The collected works of ajerimez - Page 1

Gents,

I'm running an Indigo2 MAX Impact with IRIX 6.5.10 and 512mb ram. System works fine, Maya 3 runs fine. I installed Soft3D 3.8.2 yesterday, and here are the issues:

1 - Starting the program from the Toolchest, it loads up but most of the interface doesn't draw. There's just the time slider - no buttons to click. Have to kill the process to exit.

2 - Running "soft" from the command line, I get an error about "libGraphic.so." According to the manual, this has something to do with the IRIX Digital Media Extension, which probably wasn't installed when I bought this I2 from eBay.

So, I just dumped $150 on a full IRIX 6.5 set on eBay, hoping that installing the DME will solve this problem. Am I barking up the right tree here?

Aaron

Turns out that the "libsoftGraphic.so" error was occuring because I was running "soft" from the command line without specifying any arguments. When I run Softimage from the Toolchest, the only complaint is it can't find databasedir.rsrc, which really shouldn't cause the crash problems I'm seeing.

Strange. I can scrub the time slider, which makes the viewports draw. But I can't manipulate any of the views, and there are no other buttons to push.

The Particle program runs fine, as does the Dialog Editor. This is so annoying!

Aaron

Finally got it working this weekend - turns out it was just a license issue. So now I've got v3.9.2 up and running, no OS changes required.

Man, it's great - loads up in about 5 seconds, compared to Maya 3 which takes about a minute. It also uses only 14mb ram at startup, whereas Maya 3 uses close to 60mb. I do miss the days before OOP/Java/crap bloatware.

As far as the old interface goes, I like it. It doesn't call attention to itself - lets you focus on the viewports. Seems like XSI's was over-compensation for 3D's "archaic" look, hence the fancy rounded buttons with beveled edges and shading. Overkill.

I like text buttons - you can immediately read their function. Soft|3D, Lightwave, and just a few other packages had that advantage. A far cry from 3dsmax, which is basically layers upon layers of cryptic icons.

Anyway, time to go render some dinosaurs...

Aaron

On my I2 Max Impact, Maya 3.01 is slow. Takes forever to load and yes, the interface does bog down the program. The 3D views draw quickly, but just opening the attribute editor or hypergraph takes a second or two. I have no experience with other versions on this machine, but I wouldn't attempt to run anything newer.

Soft 3.9 seems to run just as well as 3.8 - the interface updates were only made on the wintel side. It works absolutely great - the interface is snappy and it renders fast. Lots of fun to use on a Max Impact, and would probably work very well on R5K machines as well. (If you're using the wintel version, you can revert to the old interface by adding "set SI_OLD_UI=1" to your environment file.)

The current version of Soft|3D is 4.0, which I haven't used or heard much about.

Regarding where to get the program, eBay is a good bet. You can often pick up a complete set of Soft|3D 3.X for less than $50.

Aaron

Here's a fun 8-minute video of a 3rd-party Personal Iris system ("Bull?") running what appears to be Irix 3. It's narrated in French and showcases a lot of interesting old 3D demos.

I was struck by how well this 12.5MHz R2000 system ran the demos. And how loud it was!

It would be instructive to hear from any Nekochan members who have had relationships with girls born and raised in Japan. Seems to me that American girls these days grow up with a strong sense of entitlement and certain amount of narcissism, which they don't seem to shed until well into their 30's. Are Japanese girls any different? What do they tend to look for in a guy?

A law school pal has a Japanese wife whom he met while teaching English as a second language over in Osaka, and she seems pretty cool compared with most of the American girls I've met. Any corroboration / contradictions?

Definitely not - submissive / subservient girls are not my cup of tea. Thankfully another Nekochan member has provided some useful info based on his own experience via PM.

Update: So for the past few weeks I've been seeing a Chinese girl, Sophy. We met through eHarmony. She's a second-year law student at NYU (one of the top five American law schools) and she is everything that American girls are not - doting, humble, generous, attentive, and affectionate. She treats me far better than I deserve.

Still, I don't think we'll be together forever - she and I are good together physically, but she's not that interesting out of bed. She's also peculiarly close to her parents in China - she talks to them twice a day over the internet. I'm just wary of hurting her feelings, which it seems is bound to happen eventually, as I'm the first guy she's really been with. So I'm trying to figure out how to put her down gently, though if I were smart I'd probably go for keeps.

Anyway, so far the experience confirms my suspicion that Asian girls are generally better partners than American girls.

Ha! Uh, care to elaborate?

