Pterodaktyl…

http://www.justflight.com/product.asp?pid=210

I created the models for the C17 Globemaster, Su27 Flanker and Eurofighter Typhoon.

We’ve just been away for the weekend - Lil wanted to go home for a friend’s birthday party, and there were a couple of events at the NEC that I wanted to visit (strictly for business purposes of course…).

My dad drove us up country Friday night after Lil finished work (her new TomTom proved very handy for finding her office in the middle of rush hour) and stayed overnight with my aunt and uncle near Gloucester. Saturday morning we headed up to the NEC, dropping Lil off at her parent’s house on the way.

The first event we visited was the Warley MRC show. It’s years since I touched a model railway, but in today’s digital world the simulation companies have a presence at these events, and as several stands were selling our stuff it seemed worth going along. We arrived at 10:00, not long after the show opened, and the exhibition hall was already busy. Within an hour or so some parts of the floor were pretty much packed solid. According to the organisers over 18,500 people visited during the two days of the exhibition. It’s interesting to see how the hobby has changed. The model railway I had as a child had a simple controller with a dial for speed and a switch for direction. If you wanted to run more than one train at once you had to do very complicated wiring to isolate sections of the track. Now a lot of the controllers are digital, and can control dozens of trains at once - they can even be programmed to replay pre-recorded commands, so you can set a whole layout up to run automatically - although I can’t help feeling that’s rather missing the point about what makes a model railway fun in the first place!

The second hall we visited was housing the International Flightsim Convention. Although flight sims are more of a personal hobby than our main business, we have worked on a flight sim project in the past, and it’s a very interesting, highly competitive field. It’s interesting to note that the attendance for the IFC was 2,600 - so the people who complain that computers are killing off traditional hobbies such as model railways should maybe think again.

It was very interesting to see some of the evolving hardware products that are appearing on the flight sim market. While they’re still a long way out of my price range, full-scale instrument simulators which can be hooked up to a computer flight simulator are now available as off-the-shelf products. I had a chance to try a few of these, and the level of immersion they give is quite incredible. This was probably the largest one on display:

Using real switches and buttons is far more fun that clicking on a computer screen! I also drooled over this, but sadly it won’t be out until after Christmas, so Santa won’t be bringing one.

On Saturday night we headed over to Lil’s friends house for the party, which was a lot of fun - I have videos, but I’d like to be invited to another one sometime so I won’t make them public!

On Sunday Lil’s parents drove us back to Gloucester, and then after a good lunch we headed home - all in all, a good weekend!

I’m afraid it’s been rather quiet around here for the last month - but after a period when business was worrying slack, it’s suddenly become incredibly busy!

We’re currently working on three projects, including some flight simulation modelling, which is a whole new area for me. It’s taken some getting used to, but it’s interesting to be building planes instead of trains. They’re certainly much more complicated shapes! I really need to get my 3ds max skills up to scratch - these pictures show the standard of modelling that’s going to be set over the next few months. Unfortunately, the version of max that we use throws its toys out the cot if you try and render to texture under XP SP2. This technique is essential for getting the shadow effects that make those shots of the cab look so real, so we’re looking at a fairly expensive upgrade to the latest version. Discreet produce great software, but their tendency to cease producing patches for superseded versions tends to make me grind my teeth…
Tomorrow we’re flying up to Glasgow, then Wednesday we have a business meeting in London.¹ I’ll be checking e-mails when I get the chance. I’ll also try and do a few mobile updates, as I’ve finally got the post-by-email feature working on Wordpress.

On the subject of mobile internet access, I recently switched from Orange Pay Monthly to Pay-As-You-Go - I wasn’t using the phone enough to justfy spending £24 a month on a contract. I was worried that I’d lose the £3 for 4MB GPRS deal I got on contract, but in fact there’s an equivalent deal on PAYG. There’s also the option to buy a single day’s unlimited access for £1 - which for occasional heavy use works out pretty well.²

Well, that’s about it for tonight, I’ll try and update from Glasgow - it’ll be the first time I’ve been to Scotland, so that should be fun!

Oh yes, and I’ve installed a footnotes plugin for Wordpress³

1. 7am train from Honiton, the joy [↩]
2. I tend to go for weeks without using GPRS, then want to upload a load of cameraphone pics at once [↩]
3. Which I promise not to use this much in future [↩]