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Moray & POV-Ray
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POV-Ray - Perhaps the best FREE ray tracer on Earth. There is more about ray tracing further down the page.
A fantastastic games company Cheap Ass sellers of Munchkin, Kill Doctor Lucky, Save Doctor Lucky, Exploding Cow and friends. I can't praise their games enough. Their staff are way cool as well having met two of them at The Dudley Bug Ball, a convention in Birmingham, UK.
Another great RPG The Call of Cthulhu! A really moody sometimes scary world setting with huge monsters and plots that can and often do change the whole world. Brilliant!
Name : Well if you haven't already noticed it at the top of the page please switch on graphics. Or read the title of this web page.
Occupation : Well that is a long story but I am between jobs at the moment. I usually do programming stuff but the market has been slow and my real skills are Baan which is SOOOO not in demand it is untrue. But I am not bitter, oh, no, not me. Yeah, OK I am f***ing bitter. To any potential employers out there... I am available and good, honest. Maybe my skills have not been stretched much lately but I am trying. (Yeah very trying, so not funny.)
Age : Well mid thirties. Sometimes I feel much older. Especially at the moment. Life without work may sound like fun but it is not, trust me on that.
Hobbies : Computers and games.Let me explain that. Like many nerdish children the draw and excitement of computers has held me in its thrall for some time. A computer is alway there. Ready. Waiting. Available. Passive. Sure. Erm, well I think you can see where I am going with this. <cough>
So computers have always been a neat way of escaping this boring reality. Then at university I discovered Role Playing Games (RPG) and they were GREAT. Having always had a fairly good imagination the freedom to be whatever you want, in whatever era or world, was liberating. Doom was still a game to be written at this time. RPG's were it. For me at least. So I began what has turned into a huge hobby of mine. Not certain where it will take me but hopefuly it will be fun.
There are a few more hobbies to be included. I just got carried away with the computer and games stuff.
Gardening, reading Sci Fi, cooking, keeping tropical fish, music, photography, collecting cine projectors, sewing and knitting.
Life aims : (Yeah I'm really going for it, eh?) Well my short term goals are fairly simple. Get a job. Keep my home. Live a little.
Easy eh? Well you might think so but so far my first priority has yet to materialise. And I really have been trying to get another job. The rest? God knows. I'm sure that something will turn up but I want to be able to enjoy it never mind pay the mortgage with it.
Ray Tracing : Well I have played around with this for over seven years now and have not really done a very good job of it. I really like what you can do but have always been a little shy of actually finishing any project. To be honest it is like many things in my personal life. I am good at starting them but finishing them? Well not so good. If I have a work project that is totally different. I am always the consumate profesional. Maybe I don't always look the part but my mind is usually applied correctly. I try and aim to please whoever I work for. But in my own stuff I do tend to dither. Rather a lot.
My biggest thought is to try and render some stuff based on the works of HP Lovecraft. I mentioned above The Call of Cthulhu and how I like that. Well Lovecraft wrote of beasts who ruled the world long before humanity came on the scene. These Elder Gods and minions were from Out There and in the Far Reaches of space and Out of Time. Rather grandiose terms but they fit with the settings and places Lovecraft describes.
My fascination has made me want to render a little of this rather special universe. I know that creating all of the items and locations for this is a tall order but I am slowly getting round to doing this. My main problem is getting enough details for 1920 style American buildings. And also the things that would be inside such places. You know chairs, lights, wall coverings, carpets, rugs, etc. I know how to render these things, having read Advanced 3D Photorealistic Techniques by Bill Fleming. ISBN 0-471-34403-6. Try Komodo Studios or John Wiley & Sons for more details. But getting the shapes and forms correct takes more than a good imagination. Understanding the scale and relative proportions of objects is very important. And it is this small detail that I am lacking for building the necessary object collection.
My final goal is to render a little of Dunwich, a quaint little costal town in the USA. Described by Lovecraft in his story The Dunwich Horror. I hope that gives you a clue about the true nature of the town. As of yet most of this is a bit of a pipe dream. My aspirations are very high but very little practicle work has been done to finish this. As usual in my life I have no real excuse for having not yet done any of this. Having now reached a certain impasse in my life I have the time to persue this. I just don't seem to have quite started this project. Perhaps next week?
Where I live : Milton Keynes a "New Town" in the UK. Roughly forty miles north of London, about thirty years old and beside the M1 motorway. No, just don't ask, OK? Please move on to something else. And if anybody asks any stupid questions about this they will regret it. Well maybe. :-)
Other stuff... : Erm well I suppose that I could rant on about TV I like or what musicians I have cds of but frankly I can't be bothered. If anyone is really curious about this sort of thing I may add it. But unless you ever meet me I don't see it as a useful thing to have on a web page.
Well a friend of mine explained that there are these "spider" programs that go round stealing peoples email addresses. This would explain the increase in f***ing spam emails that I keep getting. So I now have a slightly better way of protecting my email address. Or at least I hope it is better.
Now this is not an excuse for people to send me lots of spam email or any sort of flames. I am not sure if those blasted spammers can read these sort of things but they had better not, OK!?!