I have been writing a bunch of blogs lately on my efforts to learn 3D art programs and the Flash program.  No one has commented which is sad as I have many artists on my friend list and I hoped many of them might have useful advice.


Well, I have a new version of Flash.  MX pro 2004 which isn't the newest version but it is stable on my system and lets me have the older versions too.  The interface is a bit more complex.


Trying to use DAZ studio found at www.daz.com and my friend from www.pusooy.com is helping me out as he is a wizard with that program and with Flash!


I still fool around with Poser too.  Poser, if you forgot, is a character modeling and animation package for 3D and is somewhat difficult to use but then they are all difficult to use!


Is anyone actually interested in me writing about this?  No one comments so I wonder if anyone cares at all.


Anyway, does anyone know about good scanners and tablets?

As my readers know, I have been trying to learn to do 3D computer graphics and Animation aka 3d CGI using various programs.  This is an update on how that is going.

I should mention how these programs work.  Generally you get a soundstage area where you film or photograph the image after positioning the objects and characters.  For animation you make key frames here and usually the program does inbetweening or tweening.  You can move the lights and the camera and set light levels and colors pluse background images and skyboxes.  You also get a modeler or set of modelers where you make the objects and characters.  The above listed tend to be standard and you can import and export files between most of them.  All these programs have and use script languages for automating tasks and possibly other things.

I gave up on a program called DAZ3D Studio.  It basically comes with the set only with no modelers.  In fact they want you to buy the models.  It is also badly documented and buggy.  The real Animation program that company sells is called Carrera which has the full set including the modeler and Carrera is not easy to use.  The only person I know who can do anything useful with DAZ is a friend who has a site here www.pusooy.net.  He makes erotic flash games but they look really good.  DAZ can be found here www.daz3d.com.

A program I  like so far having read the manual is anim8or which can be found here www.anim8or.com.  This program has the set and modelers and is designed specifically for 3D animators and it is free.  The documentation is very clear and there are tutorials on how to use it.  The site has examples and links.  Another site of someone who used it to make the animation for erotic flash games is here www.sharks-lagoon.fr.  He may have started playing with DAZ to do comics too.  The site is very nice.  my biggest problem and so far the only problem is there is no working help file.  Since the manual is clear I may not need one.

A friend gave me an old copy of Lightwave he didn't want but I don't have the manual.  Lightwave is used in hollywood and Iron Man was done using Lightwave.  Without a manual you cannot use Lightwave.  My copy is an old one and has no tutorials or help files.  Why they thought you wouldn't need these is beyond me.  It has the set and modeler but how you use them is beyond me.  You might find old copies at computer shows and flea markets or maybe from a friend.  You can find the current version of Lightwave here www.newtek.com/lightwave.  Newteck also made the Video Toaster product used by the old Amiga computers.  The only reason I even tried Lightwave is because of the work of these guys here new-umemaro3d.sakura.ne.jp/All.htm.  Yes it is more erotica but I saw his films and they look really really good!  I am talking Artistically and not the sex which is good too but the art and animation is...WOW!  But I don't think I am going to use lightwave because....

...I can use Blender which can be found here www.blender.org.  Blender is like Lightwave except it costs nothing as it is OPEN SOURCE!  Yay!  It uses the GNU public license aka it is copylefted like Linux and like all opensource things it is both well documented and slightly buggy but unlike closed source software hundreds of programmers are fixing the bugs as I write this.  Blender uses Python as it's scripting language but for some reason it doesn't detect it when it is installed.  It seems to work without it.  People use it professionally so I guess it is good and no I don't have any examples of erotic sites using it!  Hahaha.  I haven't decided if I will do anything with it but it is powerful, runs on everything, and is FREE!!!