I'd like to try this on a few items, but will it harm silkscreened logos or text? I'd hate to successfully whiten a component only to discover that the manufacturer's logo dissolved!

Ahem... so, uh, in lieu of starting another thread on the subject, does anyone have any advice on how to break up with the Chinese girl you've been seeing for two months, who is now talking about moving in with you, and who has filled your kitchen with her pots & pans, your bathroom with her toiletries, and your schedule with her constant demands for attention?

(In other words, Hamei, how did you know?)

Seriously, though, she's not all that bad, but if she were in charge we'd be married and on our second child by now. Thank god she's also a second-year law student, so we both have significant demands for our time outside the relationship. But she recently made a unilateral deal with me that if we're not totally committed to each other by the time we take the bar exam (1.5 years away), that we can go our separate ways. I have a hard time explaining to her that she's making an awfully big assumption there!

LOL @ Hamei.

Update: The good news is, she's not pregnant. The bad news is that she stopped taking birth control a week or two ago and declined to notify me until I asked her yesterday. Her explanation was that she wanted to switch to another kind of pill that might have fewer side effects, but had to wait until her next period to do so.

Whatever. I wasn't thrilled to spend a day worrying that she might have an umbilical cord to my financial future growing inside her. I was going to wait until after finals to break up with her, but at this point I just want to end this now. Plus my kitchen is absolutely full of her pots & pans.

Ugh!

Okay, here's one to add to the "picky, picky" file. While it seems that http://www.nekochan.net does have a favicon.ico file, it's somewhat plain and seemingly unrelated to the content of the site. Perhaps an icon of an O2/Octane or an anime character would be more visually appealing and appropriate?

Also, I usually bookmark this site as forums.nekochan.net, since that's where I spend 99% of my time. There is no favicon.ico file for the forums at all, so the bookmark gets the default blank page icon. Can an icon be added to the forums section?

This is obviously a very minor issue, but my most of my Firefox bookmarks have pretty little icons next to them, and I sure wish Nekochan were the same! This site is already very well-designed and visually appealing, so these suggestions are just a little icing on the cake.

As an example, here's a 16x16 hypercube logo.

While I was at it, I also rigged up a 32x32 hypercube icon. Not sure if these would make good favicons though, because they don't really stand out against a gray menu background color.

Well I, for one, appreciate Hamei's advice, opinionated as it may be. I doubt this will climax with Sophy wrecking my place, but you never know. She's been pretty well-behaved so far. If anything, she's liable to be harder on herself than on me.

She's been sick so we haven't seen each other in over a week now, but she's supposed to come over on Sunday night, and I'll have a serious discussion with her then. Hopefully she won't take it too badly. I'll post an update afterward.

Thankfully, Sophy has no interest in SGI systems (she doesn't even know that I collect them or what they are), and she doesn't know that I go by "ajerimez" online, so there's a zero likelihood of her reading any of this.

Here's your cat girl... afraid it's not very legible at 16x16 though.

Boy, it's tough to find a pic of anything that doesn't look like an indiscriminate blob when reduced to 16x16. Might have to cook up something by hand.

Nekochan favicon design competition?

About 75% of the women in America today are blond, but only about 10% of them achieved it without the use of chemicals.

I had been waiting for our law school finals to be over before breaking up, so Sophy came over last night and we had a talk about our relationship. She cried a bit and insisted that we "forget each other," but there was no smashing or tearing of anything. She left a bunch of stuff here which she insists I keep. Well, that's that, I guess.

HAHAHAHA!!!

This one is for you, Hamei!

Haha, it's nice to see such good work produced in Maya on an Onyx2, and your character modeling skills are obviously solid, but you really need to lose those breasts. They just look really out of place, they're anatomically incorrect, and they don't serve any useful purpose to the character design. But other than that, nice work!

Okay, it's been a while, but how about this? It's basically the "n" from the "IRIS|Crimson" logo. It's not exactly mind-blowingly awesome, but I think it's an improvement on the current icon. There should be no copyright or trademark issues - you definitely won't be hearing from SGI on this one.



EDIT: Here's a version that's the "n" from the "ONYX" logo. Not sure if either of these would float your boat, but just thought it was worth a shot.



EDIT 2: Okay, here's one last version, this one is the "n" from the "INDY" logo (basically the same as the prior icon, with a different color scheme. This might be the best of the bunch - the colors match this site's scheme pretty well.



EDIT 3: As you can tell by now, I've got some time on my hands. Here's one LAST version of an "N" which I made up to look like a 4DWM widget.

A) Read the thread before you post.

B) If you don't like it, submit your own.

