Exporting Nightmare

Well, I've spent the last hour and a half trying to export something simple like a door from the Google Sketchup Warehouse, but I didn't get much luck. The first annoying annoying part is exporting the textures. These models use materials and textures that are unrecognized by hammer and hl2, so it becomes your responsibility to export those textures/materials into .tga files. Next you need to create a vmt file using notepad that's named after those textures and add texture information to them. Next you need to export your model into an smd and export again but this time with soften edges. This other one is a collision model and is necessary for compilation. Next you need to place these files in a specific folder, create a qc file using notepad with proper compilation instructions, then run studiomdl.exe with the qc file to compile it. I ran into errors along the way with the textures and didn't get the results I wanted. This process is too tedious to deal with and will be much more of a headache to export the kind of models we made this semester in Sketchup.

Video Rant

Animal Rescue

This past Saturday, my girlfriend and I were planning on going to the Fire-Island Lighthouse to attend the annual ghost story telling at the base if the actual lighthouse. As far as design is concerned, light houses are so interesting and beautiful... any way back to the story. So as we are driving we see a dog on the side of the road, the service road to sunrise highway. Cars were whizzing past and almost hit the dog. We stopped and got out and tried to get the dog to come to us to see if it had a collar, it did not.  We checked the surrounding area for people looking for a lost dog, there was no one. No signs no nothing. W decided to take the dog along with us to the lighthouse because we were already on our way. She never pooped/peeped/ or barked once in the car. That night we brought her back to my girlfriends house to get her all cleaned up. It took two baths to clean all the dirt and grime off of her. While washing the dog I noticed that she was infested with fleas. She was in pretty bad shape. I cut her hair and tried to get out as many fleas as i could. The next morning we went to Petco to get her flea medicine and shampoo. Again i bathed her and took care of her. We even bought her a little sweater. Seeing as it was Halloween and my girlfriend and i were being the dead Dorothy and Scare Crow, she was a perfect addition to our costumes, we now had a little Toto. On Monday we took her to the vet top get checked out and scanned to see if she had chip. Not only was she in great health and chip-less, the vet said that she was clearly abandoned and left for dead. Lucky for us we found her. She is now an official member of the family, her name is Minnie and shes the sweetest little puppy ive ever seen. People who mistreat animals need to be shot.

Art Show

So tonight at the University Cafe they had an art exhibit that i decided to go to. It was actually pretty cool i liked how they set it up by having some of the pictures on strings going across the room. I was surprised at how good some of the art was

Concert space

so this is my concert space its very open and i tried to keep cost in mine, i figure it would b at night so i had the only lights b light bulbs hanging on strings to give it a cool glow/star effect i figured it would be in the desert so it would just be vast nothing and open space thats about it

Nice Weekend

Finally finished setting up in west. I had my room reassigned into West and had to move everything from H-quad. Really enjoying it and getting better sleep, should help me with my studies. I've been doing a lot of thinking and self observation lately. I really notice how I take on different personalities and emotions when talking to certain people. I also noticed how much anxiety really controls me. It's also so easy to make excuses when I'm facing fear, but for some reason I make that excuse a truth to me and completely ignore the fact that I'm avoiding it. Social anxiety is such a problem and I'm interested in trying different things to overcome it. Many people say that the only way to conquer fear is to face, and I believe that. I'm trying to get myself out more and trying to meet more people. Sometimes it's a little hard to socialize here though, a lot of people just sit in their rooms with their doors closed. Really get's depressing sometimes, but that's why I need to get out and do something with myself. Didn't mean to ramble on, but it's something I've been thinking seriously about.

Hammer Time

Well, later today I will be testing out importing Sketchup models into hammer. Quite a complicated process which involves many steps, but if done correctly we can actually import our models fully textured. The tutorial seems pretty simple to follow and we will hopefully be able to find a quick way of accomplishing this. Wish I had more time to put work into this and my models, but this week has been pretty hectic. Between midterms, projects, programming assignments, and my new room assignment, I've had no time for anything. I have to move out of my building this weekend and that's going to be an annoying process. Well let's hope for the best and pray that we don't run into errors during the exporting process.