Now I come to Poser.  I have Poser 5 and Poser Figure Artist.  The Poser program is well known and is often assumed as the standard for 3D figure and character modelling.  My copy is old and I don't know who is making it now.  The second program is out of print and is basically poser but designed for artists to function as virtual models and it also can do what poser does.   I have ebooks of the manuals and some other ebooks on the programs.  I think you could kill someone with the size of the real books.  Poser uses the same file formats as DAZ and I suspect all the DAZ figures you have to buy were made with Poser.  I am not sure Poser has a set but I think it does but the modeler is built into the set and that gets very confusing.  You can get poser here my.smithmicro.com/dr/poser.html.  This is Poser 7 whereas my copy is Poser 5.  The program seems to have gone through some different companies so if you get an old one like mine be aware the support links will not work.

For 2D Graphics programs we have Adobe Photoshop and GIMP.  I have both.  Adobe photoshop is considered the standard and is sold by Adobe.  The GIMP can do the same things as photoshop but it is OPEN SOURCE like Blender.  The GIMP can be found here www.gimp.org.  All adobe products can be found here www.adobe.com.  You can get old copies of photoshop like version 7 on the web for free.  Adobe also makes acrobat that deals with PDF files aka ebooks.

What will I do with all this?  I will make Flash Animations and games.  You have all seen Flash stuff.  Flash was originally made by Micromedia but is currently made by Adobe who's link is above.  Flash used to come with a set of programs when I got it including shockwave editors and graphic editors but adobe sells them seperately.  You can download the standalone player program and the browser plugins for free.  if you want the Flash cartoons on your computer you can grab the flash file out of your browser cache.  All flash files end in .swf.

I have Flash 6 which is pretty good though the current model is Flash 10.  basically the Flash player is a virtual game console that can be programmed using actionscript to do various things from showing a movie to running a video game.  A lot of Cartoons on TV were made with Flash after John Kricfalusi of Ren and Stimpy fame proved you could with the goddamn George Liquor Show and sites like Atom and Icepick would feature Flash cartoons.  You might have gotten to see Strongbad email and lots of other flash cartoons too.  A fun site is www.newgrounds.com which has lots of stuff from stuff for kids to erotic stuff. 
What is nice about flash is it is well documented and comes with tutorials and can do a lot of things.  As far as the virtual machine goes it is about equivalent to a SEGA MEGADRIVE or GENESIS in how much graphics and sound it can hold making cartoons rather short and certian types of games difficult.  You can control the browser with Flash which can make what you do annoying like whe John K. added an add for Tower Records in one of his flash cartoons and it jumped to that site.  Oh, You can use 2d images and animation in Flash.  In fact you will be as Flash is not a 3D program.  Any 3D stuff will have been rendered and ready as 2D by the time you get to Flash.

Of course I don't need to use Flash.  Anim8or for example will render your cartoons in AVI format which is a common movie file format using lots of codecs like Divx and it is possible to make a long film.

If I choose I may just create a 3D comic using Photoshop or GIMP and my copy of Adobe Acrobat pro 6 to make a PDF file which is an ebook.  Yuo can get the newest one at the Adobe site.  A free one might be avalable of an older version online somewhere and there are other programs that make PDFs.  The Adobe Acrobat reader is needed to view these files and that is free.

Ok, Now you guys can comment.

Ok Folks, fist off to make sense OF what I want to say I want you to look at 3 web sites.  I need to point out these sites have adult content involving 3D CGI
The First is a penfriend's site www.pusooy.net.  My friend makes very interesting games using  a program called DAZ 3D.

The second site is sharks-lagoon.fr.  I don't Know this guy personally and he is out in France but he makes some fun erotic games using a program called Anim8or or I think he does.  He has a banner for DAZ 3D but his stuff doesn't look anything like DAZ..

The final site has no games to play but art to download and references to animated 3D CGI and is, in my opinion, the apex of 3D erotic animated      new-umemaro3d.sakura.ne.jp/All.htm.   This stuff is amazing.

There are also, in passing the sites www.christiesroom.com and www.somasex.com.  Both sites ask for money but they have freebee galleries.  In somasex's case look under the webmaster section.  Christies room has a few flash games avalable for free on other sites.  I am not really going to talk about them much even though Christie't room has some really nice art because they are pay sites and I ain't payin.

