Posts made by Shaun Tennant

Walter, wow. thanks for posting the last image. stunning. I just stared at it for a while, absolutely magnificant, great find.

Kris,
I thought I posted a reply, but I don't see it here, must have not gone through, so here goes again!

I am glad to hear your response - still embarassed -but glad. I remember our phone convo's well, I was a little unsure of how you'd take the Sketchup news - some people really have an outlook like - it's too easy etc, and I didn't know how you'd react. Glad to see you onboard with your wicked designs.

Thanks for the kind comments - very nice of you. I would be honored, but I don't know exactly what this means "a component install and a material install" and don't know if I have the "mad skillz" required. Clarify this for me and I'll see what I can do!

[SHAUN TENNANT]

Kris

Well, I'm a little embarrassed to tell you (and you likely remember) that I'm the guy that emailed you about your designs, and that I wanted to have some practice and would like to work up one of your projects... you were very kind last year and provided me with one - and I got through it a bit and got busy. I'm really sorry that I didn't go any further. I'm sorry that I got busy and never got back to you - that wasn't very big of me - I have thought about you a couple times since. I really appreciate your kindness and am quite embarrassed about my behaviour - and I think that's why I didn't contact you, sometimes it's difficult to be mature!

Enough about that - I will have to dig up the files and see how far I got, maybe I can keep working on it later - when things are a little slower. I really like what you have done here though, these are really nice in context and the SU renders are brilliant. Thanks for posting - and letting me actually get back in touch and admit my issues... sorry again.

[shaun tennant]

Mike D
I think I just found my doppelganger.. I will post a better avatar later, but there are some similarities for sure. I just need to know which one is the evil one - is it you or me?

Actually, funny story - about 6 years ago now I saw a guy that looked EXACTLY like me - similar height - very similar weight and build, same glasses and hair, even the color was the same. I always do interesting facial hair, and ours didn't match at the time - but he had one that I had done pretty recently and I almost got into a crack-up (I was driving and craning my neck - I couldn't believe it)
I have had people tell me that they saw me at a place I've never been or a time that I wasn't around the area.. strange.. this guy is basically me?

Anyone else? (I guess you could consider this a thread-jacking!)

[Shaun Tennant]

Jackson - very cool - nice to see some image posts and the design looks very functional and interesting. Thanks for all the nice images to look at (except I don't like the first one too much - is that Artlantis?)

[Shaun Tennant]

Paul,
thanks for the comments - you hit the nail on the head with this one. All the faults and things I would do next time. The trees were a large issue for me, not being able to use trees that I liked quite a bit - the trees did the trick, but I disliked the ones I made. I think I also spent so long on the model because of issues with getting colors from them and design changes, that it really wasn't fresh anymore. I also really wanted to get on with rendering.

I haven't checked out your youtubes yet, because I want to have lots of time to digest 'em. Your church is absolutely amazing and I am looking forward!

[Shaun Tennant]

Chuck,

Most of those are rendered in VUE although you can't really tell with the reflections etc.. the original file is 140 MB, and I cut er down to about 9. So - yeah, you'd like to see the DVD. I had a few billion polys in that scene, but VUE doesn't have a clipping problem - so no worries. Yeah I have a farm now, but it is still not powerful enough.. (MORE, MORE! MOREEE!!!!) I would LOVE to get some Linux genius to help me with a PS3 hookup - I tried it, but failed and took it back. PS3's are sooo powerful for floating point operations. 1 of those would likely equal about 200 of my machine! (see the Stanford U Folding@home project for more of that)

Thanks for the link - I need some hi-res satellite imagery, I was looking a while ago and couldn't find what I needed. Thanks!

The sound - go back and crank er up... I used full 5.1 on this and did some hard panning for tree leaf blowing and wind etc.. but you gotta crank er. Couple of misplaced birds, but, what can you do!

The morph section (for which I just noticed that one of the frames is out of place - oh well) was a sort of "plan to reality" idea that didn't really work out as I had hoped, but the client loved. This was what he remembered most... the blueprints on the site, to some linework, to color to textures and finally add trees. I would do it differently next time I attempted it, make it slower and I would have SU output that I actually liked. I got to hating the SU output on this project (only because of the model)

If you look at the first 2 pans again, you will see that I did use the PNG rotate tree business, but the rest is all Vue Trees.

