Last photo taken with the d90 before it escaped my grasp and decided to hit the floor of Fatty Crab.
Nikon technicians are only available Mondays to Fridays and the bunch of us will be leaving for Pulau Perhentian on Monday night.
Looks like this will be the first trip I’m going on without a camera.
So I’m back in Malaysia for the winter break. It’s gonna be a good three weeks back home.
Time to spend with the family, catch up with friends, and stock up on items to bring back to Adelaide.
More updates perhaps.
Sleeping till dusk wasn’t such a good idea after all. A quarter past four in the morning and I’m listening to “Best Friends” by the Perishers. Whenever I listen to the few songs that I have from this Swedish indie rock band, or to “Those Eyes” or “When the Weather is Fine” by Thirsty Merc, I’m always reminded the cold mornings in Launceston spent walking on Invermay Road up towards the university.
Waking up in a three by three metre bedroom which once was a dusty room with nothing but a desk and a couple of boxes, in a house at the back of a red paint shop in the industrial suburb that is Invermay. Reluctantly pushing the sheets aside only to get out of bed and step on the cold carpeted floors. Stepping out of my room and towards the bathroom to get ready, less than 10 steps away.
“Is it hard to be unknown? Is it dull to be alone? I’ve heard you’re turning into stone. Well, I’m on my way home." – On My Way Home, The Perishers.
Seeing my own breath as the double brick walls of the house built in the 1880s, just stood there all around me looking all strong and sturdy, but did absolutely nothing in insulating the house. Shivering as I headed towards the kitchen to pour myself a bowl of Nutri Grain, only to find myself shivering even more while having it with cold milk.
It does not matter which month of the year it was. No, the seasons didn’t matter all that much down in that island state. I recall having to put a jumper on even when it was only the end of February, the end of Summer, the beginning of Autumn.
“One may think we’re alright, but we need pills to sleep at night. We need lies to make it through the day, we’re not okay.” – Pills, The Perishers.
Taking at least twenty minutes to walk up the road to the university gym didn’t help much either. But it was these tracks that kept me moving, as odd as it sounds. They just fitted with the cold mornings so well.
But once in a while, when I’m not having to drag myself out of bed, I’d feel good about waking up early. The walk up the road would be totally different from the previous walk. With beats from Paramore, I’d march up the road, all pumped up and excited to work up a sweat, before grabbing a Subway sandwich on the way back home after.
Seafood Sensation. It always had to be seafood sensation on an Italian herb and cheese bun with tomatoes, onions, capsicum, and some olives. It always had to be a mix of Cheddar, Swiss, and Tasty cheese. I’d tell myself that the sub would taste better with three cheeses instead of one, when the real reason was that I never knew, and still don’t, know the difference between the three. Top it off with some sweet chilli sauce, salt and pepper, and you’re good to go.
“It’s you, why’s it always you and never me? I’ve never dared to let my feelings free; It’s you, why’s it always you and never me? I’ve never cared about honesty.” – Trouble Sleeping, The Perishers.
Perhaps this is the reason I stopped blogging this way. It always just takes too long to think of what to type, and how to type it out. Then things just got in the way. From events to travelling to everyday happenings, it became all about the pictures. Words became nothing but brief descriptions of the pictures, which were exactly what they were, photo captions.
I’ve just come to the realisation that I miss using words. Everything’s so abbreviated now. BWK for brickwork, DWG for drawing, SPEC for specified, and the list goes on. I miss writing. I miss sketching. Everything for the past few weeks, or this past semester, have been so digital. 3DS Max modelling and animation, Google Sketchup modelling, Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, AutoCAD drawings, one after another.
Don’t get the wrong idea, these programs are great tools to have at your disposal, but that’s all they are – tools. What really matters is what you’ve got inside you. Your thoughts, your ideas. From there, all you really need is a pencil you took from a hotel room sometime last year, and a free notepad you got with some gift bag from some company sponsoring something at university.
The many pencils I purchased back in February are still wrapped up in plastic somewhere. I don’t need them. But I most certainly thought that I would. Thinking that there would be alot of sketching going on this year. Sketching for ideas, sketching to past the time.
I miss sketching. I’ve already mentioned that earlier. Just sitting somewhere and focusing on something, translating that from one medium to another. I remember standing in a deserted alleyway on an Indonesian temple ground, sketching its boundary wall in the shade. Watching as every stroke of the pen left a white marking on the black-paged sketchbook.
The feeling of satisfaction you get after having spent at least half an hour working on it, then only to realise the many flaws that exist all over the page. It’s only a few days later do you look back at that page and say to yourself, “Hey, that actually doesn’t look too bad. In fact, it looks pretty darn good!”. It’s these imperfections that make them perfect, or so to say.