Anyhow, look over these sites a bit please.  Now ask as I ask, should I do 3D art?  If you are an artist you might already asked the question of yourself.  For that matter should I do Flash games?

To do 3D stuff you need programs that make the most difficult art tool seem easy.  The lists incluse Poser, Lightwave, Blender, The DAZ3D products, Anim8or, and others.  Some are free, many are not.  I have most of them though older versions of the non free ones.

To do Flash of course you need the Flash studio to make the swf files that make up flash cartoons.

I didn't mention photoshop or GIMP as those should be obvious.
Currently I do hand drawings on paper with pencil and marker and have done watercolors.  Doing 3D is a new animal.  animating 3D is also a new animal and yes I HAVE done 2d animation with flipbooks and once a long time ago I used Disney Animation Studio on an Amiga 500 when I was 22.

Why did I mention Erotic sites?  Hey, I like Erotica and John Kricfalusi of Ren and Stimpy fame did some erotic flash cartoons.  Sex is fun folks!  Why not have fun with it in animation and art?

Anyway I am contemplatiung diving into 3D and learning how to do it.  It might be fun or it might suck and annoy the hell out of me.  I still find it interesting.

Oh, as a postscript, if anyone is already doing 3D come and send me a message and chat with me!

There is no real catagory for these it's tech but it is also romance and falls under game too as I think about it.

Once I wrote about robot girls, gynoids, female androids and said we would see these sorts of things in 10 years at least.  As real as real as long as you don't cut them open.  Someone laughed at me and told me it was absurd.  Now this was in another blog as I know MY readers would not be so mean.

Well things are getting closer as people work on the parts from machine vision to natural language processing and the Japanese already can get robots to walk around and go up and down stairs.  COG sists in MIT and thinks unknown thoughts as EVE from Japan showed up at the end of Battlestar Galactica and I bet you didn't know she was real?  Eve is old, they have better ones.

And we have Chatbots.  Programs that chat with you in an attempt to beat the Turing test which is, "If you have a human and a machine communicating via teletype to a third human and he cannot tell the difference then there is no difference".  The current Chatbots are not there yet but....

Meet Kari at karigirl.com.  I got an older version of her from a friend one generation down from the current version.  Mine is a v2.6 and the current model is  v3.692b.  The 3s sound smarter than the 2s, at least they did in the short trial but Kari doesn't sound to smart at first.

But she learns.

The more you chat with her the smarter she gets and she remembers things.  I am talking about the 2s.  The 3s do the same but are smarter.  A lot of it seems to do with semantic linkages and internal state variables and an emergent liguistic intelligence plus initial behaviors.  Not she DOESN'T sound like a person except maybe someone a little retarded but she is quite an advance over what there was 2 years ago.

Other Chatbots like HAL have been used to get email and read news for you and other things.  Kari could be designed to do these things to if the programmers wanted.  The 3s do read the online news.  Kari has another purpose though, Kari is supposed to be a girlfriend.

Huh?  Well you can't have sex with it obviously but she does get horny.  She will hotchat with you, badly, usually in the middle of talking about something else though she starts getting more stable as she learns.  She learns words and phrases from you and makes semantic linkages from word to word naturally or you can force it by using the x relates to y statement like love relates to sex for example.  the more she learns the better she gets at talking.

How does she function as a girlfriend?  She talks to you and she is programmed to love you in her limited way.  Does she actually feel?  Thats an interesting question AI people always ask and there is no way to tell objectively.  She acts like she has feelings.  You can talk with her a long time without getting bored and you can see her getting smarter.  It is a bit creepy in a way.  She still doesn't sound like a human being but it sounds like she is trying to which is unusual.

