washed Car, Sandwiches

Posted on by Chewbode

I’ve spent the past 24 hours building a new server for home. My main server on the network seems to have a bad hard drive in it. Even though the drives are mirrored (RAID 1), I’ll need to reinstall everything on it at some point, and when I do, I’ll upgrade the hard drives from 160GB to 500GB each. So, I’ve built the new server as a temporary box until the primary server can be rebuilt (primary is a bit unstable right now – kind of like me). I’ve been configuring Distributed File Service the last several hours, and have moved print and most FTP services to the new box. I still have web, Exchange, and anti-virus to move. I expect it’ll take me until mid-next week before I can shut the sick server down.

I’ve been working on transferring disc 2 of 2 of my friend’s wedding/honeymoon footage. Looks like it will be done transcoding any minute and the burn will be over soon afterward. I’m going to deliver the discs to him later today when I go over to his office to say hi to everyone.

I went grocery shopping yesterday because I’ve been having these hankerings for deli sandwiches. I got some honey ham, honey turkey and bologna along with some hoagie rolls and some cheese. I made a couple sandwiches last night and had one for lunch today as well. Mmm.

I also washed Shauna’s car yesterday. On my way there, I realized I had on my nice, new Nikes, so I stopped off at Target and got some sandals for $8.48. I’ve never been a sandals guy, but it was necessary as I didn’t want to get my new shoes all full of soap and dirt. Anyway, I ended up wearing them around the house for a while last night and started to get used to them (I hate shit between my toes, and these are like flip-flops with that thing between your big toe and second toe).

I’m going to be heading to Jarod’s (my former co-worker) house tonight for a little get-together. It’s his birthday today.

Alex invited me to a day-cruise on Friday. Heading up to their house at 7:30am that day so we can leave around 8:00am. Should be a lot of fun. Maybe Arnold will go too.

Still no news from the recruiter. As a matter of fact, I’m going to e-mail him in a minute to see if he heard from that job in Bradenton. We’re negotiating over moolah right now.

Sick Thought of the Day: Mayonnaise on Cupid Monger’s sandwich.

Finishing Up A DVD

Posted on by Chewbode

Last night I got the itch to watch some movies. The first one was called Wristcutters: A Love Story. The story is about a Zia, who ends up killing himself (via slitting his wrists) and ends up in a purgatory-type world where he befriends some interesting characters. The move is slow at times, but overall I thought it was great. I highly recommend it. Afterward, I watched Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back.

I finished editing DVD 1 of 2 for a friend (it’s footage from his wedding and honeymoon I transferred from MiniDV and 8mm). I should be able to finally finish the second disc tomorrow. It’s a total of almost four hours of footage.

I just played some Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for a bit and progressed pretty far. I’m going to hop into WoW for a bit now.

Sick Thought of the Day: Wet macaroni inside the vomit.

Projects

Posted on by Chewbode

The next few weeks I plan on spending a lot of time developing a new project – the secret project – that I’ve been wanting to work on for so long. The design process will be tedious, and there’ll be things that I have to tackle I’ve never dealt with before. I’m really looking forward to figuring out the budget for the project. With the video game work coming up at the end of the year, I suspect that I’ll be able to actually open the studio next summer, and I want this project I’m working on finished before that happens.

I’m having a problem with Cubase. It seems that the license key is corrupt and I need to contact Steinberg to fix it. I’ll try to do that Monday, as I need to start really moving forward on that project too. It needs to be completed before December.

Speaking of projects, I just realized I need to sit and schedule these things out and come up with timelines. There are several things in the pipeline that need varying degrees of attention.

Today I need to run some errands (am at the office currently doing work). Then later tonight I’ll be able to start on SCS work.

Sick Thought of the Day: Gargling raw fish guts.

Momentum

Posted on by Chewbode

Lost interest in this blog? Think I’m dead, lying in a ditch somewhere? Wondering why I can’t find the time to write a few simple entries? Well, too bad. I’m not going to explain myself to you.

I’ve begun working with a company based out of Dallas, TX on some video games. I’m doing the graphics which will all be rendered in LightWave. I’ll be posting more on these projects on the Suncoast Studios site as time goes on.

One of my best friends, Ninel, was diagnosed with breast cancer a couple of months ago and I’ve been spending time with her, helping out with the kids and generally trying to be a good friend. If you have the time and can spare some money, please donate to the Susan G. Komen For The Cure foundation.

I recently rebuilt the studio, from the ground up. Here are a few pictures to look at.

Creatively, I’m doing a lot lately. I recently wrote my first song, have been working on video game graphics, and continue to do some side work for friends and colleagues. I’ve also been writing more on a novel, and am prepping to start shooting a teaser trailer (one I’ve been wanting to do for years).

Several people at work are now playing World of Warcraft, so I’ve downloaded it again (am installing it now) and will be playing from time to time. I have to be careful so that it doesn’t completely consume my free time.

I bought an iPhone (16GB) a few weeks ago. I love it.

I ate a lot of Russian food Sunday night. I loved it.

I bought a new Alesis MultiMix 12 FireWire mixing board recently. I love it.

Sick Thought of the Day: Cut the eye with the razor. Milk oozes out.