Matthieu,
Still not working properly I'm afraid. Despite selecting "Yes" and "Default" 3 differently painted cars all turned red. Can you reattach the original (i.e. pre 17th March) ruby script while you're fixing the new one please? I stupidly overwrote it when I installed your new version and I'll need the old fully-functioning one for work tomorrow!
Thanks again for all your hard work!
Sorry Matthieu, I just ran a test and this isn't working, or at least it's not working at all as I would like. It doesn't create distinct components according to colour as ThomThom suggested- after running it on 3 identical car components which I'd painted different colours it just turned them all blue and they are still intances of the same component. I don't understand the logic behind the new colour choice for default either (personally I don't like ruby scripts to use their own material libraries, as I keep very strict control over my materials libraries, but that's another story). Surely this feature overrides the whole point of the original script i.e. that it replaces the default material applied to geometry within groups and components with the material which has been applied to the groups or component. Now all the geometry with default material applied turns a new global colour, which make the script useless for V-Ray users.
Sorry for the criticism, hopefully you understand it is intended strictly constructively! I am still your number one fan! 
Amazing work Matthieu! 
@unknownuser said:
Sure. Never punish a person that is honest. Most people lie when they have done something bad and get caught. People often complain so many people lie, so I say don't punish someone when they do, because you only give reason for them to lie next time. If you stop punishing people they will tell the truth next time. If we all did this, the world would be a better place.
There's at least one major contradition in the above- you say "Never punish a person that is honest.", but follow it up with "I say don't punish someone when they do (lie)". So the above statement implies that you don't believe in punishing liars or honest people.
Furthermore, if lying was the only crime the above might make some sense, but lying is undoubtedly the most common ethical misdemeanor humans commit and arguably the least harmful. If you mean "Never punish a person for being honest", then fine, but suggesting that someone's honesty regarding their crimes overrides their guilt of the crime itself is nonsense.
Judge: "Did you kill your wife?"
Professor Plum: "I certainly did, with the candlestick, in the library at 8:15pm last night and I'd do it again I tell you!"
Judge: "Thank you for your honesty, you're free to go!"
@unknownuser said:
If you stop punishing people they will tell the truth next time.
Ehm... right; and if you stop punishing bank robbers they will all go out and find good honest jobs. 
I can personally verify the attached as I took the photo of a menu outside a restaurant in Kobe a few months ago. I quite admired their logic, they obviously realised they were unable to translate it correctly, so if in doubt why be specific?
Japanese bar names are a treasure trove of absolutely bizarre English- pretty much every single building entrance in any Japanese downtown area is plastered with dozens of signs for a plethora of tiny bars hidden away on upper floors. Almost without exception the bars have English names even though non-Japanese are often unwelcome and as even a small city has probably tens of thousands of these miniscule drinking dens they have to be very imaginative to come up with anything original.... very imaginative indeed.
Two goldfish in a tank, one turns to the other and asks "So, do you know how to drive this thing?".
What annoys you so much about this Eric? It seems like a reasonable technological solution to a modern technological problem (and $150 isn't so much when you consider the overall costs of further education). Regarding paranoia or invasion of privacy it's no different to having a human "proctor" ("invigilator" in Brit. Eng.) in the room which is hardly controversial. The only thing that worries me is how easy it probably is to crack and circumvent, I bet there's several hackers sitting working on it right now.
For a CG audience it's a great short, but from a regular film-goers' point of view their choice for leading man ruined the whole thing for me, his constant smug smirk made me want his modelling software to suffer a fatal error. 
It's also a shame the necessary algorithmic aspect of his futuristic software wasn't alsimulated more as the model clearly jumped from basic orthogonal volumetric modelling to advanced organic modelling and environmental texturing rather abruptly (i.e. the tree-modifying part worked brilliantly, but the "tweaking" of the flower petals just seemed a bit silly).
The scene where he copied and rotated the street facades was amazingly reminiscent of SU's current workflow so maybe there's hope for SU yet!
Michael Jackson's turning into a schmoo- that's hilarious! 
"There's no such thing as a soul. It's just something they made up to scare kids, like the boogeyman or Michael Jackson.
