gottahavacuppamocha

I’ve been on one of my Blender kicks lately. Part of it is because I am teaching myself Yafray and part of it is so I can build up my online portfolio/store. Since a couple of the projects I’m working on require glass blocks, I figured I would model them in Blender. I should have remembered one thing from the last time I made glass blocks – the render time.

I made a glass block this weekend and was rendering it with Yafray, but not having much luck. Sometimes if I am staying up late I will set Blender to render a big image overnight, since it takes longer to render a larger image. I had been doing 640 x 480 images, which were taking an hour or two two render. They weren’t necessarily compex, but I only have a 750 MHz AMD Duron and about 750 MB of RAM, so it’s not the speediest PC in the world.

On Sunday evening, I was getting ready for bed, so I set Blender/Yafray to render a 1280 x 1024 image. However, with the previous images, I kept getting rendering artifacts. I read that one way to make it a better render was to increase the Ray Depth. The default was 5, but I set it to 10. It was about 12:00 am on Monday when I set it to render, figuring it would be done by the time I woke up. It wasn’t, but then I thought it might be done by the time I got back from work. It wasn’t done then either. In fact, it has been rendering now for 46 hours and shows no sign of finishing up. That’s one of the frustrating things about Blender and/or Yafray is that there is no progress indicator. It’s frustrating because I don’t know if the render is 90% done or 10% done. The only option with that would be to leave it on that desktop at all times (Linux/Unix = multiple desktops), but the screensaver will kick in before it shows any progress. I’m pretty sure no other renderers have progress indicators either. So I’m going to leave it on again tonight while I sleep and hope it is done when I wake up. All I know about it is it had better be a very good render, or I’m going to be disappointed.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged, but I’ve been busy/lazy.

Like many, many others, I’ve seen the recent movie Snakes on a Plane, so I thought I’d give my two cents worth of opinion. I’m cheap that way.

First of all, very early on it requires the audience to supend disbelief. Most fiction requires that to a certain extent, though in most cases the creative powers-that-be will at least try to make it all seem plausible, like it could happen. SoaP isn’t quite that pretentious.

The basic plot is Samuel L. Jackson’s character is an FBI agent escorting a federal witness from Hawaii to LA to testify against a mafia kingpin, whom he saw kill a prosecutor. The witness is essentially a MacGuffin. His only purpose is to drive the story. As the title of the movie says, the story is about snakes…on a plane. Lots of snakes. It’s all about having the snakes kill people in gruesome, and rather ridiculous, fashion. So since there are snakes on a plane, they’ve gotta kill the pilot and co-pilot. The couple joining the mile-high club…goners. So is the guy taking a leak. It’s so kitchy and stereotypical, it doesn’t take much to figure out who’s gonna die. Just when the passengers think they’re safe from the snakes, something happens and it’s chaos all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat. This movie requires some big-time suspension of disbelief. Then again, maybe it doesn’t.

The movie isn’t trying to be serious or realistic. It’s absurd and proud of it. It’s ridiculous, but not quite as silly as Airplane. Again, the whole point of the movie is to have snakes on a plane. The idea is so far out of left field, you can’t possibly take it seriously. People will believe terrorists on a plane. They might even believe food poisoning taking out the flight crew (most people know how bad airline food can be). But snakes on a plane? How the hell does somebody come up with that idea? I bet there’s terrorists looking at the idea.

It was a funny movie. There were a lot of laughs, and even some applause…dogs are not fashion accessories. I recommend it. I saw some reviewer gave it three and a half stars out of four. I don’t know if I would give it that, but then again it’s difficult to compare it to any other movie I’ve seen. It’s not a straight comedy, or a horror flick, or even a straight action film, so how can you compare it to other pictures. I would give it a thumbs up, but even that seems to lack the proper touch. Since it seems to need a new and odd rating system, I guess I would give it four fangs out of five.