What tomo & skywriter said re: interlacing is correct - this is normal for video capture. If you intend to re-output the video for playback on a television, you probably should not remove the interlacing. If you intend to output digital video files for playback on computers, however, then go ahead and remove it.

As far as twitching or timing issues, the O2 is very sensitive to time sync, and the poor signal quality output by most consumer-level equipment may cause dropped frames, judder, and other issues. You might try re-routing the signal through better equipment or using a time-base corrector. I think there should be info on Google groups about these issues with video capture on SGI.

EDIT: See here , here , and here .

You most certainly do have hardware compression on the O2.

To make things easier, try using one of the presets in Media Recorder. There should be something like "SGI video production" that will configure video capture to use the O2's built-in M-JPEG video compression, which occurs in realtime so there's minimal post-processing of captured video.

In my experience, the best way to remove light scratches and scuffs from colored skins is via careful scrubbing with an ordinary rubber pencil eraser. The large block-shaped kind is easy to hold and can be applied with reasonable accuracy. You should be careful to scrub directly over the mark, and don't overdo it, since excessive scrubbing will wear down the plastic texture, leaving a shiny spot on the case. However, for most light scratches, this method works almost perfectly.

Have not tried Mr. Clean Magic Eraser - sounds like a similar process/result?

Considering that the price includes monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, IRIX CD set, and delivery, it sounds like a fair deal. You could easily spend more than $300 trying to buy all those parts separately on eBay, especially with the cost of shipping.

If that photo is the actual system, then it seems to have VPro graphics. You should check with the seller to be absolutely sure about what you're buying - ask for photos of the system all around, and insist on being able to "test-drive" it before letting him drive away with your $300.

Also, if you're looking for a first SGI system to tinker with and learn IRIX, consider an O2. As has been discussed here several times, an O2 can be a more convenient starter system than an Octane, especially if space is tight.

Usually 3D software has some sort of "ray recursion limit" that sets the maximum number of bounces/refractions for any single ray. This is to prevent rays from bouncing back and forth many times, which would slow down rendering. If that limit were set too low, it might explain why you're not seeing reflections in the sphere through the glass. Have you tried changing the Reflection Limit to 2 or 3?

Have you considered trying with natural sunlight first? might be easier to get the whitening to happen more evenly?

I traced it and exported as an Enhanced PostScript file . Hopefully you've got some app that can read this. You can export at any resolution you please, since it's vector.

After you open in Photoshop, Layer > Flatten Image, then Image > Adjust > Hue/Saturation. Check "Colorize," set Lightness to about 50, Saturation in the middle, then experiment with the Hue & Lightness sliders until you're happy.

Very nice. Do you notice any difference in the surface texture of the plastic - has it retained its prior shine? Also, have you taken any steps to prevent water from accumulating behind the metal shielding on the inside of the lid?

Great video, thanks for posting.

I agree, Jose. The addition of layers in v3 was really revolutionary. Every new version since then has merely added gradual refinement accompanied by massive code bloat. If v3 had multiple undos, I'd still be using it today. As it stands, I currently use v5.5 as newer versions don't offer any features that I need. I think most of the Adobe apps peaked in the late 90's: Photoshop, PageMaker/InDesign, FrameMaker, Acrobat, Premiere, After Effects - have any of them been improved on any fundamental level since 1999?

Here are some photos of a boxed set of Photoshop 2.5.2 for Sun. Apparently it was originally sold to an Israeli company (the box contains a ton of old faxes and invoices). I'd love to install it on my SPARCstation but unfortunately it uses a flexLM license based on the system's hostid (making the registration number on the box more or less useless). Oh well, it's fun to flip through the manuals and the faxes between the buyer and the dealer - note the price on the last page! It's hard to imagine paying almost $2,000 for it, considering that most SPARCstations didn't even have 24-bit graphics back then.

Nice collection! That would make a pretty nice animation studio.

Is that a Presenter 1280? I've never actually seen one in person - how does it look? Do you have the necessary cables and adapters to hook it up to your O2?

I might be able to get my hands on a DECstation 5000/260 - just the system unit, no keyboard, mouse, monitor, or drives. Aside from the basics that can be gleaned from Wikipedia and a few fan pages, I know next to nothing about these systems.

Any practical advice? What are some of the more interesting apps that can be run on these machines? And where would be the best place to find parts & accessories - eBay doesn't seem to have much? Any input is very much appreciated.

Thanks for the suggestions - I'll try to pick up the system this Sunday and will write more then.

In the meantime, I stumbled across this page , which seems to have a lot of useful little programs for the platform.