Thanks for the comments man!

[Shaun Tennant]

Patrice,
I neglected to mention how the project went together:
Modelled all in SU, except the trees and the trees and the far landscape - but those are just planes. Some of the Textures I made in Wood Workshop (awesome app). The first two zoomed images from above are SU output - but the animation stuff was done in VUE5i, rendered out as JPEGS and virtual dub to make AVI's from. The audio was atmosphere deluxe, the SU images zooming were part of the overall presentation for a trade show, and I used Photostory 3 (free from micro$oft) for the SU/Slide portion. Some of the animations took so long to render, it's a pity to see them so low quality in a form like this - but what are you gonna do? The deck portion of the video took my machine 60 hours to render out at DVD quality, 30 Fps. Thankfully I've now built a bit of a farm so this would take about 18 hours now.

I found SU to be amazing for building this model, except the speedbump with the trees in SU, and still don't love the solution - but it works okay.

Eric,
If you mean you've been to the location - it is a Christian Camp near Red Deer, Alberta - there is a small town called Lacombe about 15 KM outside of Gull Lake - that help?
If you mean you've been there in the stresses - well, tell me about it..!

Thanks for the kind comments.

[Shaun Tennant]

Hello all!
As I sit this morning having my waffles (a real treat) It gives me great joy and I am very proud to present some of the final video shots from my project for a local camp called Gull Lake:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P75G_5jjmRM
As some of you know, I'm fairly new at all this, and I guess that this project was pretty ambitious. The terrain was a little tricky and the sheer amount of trees.. well wow -thanks to Alan and Tom, I was able to display them reasonably well enough in SU. There are issues, and things I'd do differently for sure, but I'm glad to be done and fairly happy with how she turned out.

Thanks for looking!

[Shaun Tennant]

yeah, um, michael, yeah, if I could just get you to add a "reality" portion to the script, that'd be good mmkay? I'm just going to get you to make it so that after you make your dream car with a couple fast clicks, the ruby will make it actually real mmmkay?

Oh, and I'm going to need to have you come in on saturday to add in lots of custom car designs that you need to design yourself to this ruby. I'm going to get you to include a cover on your TPS report to as per the memo also mmmkay?

Thanks.

[Shaun Tennant]

Bruce - see the bottom of this thread:
Dead Link
This is timely- project management software commercially available for free today, but only today - 16 hours left

[Shaun Tennant]

TIG,
I'm very glad you are here! - you guys are amazing. I get so tired of not having "a" as my add scene shortcut, and having to re-do the prefs or re-load my shortcut file.. Arrrgghhh. I don't know how many times i asked Google to fix this... Thanks for the tips on the registry though kindly appreciated!

[Shaun Tennant]

Howard, very nice and clean - thanks for sharing.. very cool

poster-Shaun Tennant

Guite,
really nice, those curves and forms are really impressive. I need to challenge myself more, I see. once again - wow. Thanks for sharing...

poster-Shaun Tennant

Joe, I remember Dojo Dawg.. I would have to guess Alan? Just a gut feeling..!

poster-Shaun Tennant

Gaius,
I ran a "purge all" and the file dropped to 87 KB. There was one style not being used - the styles can very quickly bloat your models - even to the point of not being usable. The Purge All Script is available here http://forum.sketchup.com/showthread.php?t=78887&highlight=Purge+All
Written by TIG and it rocks so hard - you don't even know. Thanks again TIG!
ent_ctr[2].skp

poster-Shaun Tennant

Not yet a FF subscriber...

poster-Shaun Tennant

agreed - wonderful suggestion - we all love modelling, but often it is not for fun where we can take our own direction. That is what I liked with the 3D challenge during the first 2 weeks. The model challenge was a stereo and a chess set. For the chess set, I made a mayan obsidian one and learned all about intersect (lots of them!) for the stereo, I made an old transformer robot/boombox - that was fun too. I didn't keep up because it was in a different place and became pretty low quality I thought...

I think this idea could help brush up on some skills as well as get some design ideas from each other. Some of you guys have some wild ideas about what certain form/functions should be, or what can fit into a specific category.

Great idea man.

poster-Shaun Tennant

mmmm, succulent.. all you need is mustard Stu.

poster-Shaun Tennant