autolabs, cacciatore

jeez lots of blog writin' from me lately. that's cause it's a lot of extra late-late-nights in the office for me these days. honestly i can't really remember the last time i was used to gettin' out of here before midnight. i consider getting home before 2am relatively a good thing. so, yeah. anyway, i am lighting now. i spend all this time building stuff, and painting the textures, and testing how it looks while playing thru - the last step of the creation process (before further testing and eventual breaking everything) is applying the nice, nice lighting which makes it all look really sweet or really bland. lighting is a pain, because you set up a bunch of lights as if they were in the real world - set their colors, the brightness, the falloff, directions, etc, all to a --very-- rough approximation of what it would look like onsceen. hey, it is something. a lot of calculation must be done in one's head, a lot of fakey stuff must be setup. there's not a real good "true lighting simulator' out there yet, just tons of tools to help you approach half-decent fakitude. when you do it right, things looks real smooth, real nice. when you don't set it up properly, all your hard work ends up looking sort of flat and chumpy and just not as awesome as it SHOULD (esp. compared to the other stuff!) So it's kind of a big tease really, especially when you are strapped for time. The upswing is that once you get the hang of it, and learn a bunch of shortcuts and things (like anything), you can put out some really nicely-lt looking things with some relative ease. Anyway, this is all very fascinating, I am sure. Hey. It's my freakin' blog alright! You don't like to hear about light attenuation? You don't wanna hear about my turkey sandwich from subway? You don't wanna know about the the fact that I have to dump some stuff in a dumpster illegally and hope not to get caught? Don't read! Yeah! YEAH!!!

Anyway, it's about quarter to two. I have a good 45 min of driving ahead of me yet. I am gonna let this light pass finish rendering, and so long as it's not all ugly when it comes out, I am gonna pack it in and go home.