This is one of the first versions of the 1000 Pound Cake website. It is coming along thanks to Tyler Kupferer's help with Flash compression schemes. A week ago I thought I was going to have to pack up my things and move back to West Lafayette early when I was getting seventy megabyte SWF's!

It turns out that I was importing the frames individually into Flash and then attempting to compress the images only by converting PNG's to JPEG's with 80 per cent quality. That is the worst idea! The correct way to import frames into Flash is to export a FLV from After Effects and it will compress the video inbetween frames. The same video with even higher quality and music is a six point four megabyte SWF instead of being ten times larger (and stupider).

In this version of the website, nothing is coded to be interactive yet and a lot of the animation is rudimentary. It just feels good to lay down keyframes sometimes. Also, each frame is taking a bit over two minutes to render and I set a batch last night so it only rendered four hundred new frames. Halfway through you can see what it used to look like. I am rendering with Final Gathering, Image Based Lighting, and two particle systems that simulate clouds (and hike up rendering time).

On the thirty third day of working on the 1000 Pound Cake website I have come up with what you see above. The project has been directed by Leif and Charles as I eagerly attempt to finish the production before August 13th. That is exactly fifty days away, twelve hundred hours if you will, that I'll need to make this the best website anyone has ever seen. It is dramatic, but it will happen as long as I don't die or something.

Today is Sunday and so it is supposed to be relaxing yet I still find myself pushing and pulling verticies at the office. I can't really imagine doing anything else though. Working in Maya is so relaxing and rewarding (usually) that it makes sense to be spending my weekend in front of my computer.

Don't fear for me though. In twenty years if we meet I won't be a slug who doesn't fit into anythinig but sweat pants. At nine this morning I set off on an ambitious trip to Denver via my fixed gear. According to Google I had to take the 93 South for twenty miles and then the 6 east for ten. What Google has yet to implement at the time this is written is an elevation utility. From my house to the county line is entirely up hill.

Bah! I should have know of course. I do live next to a massive mountain range. After an hour and fifteen minutes I saw a sign for Jefferson County. It was the ten mile mark and I decided to head back. It was getting hot, the cars were not acknowledging me as much as I'd like, and I was tired. I don't think the return trip took more than a half hour. I flew down Foothills Highway and had to take my feet off the pedals to avoid losing control.

I'll head to Denver tomorrow for free via the bus pass I have to get tomorrow. Because I work on Pearl I get so many cool benefits!

I took a lunch break and walked to Whole Foods to buy a frozen pizza and while I was shopping I set my computer to render the 1000 Pound Cake world all with the same water texture assigned to the lake. The result was pretty cool.

The world I am making only works from one camera angle. The illusion of bringing such a bizarre two dimensional world into a new universe is only belivable thanks to the stationary camera. Of course 'Bee' as I named my primary renderable camera, can hover about, but if she deviates too much then the mirrors will shatter and the smoke will evaporate.

To illustrate the point I flew Bee to the opposite side of the planet and you can see all the bits. Currently I applied a few deformers to the grass mesh so the planet would look more like a muffin and in the process I buried a lot of scenic elements. This was just for the purpose of showing how the scene was made. It isn't often that tricks are revealed even though I would not say this was too tricky. However, enjoy. And look at that cool lake I've got there. Neato!

This is progress! 144.36 hours into this project and this is what one man can create! Today I imported all of the individual Maya files. That process is always so problematic. The first time I opened Maya and discovered that there was no such thing as copy and paste (sort of) I was instantly disappointed. That was on top of every professor telling me that it was the most daunting package they had ever worked with. There is a lot to learn, but Maya isn't that bad. Perhaps one day I will know everything it can do, but probably not anytime soon. But hey, I know enough to create the world you see, that is pretty good right?

This will be the cornerstone of my internship. If I pull this off I will prove a lot of people wrong... and I will. The assignment is to create something like this, but way better. It will be a pretty huge challenge, but I love the pursuit and as long as my computer plays along then by August you'll be able to interact with this world.

This is one of the characters in the massive Flash website that I am working on. Look at the picture and he is the little guy up in the top right. His role of the cookie production is to pick up the chocolate chunks that come out of the mountain when the Mountain Monster bites them off. Look at that mustache!