Here’s the money shot:

The full sized version of this is nine megapixels across, and about one and a half megapixels high. It was shot from the porch of the western gate, looking out over the garden and reflecting pool, using a 5.1 megapixel Sony Cybershot. I took about 32 separate images and tiled them together to produce this single image. The version you’ll see if you click on the above image is 2048 pixels wide. Sorry, but I can’t let you download the huge one from my server and have any bandwidth left for myself.

What you’re looking at here is a one-hundred-eighty degree view; you can see the red walls of the western gate on either edge. The tiny dots at the base of the Taj Mahal itself are people. This was taken at about 10AM local time.

It’s hard to describe how I felt when I saw this for the first time. The Taj Mahal is something I’d heard of all my life, and to see it this way - what you’re looking at is what I saw coming through the western gate - nothing I can think of to say really conveys how I felt at that moment. It was a moment of grandeur, of sheer awe. It truly is one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, and it is more beautiful to see in person than any photograph could ever possibly convey.

Last month I was sent to India to help teach the art of animation to apprentice animators at Rhythm & Hues Studios, Hyderabad.

I made a little detour…

Check out those freaky body proportions!  I look odd here because my pants pockets are jammed chock full of stuff.  Cameras, wallets, water bottle, you name it, it’s in my pockets.  The reason was that there were these rhesus monkeys everywhere, and I was warned to keep careful watch of my possessions because of pickpockets - but they didn’t mean the people.  They meant the monkeys.  They’re known to grab your wallet and run up the nearest tree.  Good luck getting it back.

My Eagle Talon decided to commit suicide days before I left on my business trip to India during the month of March - the studio sent me there to teach the art of animation to apprentice animators in Hyderabad.  Blow-by pressurized the cooling system in the car, which manifested by explosively disconnecting the top hose on my radiator. This eventually resulted in the engine seizing up.

The good news is that the replacement car is a 2001 Toyota Prius! It’s not new, but it’s a hybrid and I’m going to save so much money on the gasoline that the thing will come pretty close to paying for itself in the savings on fuel every month. I drive quite a ways to work, about 85 miles a day as a round trip, so it adds up pretty fast.

Now I just have to figure out how to get rid of the dead car.  I put it up on eBay, and while people are bidding on it, I don’t think it’s going to go for anywhere near what it’s really worth.  Then again, what it’s worth is defined by what people are willing to pay.

Hi, everybody - I finally decided to toss my entire old web site in the trash and start over with a Wordpress blog like every other busy creative professional I know. I finally picked up on the reason everybody uses Wordpress - who the heck has the time to update HTML pages?? I sure don’t. That’s why my site was static since, uh, forever.

The main thing here so far is the Gallery, which you can access from the tab bar in the upper right. It has subpages as well, so there’s a fair amount to look at.
These images below are in the gallery - they’re just here to whet your appetite, and because a web site without cool stuff to look at on the first page sucks.
- Gene

This year my son absolutely had to be Optimus Prime for Halloween, so since I used to make all this crazy stuff when I was doing practical FX, I decided we’d do it! My web site was so hopeless for updating it that I never posted the picture till now, but here it is:

I cut about 140 pieces of foam core and hot-glued it all together, test fitting parts on him as we went. On Halloween, it was a little chilly outside, but he was hot and sweaty inside the suit. He also had to learn how to walk in the suit, and it was very difficult. He had to adopt a sort of swinging gait, and it was so much work that after only about four blocks, he was pretty much done for the evening. He got a lot of compliments, and he was quite proud of it even though he complained rather a lot about how uncomfortable it all was.

The helmet we bought.

I’m no idiot.

That’s the name of my article in Computer Graphics World, April 2007 Edition - yes, I’m now a published writer too. See page 8 for the beginning of the article, “Pushing Light”.

One of my fondest wishes has finally come true: I’ve gotten my eyes repaired! I had my LASIK surgeries (one eye at a time) by Dr. Peter J. Cornell on July 28th and 29th (we celebrated my son Charlie’s birthday two days early because his cousins and grandparents from my wife’s side of the family were in town). Within 24 hours after the second surgery, the vision in my right eye is 20/15, while the left eye is currently something near 20/25 to 20/20. However, the left eye was much more traumatized than the right one during surgery, and I expect both eyes to improve over the next three months.I have some halo effects - it’s kind of like watching an old black and white Humphrey Bogart movie, not unpleasant at all - and some starburst effects, particularly at night. However, the intensity of these effects come and go as my eyes heal, and of course my corneas have only begun the healing process. I’ve been told that these artifacts should disappear as my vision improves over the next three months, and I may see improvement in the quality of my vision for up to a full year after the surgery.

I’ve been told I can’t go swimming for a couple of weeks, and to sleep with protective goggles on for the next half week, and to use antibiotic, steroid and lubricant eye drops till then. After that it’s just lubricant drops as needed, and I have to remember to blink more often when I’m working at the computer. But that’s really it. It’s amazing to have clear vision, sharp as a tack, from one visible edge to the other. It’s like sitting front row, center in the Cinerama Dome!

I’m also still drawing. I did a drawing of somebody at the local bookstore, and she paid me a $20 bill for it, so we got our copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince basically for free. Quite a feeling, to have somebody go that apeshit over my art like that!

Oh, and by the way, if you’re considering getting LASIK yourself, just do it. There are a few things not to do:

• If you get told “no” by a doctor, don’t shop around till you find one that tells you “yes”. That’s not getting good medical advice, that’s fishing through the draw pile until you find the ace. Some people are just not good candidates.  If you’re over 65, you should probably skip it.  Likewise if the doctor tells you your corneas are too thin, or if you have lupus or some other immune system disorder, you should probably not go through with it.  I’m not sure about diabetics, ask your doctor.
• Don’t listen to the wild stories about the quacks and malpractice suits against them. The only reason you hear about them at all is that they’re so rare that when it does happen it makes the headline news. The rest of the time these operations go off without a hitch - it’s actually far more dangerous to have a bunion removed.  Most of the horror stories are from South America where they do your eyes and then give you no follow-up care.  Then they run to this one clinic in Florida to see if the American doctors can save their eyes after a screwed up LASIK job, and about two thirds of the time they can, but about a third of the time they can’t.  So if you’re hearing about these horrible situations, most of them come from that.  Or the stupidity of the people getting them in the first place.
• Don’t expect a miracle: if you’re 50, expect to need reading glasses. I didn’t at first, but I did later - but it’s normal. What you’re after is normal vision, not perfect vision. Still, that might be miracle enough for you.  It was for me.

After three months of chasing wild geese, I think I’ve finally stabilized the server. I’ve finished the life drawing course, and my skills have taken another quantum leap - so much so that I’m considering pulling my demo reel and about half of the stuff on my gallery pages as being hopelessly nonrepresentative of my current abilities. I’m also working on a small personal animation project, this time in Maya. I have the advantage of having access to some of the best animators in the world as I learn. I’m perfectly positioned - now all I have to do is the work itself.

I start another life drawing class in about a week, and I’m brushing up on my Maya chops. Soon I’ll be able to run with the big dogs. In the meantime, check out the code page - I’ve finally fixed the problem with the nGene source code that prevented it from compiling cleanly on Linux using KDevelop 2.0! Unfortunately, I waited so long that KDevelop 3.0 has been out for months now. Ah, well, it may work as is, but if it doesn’t, I’ll fix it.

What a busy year it’s been. It seems like it’s all gone by in a blur.