~ Bart Simpson"
I don't understand Spanish, but unless there's something particularly objectionable in the lyrics/text I don't see anything wrong with putting alternative lyrics to a Beatles song. Having spent the time and money on producing a professional music recording and advert I'd be amazed if the makers hadn't paid the required royalties for the use of the "Hej Jude" tune. Having watched Michael Jackson's disturbing recent Final FINAL FINAL tour announcement the last thing I'd want is him chasing me for money.... all legal accusations aside, he just looks like something parents would use to scare their children into behaving.
LOL, Csaba just triggered a currency rush on Hungarian forints!
Yep, exchange rates are a funny thing- as an ordinary consumer back home in the UK it's not something you think about much until your holidays come around as we buy most products nationally (and private import is somewhat inconvenient when you're an island), but here in Sweden the weak Swedish krona and strong Danish krona has paradoxically insulated the southern Swedish retail market from the worst of the economic crisis. The Danes are flocking across the Öresund bridge from Copenhagen to Malmö in their thousands every weekend to get almost a 30% discount on everything they buy. It was quite astonishing on Saturday to hear so much Danish being spoken in every queue in every shop in Malmö's city centre.
I promise it wasn't me, I have an alibi- I was at home all day doing a full system restore.
Tom,
That joke works on so many levels, at first I just burst out laughing, then I got thinking about it... it actually raises some excellent theological, philosophical and moral questions!
Now I don't know whether to laugh or to ponder. 
A bit of both I think.
@pbacot said:
So just to set the record straight, maybe we can all agree:
ALL Mac users are fluff-headed, fashion-obsessed fan-boys, barely capable of connecting a monitor, and easily duped into paying exorbitant prices for "pretty" above performance.
All PC users are propeller-headed, tech-drenched, drudges, who would rather fix a computer than use one, and are too cheap to pay for, much less recognize elegance.
There, debate settled.
Very well said!
Estwing blammers are the business! I wouldn't buy Stanley anything other than their blades.
Prices straight from manufacturers' websites:
MacBook Pro 17-inch
2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB Memory
320GB hard drive
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 512MB
No internal optical drive
£1949
3 year extended warranty excluding accidental damage- £273
Total= £2222
http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_pro?mco=MTI4MDI
HP dv7-1050ea 17-inch
2.26 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB Memory
500 GB
NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT
Blu-Ray ROM with SuperMulti DVD±R/RW Double Layer
£ 1069
3 year extended warranty including accidental damage- £155
Total= £1224
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/ho/WF06a/321957-321957-3329744-64354-64354-3744231.html
I've heard that you can buy and fit OEM RAM for Macs yourself (can anyone confirm this?), but just for comparison Apple will charge you an extra £840 
to bump the Powerbook up to 8GB RAM, whereas the first price I found for the equivalent upgrade for the PC is £446- that aint no small potatoes.
The Powerbook is unquestionably the more powerful of the two, Apple's build quality and QA is far superior (and this particular hp model hasn't had the best reviews to be honest) and it weighs about two thirds of the hp, but if I was looking for a laptop to use in my daily work, there's no question that the pc would be my choice, if only because effectively it's 95% as powerful as the Powerbook, 500% as useful (app-wise) and more or less half the price. Looking at it another way, if I was looking for a small portable office setup that I'd use for mostly modelling and rendering for £226 more than the cost of the Powerbook I could buy TWO of the hp machines which would
a) take care of me and a colleague and/or
b) be a pretty powerful, yet extremely compact and efficent render farm with approximately >180% of the speed of the one Powerbook and/or
c) be a desktop for the office plus a portable workstation for presentations, etc and/or
d) allow for almost zero down-time when anything does go wrong with one of the machines and it has to be serviced, repaired or recovered as you just switch to the other one and/or
e) allow for completely swappable (and of course cloneable) harddrives in the event of hardware, firmware or OS failure. Cloning the harddrive of one machine after it's set up properly with all major apps and updates installed could even save 1 or 2 days of setup time for the second machine.
Yep, no surprises that I'm a PC fanboy, but I just prefer to spread my money around rather than put it all in one company's coffers and for me the cons of a less stable/reliable platform are far outweighed by the pros of cost vs. power, self-reliance and tweakability which appeals to the I-like-to-take-things-apart-to-see-how-they-work part of my brain. 
LOL, that ad is so fake/cheesy/staged/etc it's actually counterproductive. Microsoft's PR is utterly laughable these days.... if only it was supposed to be.
Before watching it it did occur to me: "That's all all I need: a 4 1/2 year old Photoshop pro putting me out of a job". Having watched it, I'm not too concerned.
