Igor has made me a coffee machine out of old bits of junk he found in the shed. Thanks a lot, Igor! I’ve always wanted a coffee machine, but would you drink anything that came from this thing?

Igor is keen to show everyone how it works in a video. Personally, I can’t see how this grotty looking thing can make a fine cup of coffee. Igor is quite proud of it, and of course I have told him what I think of it. I told him I can’t wait for the next garbage collection. He’s not really talking to me much right now, the last thing he said when he was leaving was that he had really hoped I would love his present. He was sure that if I drank coffee from it, I would love it. We will never know. I’m not drinking anything that comes from this coffee machine. I recognise my old paint tin as part of that coffee grinder. At least I think that’s what it is supposed to be. It doesn’t even look like he tried to clean it, goodness knows what the inside looks like.

After a lot of nagging from Igor, I am now posting photos I took of this ghastly thing. They are nothing special, just some quick snapshots.

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In this blog entry I will post photos of our new unit, before it was renovated. It was interesting to revisit these photos, I had forgotten how bad things looked. The photos of the finished renovations are here if you missed them: Finished Renovations

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Finally I have the internet again. I can’t have Optus anymore, so I have a TPG account with 500GB download limit, shaped to 1Mbps IF I run out. From September 1, TPG will have a new plan of 1TB, so I may as well upgrade to that for the extra $10. Well, then I could then just get the unlimited plan for an extra $6 from that, it’s only $75 for unlimited ADSL2+ broadband and the plan is available at my local exchange.

Speaking of the exchange, I only live 816m from the exchange, so I am getting very fast speeds. Currently I am connected at 21824 Kbps downstream and 1020 Kbps upstream, my modem stats are only fluctuating a tiny bit. These are pretty stable stats at the moment, my sync speed is constantly over 21000kbs. I won’t speak too soon in case it all becomes an awful crawl. You never know with TPG. It’s the first time I’ve had web pages appear on the screen instantly, rather than gradually download and appear.

It’s a bit slower in the real world, but not bad for on-peak 8.30pm:

I’m really late to the party with ADSL2+, but I’m loving it. Good riddance Optus! Talk about an ill wind that blows some good!

I haven’t got as much time today as I hoped to post photos today, but here they are. These photos were taken on the morning we moved in, just before we moved in.

Things to note, we have curtains now, and the colour of the floor is a little less saturated in real life. The bathroom tiles were not what we asked for originally, but we compromised. We wanted larger black tiles. The flash of the camera makes them look more glossy than they really are, the black is not so heavy in real life. With all that in mind, below are the photos of our empty unit.

There’s some pretty wild lens distortion in the photos, but that’s wide angle lenses for ya!

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I’ve moved house, or er, unit. It has been a grueling couple of weeks of packing, throwing out junk, moving, throwing out more junk, more moving and throwing away things that weren’t junk but we couldn’t fit into the new place.

Now we are unpacking and finally I have got the computers set up. I don’t have a landline yet, I am hoping the phone will be on tomorrow. I will have a new phone number, I’ve left Optus since they can’t provide a service to our new place, and am now looking into a new internet service provider. TPG’s latest deal is 500GB for $59.99. I was paying the same price with Optus for 150GB. I’ve been unsure of the reliability of a TPG service, but people who live locally said they’ve never had a problem with their TPG service. Time will tell.

Everything we own (except for our cars) fits into this small one bedroom unit. That should give a good indication to some of you of just how much stuff we had to throw away and give away. We had to hire a rubbish truck to take a big load of stuff away.

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The outside is pretty much finished now. There are refinements I want to make to the exhaust at the back, like adding some scalloped grooves like what I’ve seen on some fighter planes. I want to concentrate on the interior of the cockpit now. This will be seen by a camera from the front and behind. It won’t be too sophisticated, because things like panels of lights and digital displays would be done in After Effects, not 3ds Max. In Max, I just need to do the geometry, and the lights and other displays would be put in later in post production.

What’s new? Well I added doors. Igor can just fly in and out, but I have to develop a stair system for the biped fellow to use to get in and out. The doors are rigged and can be easily opened and closed in animations.

Some windows were added, I wasn’t sure if they should be there or not, but my wife feels that they help break up the plain silver of the fuselage. I’ll leave them for now.

I added chrome rims to the headlights, though in the images below they are just reflecting a grey environment.

I reshaped the exhaust, but I only spent less than 5 minutes on this, and it will change, but just a little bit. As I said before, I’ll try to add some scalloped grooves.

Here is what I have (click the images to see the larger sizes):

Below: Same as above, but the left door is open.

Below: Front view showing chrome headlight rims.

I think this should be called a space car. It is a car, that can go into the air, and even space. It also happens to have the ability to do time travel. I’m not sure what this craft is called.

I had to bulk up the front so there was room for the wheels when they fold up. Even though it is in the future, it doesn’t have the ability to rotate the wheels as they fold up so that they take up less space. I don’t mind the extra bulk, it makes it look a bit more cartoony and gives it a funny character.

I still need to make a hatch so people (things) can get in and out, and make a proper exhaust.

Here are some progress pictures:

The wheels are rigged to go up and down:

This is a spaceship/car combo that I am making for Igor and Mr Nameless robot guy. It is a work in progress, I still have to make wheels and other details yet. The wheels will come down from the cylinders under the wing. There could be changes to the scale of the body and some other parts yet too.

Here is what I have so far after just a couple of days (click the images to see a larger size)

I have made a new character to be a kind of friend of Igor. It’s a robot, which so far has no name (any suggestions?) and will star with Igor in future animations. It’s a challenge to come up with a unique robot, there are thousands of robots out there in Google Images and beyond.

It’s not completely finished, I may add some things. The display panel on his chest has a retro look to it, and I’m sure the display will change to something modern. I haven’t yet decided to think of a design for the display, I just quickly put what you see in the pictures as a display. The main idea for the display was for it to somehow show visually when the character speaks, since the character has no mouth.

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LittleB and I were playing with the Unreal Development Kit this weekend. Well, more so LittleB, but I did come up with a small level. My focus was more on learning how to get 3d models from 3ds Max in to the UDK3 game engine. It’s fairly straight forward, I put a simple sign in the game with the Mad Violinist picture on it. You can shoot it, which I’m sure will bring pleasure to many! I hardly ever play computer games, but seeing a 3ds Max object I made go into a game engine was a big thrill!

I’ll back up a bit and explain what this is about, for people who aren’t with me. Many of the top video games on the market have been created using a game engine called Unreal Development Kit. This engine is software for creating game level environments, characters and weapons etc. This game engine is free to download, and anyone can learn how to create games with it. If you want to sell a game, then you have to pay $99 to Epic Games, and after you have earned $5000 revenue from it, you must pay 25% of your total revenue after that. Not profit! Revenue! Which means after advertising costs and other marketing expenses, you earn very little. Hey, you can at least know you can keep $4901! ($5000-$99) Making games and not selling them costs $0.

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