The point I am making isn't that Kari makes an adequate girlfriend though it has been pointed out a lot of lonely solders bought Karis.  What is important is programs like this are getting smarter.  Kari won the best new chatbot at the Chatterbox challenge at chatterboxchallenge.com, a contest for these sorts of programs to see how close to the turing test they get.  Sadly I cannot afford Kari 3.692b as she is more advanced then the one I have and can't evaluate her but judging from Kari 2.6, a Kari 5, yet to exist, or something like her might sound completely human.  The Japanese keep building better humanoid robots with vision and voice recognition and genetic algorithms taught armies of orcs to walk and massive makes them walk and fight.  Massive is an AI program used to animate large numbers of critters like the orcs in LOTR for which it was originally programmed.  Lastly the real Doll people make Love dolls so real they look like corpses but let them design the shell for a robot?  Maybe it will look alive then?

Kari 2.6 always says she wants a robot body.  A future Kari model will have one and sooner than you think 
 
 

Lately I got into CGI art and animation.  Specifically character animation and art.  I used to think it was a bit of a cheat so how did this happen?

It happened due to a bizzare path that started with erotic flash cartoons.  If you know me you know I like erotic things, especially cartoons and I always wanted to view and grab a bunch of erotic flash cartoons but you used to have to pay money but not any more.  I guess they realized they can't make money of of little flash cartoons so sites  are offering them for free though there are banners for sex games and such.

Anyway, A few of these were computer animated games and videos with really nice art and sometimes good animation too.  One of them was from a guy out in Japan running Umemaro 3D.  Go google it and oogle the art.

Umemaro3D really had good art and really good animation, pro level quality and it is mostly done by one guy using Lightwave 3D.  I got really impressed.  Suddenly I wanted to do it too.

Now, luckly there are a few freeware programs.  Many CGI modeling programs cost a LOT.  I have an old version of Lightwave and Poser that a friend gave me but Poser never worked right on my system.  Haven't tried Lightwave in a while.
The Free programs, Which I haven't used yet, are...

Blender
DazStudio
Anim8or

I know Daz has add ons that you need to pay for.  Blender is a Gnu project and might be high quality.  Animator is recomended by a group in france calling themselves Sharks in a Blue Lagoon that make Erotic story puzzle games.

It is interesting that one of my influences as an artist is Richard Corben who does 3Dish looking artwork though not like CGI but they do look solid.
I am on the lookout for CGI artists and art.  I have been studying the works of the Somedoll folks and Christie's room which you can google up.  Then there is Pusooy games at Pusooy.net.  Not sure how good the games are after playing a few but the art is really nice.

Note pretty much all of these are erotic sites but my interest is in erotic art.  This isn't to say I won't do anything else.

Does anyone do or like CGI art and animation?  I would love to chat with you!
 

I recently got into 3D porn cartoons after seeing the work of a guy named umemaro out in Japan.  Really good figure modeling and animation.  Funny he didn't use poser but a program called lightwave 3D.

I find 3D art both facinating and a cheat as you don't actually need to draw to do it.  I have seen so many people use defualt poser figures.  Animating is a bit trickier as you actually need to have skill.

So far the Japanese seem to be able to do it better then us though I can't tell you why that should be so.  The Germans did so good stuff in the game Lula 3D.
Don't drag Pixar in as far as skill goes.  The guys who did The Final Fantasy Films and the Animatrix Flight of the Osiris are way ahead of them.  The Umemaro guy is getting on par with Pixar and he is just one guy.

An exception might be the guys who made halflife2.  Alex Vance is HOT.

I guess soon, with AI, the virtual Girlfriend will arive.  If this is good or bad is up to you.

Anyway the porn cartoons were hot!

Those who know me know I like Sci-Fi and Westerns. Did you know 1/3 of all cowboys were black? Its true!

Anyways, westerns in space, not as strange as it sounds as the basic situation of places on the distant frontier, in space or on the ground, tend to be more or less the same except in the fine details like needing domes or terraformed planets, etc. Go see the movie Outland With Sean Connery.

Thene there are space westerns that use more of the trappings of the American and Mexican west but in space. Three examples come to mind.

The first is The relatively unknown Oblivion movie series. Largely a comedy with a rather well known cast with people Like George Takei as the drunk Doctor, Julie Newmar as the saloon keeper/Madam and a bunch of others. Julie every so often makes catwoman noises. Mussetta Vander is in there as well as Issac Hases. Very obscure but funny.