“You are your toughest critic; Don’t look at your work after you’re done with it, look at it a few days later”. Words from Ian Clayton – painter, funny man, hat collecter, and lecturer at the University of Tasmania.
(to be continued)
To state the obvious, this here’s finally an update to this otherwise dead blog (:
First up, WHAT’S WITH ALL THE SPAM IN THE CHATBOX. Is this what I get for not updating regularly? ):
Gosh I hope not cause this is probly gonna be my only update till the end of semester cause of you know, the whole being in university thing which kinda involves being busy with never ending assignments.
For any kids out there who may be reading this, GO TO SCHOOL AND HAVE FUN. Sure, skip it every now and then if you need to but stay in school and don’t do drugs.
And that was a public service announcement brought to you by www.pingchienng.com
SO ANYWAYS, there’s nothing like blogging bout an assignment which you’ve been pouring your heart and soul and laptop battery life and electricity and sleeping hours and eating times and time spent walking to uni and back and stayin till night time and walking home alone on a saturday night just cause you finished rendering it and decided not to stay over at uni as you initially planned and so congratulations if you read all of this you rock.
SO ANYWAYS, for the elective Digital Media II that I’m enrolled in, the entire semester’s work is basically revolved around a building of our choice. I went with the crowd and decided to do the BMG Art Gallery here in Adelaide, whereas only a hand full of people chose other buildings.
The first project was to come up with a 2D + 3D animated logo for our own made-up design/architecture company/firm. Remembering how much I liked the terminology of Greek and Roman architecture which we covered last year, I revisited the form of a Greek temple.
Not quite sure if anyone can see why I like the terminology as much as I do. It could have something to do with Greek architecture being one of the first periods covered in history last year, which I did extra research on, and actually studied all the terms :D
So from there, I decided to just go with the name Entablature Designs, and keep the logo, text, and colour scheme of it real simple – grey on white. Feedback I got for that project was “Grey colour scheme a bit boring”. This was back in March. Just last night, I finally got round to editing the logo and its animation. All I did was invert the colours and made it black instead of grey, just to fit in with the rest of my project.
Which brings us back to the BMG Art Gallery. Project 2 was a storyboard to present our concept for the architectural visualisation (or animation), and that was followed by Project 3, the actual modelling of the BMG using an incredible program, Autodesk 3DS Max.
Personally, I could never be bothered to learn a software on my own. So taking this elective was definitely a plus for me to learn modelling 3D objects and animation in a more refined manner as compared to Google SketchUp.
The series of images below are in sets of threes, namely:
Image 1: Photo taken at the art gallery itself
Image 2: RAW footage for Project 3
Image 3: Edited footage for Project 4
The Facade
The Name
The Courtyard
The Space
The Art
The Work Space
Feedback I received for Project 3 was that my modelling was a bit harsh, which I totally agree with. Just check out block-ish my furniture is. One of the chairs you see below took me 30-60minutes just to model it out cause I was really still learning and getting used to the program at the time.
The Desk
The End
Although the modelling, lighting, and rendering could definitely be further improved, I like the how my final project turned out, with a great soundtrack from Propellerheads, “Take California”.
Still thinking bout posting the animation up on Facebook or YouTube. But that’s not gonna happen until it’s been submitted.. on Monday.
Last bit of Project 4 was shelf-quality DVD packaging, which basically means a DVD case cover, insert, as well as a disc label. TOTALLY FORGOTTEN BOUT THIS PART OF THE PROJECT thinking that this was Project 5. Fortunately, I managed to get all of this done in the past couple of days, hence being able to blog right now. Only thing left now’s the A2 poster to end this subject!
For all you people who love numbers, the requirements of this project was:
1 frame = 1 .tiff image file
25 frames per second
60 seconds of animation in total
1500 frames in total
1 frame takes about 5-10 minutes to render
In conclusion, it took at least 100 hours of rendering for this entire project, for both the raw footage as well as the editing and re-rendering of the entire animation. 100 hours of rendering = 100 hours of leaving the laptop on with 3ds Max running, while not being able to do anything else cause it just lags the laptop = laptop being overworked for days and nights at a go. Then one night I decided to render at uni and found out that the uni computers do a much better job than my laptop T_T
What would’ve taken me a few days to render took me only 6 hours+ in uni. That is, by hogging 7 or 8 computers at a time (Y)
I can only imagine what my friends go through. Their rendering with a higher quality setting, takes like 30 minutes for a single frame. Yeahh, you do the math.
That’s a little update from me. Thanks for reading bout my uni assignments. To those of you currently having or are about to have your exams, all the best. Study hard and study smart but don’t forget to exercise. It’s great stress reliever (:
Fingers crossed, I’ll TRY MY BEST to squeeze in a little update every now and then, and hopefully it won’t be about uni. Who wants to read bout that stuff ey? Tell me if you do! :p
No seriously. Tell me.
BYE :D
