My latest new toy arrived yesterday. I'm having a go at replacing typing (I'm actually quite a good typist -- I took touch typing at school and that's one of the few things I learned there that I use regularly in my life now) with speech recognition. I've invested in Dragon dictate and the best microphone I can buy for that with £15. I'm actually quite amazed at how good it is. I can speak almost at normal speed and as long as I pronounce my words pretty well, it recognizes moral less everything I say.

I once say using it is instinctive, but it really is pretty good from the moment you install it. I've spent about 10 minutes training it (and all that means is reading a few paragraphs aloud), and it's spent a few minutes going through my “ my documents” folder getting used to my style of writing. It's probably been given a bit of a head start because I write a lot, and most of it I have to say is probably fairly formulaic -- after all, I write a lot of tutorials and reviews for similar kinds of magazine. There are also couple of books I've written in those folders, so there's a lot of material for it to do what it calls a collocational analysis on. Basically this means working out what words are unlikely to say given what's already in the sentence. As a writer, it's a bit dispiriting to realise that a computer can predict with a relatively high accuracy what you're going to write based entirely on how similar it is to what you've already written in the past. And there was I thinking I was being original.

And it said that the success rate is very high. I'm having to get used to saying the word comma and the word full stop, so this entry is probably lacking in punctuation. Dictating this sentence I realised that I don't know how to actually write the word comma -- I have decided with the keyboard because whenever I say it the computer adds a punctuation mark.

Not sure to what extent using voice recognition will change the way I write. The problem with typing is that however fast you type you tend to forget what you were writing before you get to the end of the sentence and that means you tend to rewrite as you go along. With voice recognition things go onto the page almost as quickly as you think them, so perhaps it's possible to be a bit more flowing. On the other hand, maybe that's not a good thing. Maybe you need the time it takes you to actually type to work out whether what you were going to say makes sense or not.

Probably, it's just about getting used to the system.

One problem I think and have is that the programme takes a lot of processing power so if I'm doing something else, which I usually am, it slows right down. Given that if I'm writing a tutorial I'm usually running the programme the tutorial is about in the background that might be a problem.

D-Day

Today is D-Day for the yacht animation. By the end of today I have to get finished version over to the client. I've realised that there's one thing I forgot to add and that's the on-screen text. I want the text to be a bit stylish, so it may take a while.

There's also a few fussy little details, the odd flicker here and there, and pieces of lighting and aren't quite right. That I'm hoping to correct and that could slow me down because I have to re-render a few shots.

I finally got everything done and had a completed movie by the end of the day however, getting effectually rendered out in a format that was high enough quality, but still small enough to be uploaded online turned out to be a bit of a pain. I had to keep going upstairs to the office throughout the evening to check whether whichever version I'd rendered was good enough and small enough to be sent. It was about nine o'clock before I got finished version out. Even then, I'm sure there will be some changes that need to be made. I don't think this is the end of this project.


Andrew
Andrews back problem, which has been troubling him for a while, has got a lot worse. He's had to take several weeks off work (something he never does) and move back into my parents house. And with mum recovering from her operation and unable to bend down and him on painkillers and unable to stand up it sounds like things are a little difficult in the house. It's a lot for dad to cope with I imagine.

20th of November 2008

Work
checking through my invoices and looking at them against what bank account, something I've only just had time to do, because of all the work I've been doing, I've now realised that there's an awful lot of them that haven't been paid. And we now going to have to go through and contact some of my clients to remind them to pay me -- sometimes the work I did months ago. This is a pain for two reasons. One is that I don't like having to pester people about money. The other is that it makes me feel as if I have been remiss in not knowing when I've got paid and what for.

Probably to most people who have regular jobs, where they get paid every month. It's difficult to understand how I can simply not know whether I've been paid or not. However, when you're doing dozens of different jobs sometimes all at the same time. You tend to think once you've completed the job and invoiced for it, you can forget about it. Checking my bank details for every deposit is something I don't really have time to do, unless it's a really big project. I suppose this is a bit of a weakness in the way that I work, but I tend to concentrate on the job but I'm doing, rather than the money that I'm paid for it.



Castles

Today I'm working on the castle animation. It's looking good already, but when only to add some extra detail, and that means people in period costumes, animals, farming equipment and furniture. I've also redone the texture of the landscape. I started off by using a very large (4000 pixel across) texture, drawn in z-brush but that wasn't detailed enough. I wanted to create a landscape with grass, but paths through the grass, and that meant a lot of detail, especially because I had to zoom in very close to the model. So, what I've done use, used a much smaller texture and used it to draw a black and white mask. I've painted the paths in white and the rest in black. Then I've used 'd use that in 3ds max to define where I place two different textures -- 1 of grass, and one of muddy earth.

The good thing about this is that it means I can now title. The grass and earth textures, so that they are repeated over the whole model. So now when I zoom in close, There's still a lot of detail.

The result is that I can have a very large area of texture, but I don't have to use a really huge image to map onto it. I can use several much smaller images and use masks to define where their place, which makes the whole thing much more manageable.

Hopefully, this is going to allow me to use a lot more of my processing power on the extra detail I want to add to the models. The people I'm going to place into the scene will be from Poser and so they will be fairly high resolution. I'm hoping I don't end up making the scene so big that it's impossible to render.