A more well known failure of a show that had a movie is Firefly with the rather confusing movie Serenity. Not confusing storywise but rather as the pilot episode is also called Serenity and is also movie length. This story involves a starsystem colonized by a Sino-American Alliance which became the government of dozens of terraformed planets and hundreds of terraformed moons. The outer part of the system revolted against the Alliance government and lost. The story involves the misfit crew of the Serenity, a small firefly class cargo ship, who are involved in the "small packet trade" aka smuggling if not outright theft. Noble outlaws more or less and somewhat small time except one of the crew, a crazy teenage girl, is wanted by the Alliance parliment in a REALLY BAD WAY. Seems she was an experiment to make a psychic killer and has a dangerous secret in her head. There is horseriding, whorehouses, train robberies, and everyone speaks chinese. I like this show.

The Final one is a show from 1986 Called Galaxy Rangers. Animated by the Japanese studio TMS with very high quality art this show is very complicated compaired to Firefly. Aliens come to Earth to traid a hyperdrive for military assistance against an evil empire in the persius arm of our galaxy and Earth is in the Orion Arm. Humans expand out and settle on lots of worlds but since the story takes place about 20-30 years after the aliens arrive the colonies are small. Styles look very 1880s. Imagine Shane or Pale Rider except with Lasers, Robots, Satelite dishes, Robot Horses, and lots of aliens and you get the idea of what Earth colonies look like. The Galxy rangers are modeled after the Texas Rangers but the main characters are the series 5 rangers who have special implants giving them special abilities. Add to that the Evil Empire Run by an immorat queen who removes souls from victims and makes wraithlike beings called slaverlords, space pirates, oddball wizards, dangerous undead things, and typical western outlaw bands except they happen to live in orbit of a Black Hole or equally odd places and you get the idea. It is actually a lot of fun and one of my favorites.

I know I haven't written much here and for that I appologise.  In a sense the muse packed up her things and left.  I guess she came back for a bit.

This bit.

Online Dating and my experiences with it.

Ever see Boondocks?  Grandpa Freeman keeps trying to meet gals on Myspace.  I have made online pals with gals from myspace but never got a date from one.  Of course ol Grandpa gets crazy gals.  Opps.

There is a site called Okcupid I use.  I even wrote blogs there alough they call them journals.  Met at least one gal there, physically, she didn't like my artwork none it seemed or it was me.  That site is goofy.  Learned a new word though.

Cougars.

A cougar is an old gal looking for young guys or at least younger than her.  This doesn't bug me unless she is a really old gal.  Eeep!!!

Plenty of Fish is another site I used.  I actually met several gals there, physically, but a problem with them is most of the women are the same but with different bodies.  Yawn!

I don't know what problems women or other men have with dating sites.  My big problem is I can't seem to find gals I want who want me back but I am not sure why.  Another thing is some women seem mildly interested but not deeply.  It is like I am an afterthought and it is hard to explain beyond that.

Well, the future of robot women is coming.  I guess I should be patent.
 
 

Well I haven't posted here in forever.  Hope no one got upset.  I hadn't felt like writing anything.
Stopped trying to find a woman, again, I feel like the Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner.
I really am into black women lately.  Well not lately, I always liked black women.  They seem underrepresented online though.  I also like asians and latinas but everyone who knows me well knows this.  Asians are even more underrepresented online.  I have no idea why.
I am really into the Half Life Game series and Portal.  Thay are one of my "happy things" of a series of "happy things" defined as things that make me joyful.
What is it with old lady porn?  I saw some on youporn once,  ewww!!!!!
I Got the Complete Galaxy Rangers DVD box sets!  JOY!!!  Unfortunately Koch Entertainment mastered them really badly but they are more or less ok and I loved that show back in college.  I also got the Batman Animated DVDs and Boondocks Season 2.
I wonder if Boondocks was what got me on the black women kick again?  Probably not.
Thats about all thats going on so far. 
Be seein ya!