Mike's space

For obvious reasons I couldn't show her face, but trust me, not only was she very pretty.. she was very nice to talk to.  She happened to be at one of the stations that I was photographing, and I asked her about a nearby building.  She gave me a little information, I thanked her and went about my business.

This wasn't a unique experience, everyone I talked to were very pleasant and helpful and made my time there so much more enjoyable. 

When people hear that you are going to do research someplace, they automatically think "they are so lucky, they are going to have a great time"  It's true, usually it is an awesome time, but the reality is that you are walking for 12 to 14 hours a day.  You are also carrying around somewhere between 20 and 100lbs of gear and cases to make sure you have what you need.

Below is an image of part of the Horseshoe Curve route in Pennsylvania.  Keep in mind that the team that goes to these things usually sits behind a computer for 12 hours a day.  Rick and I are not what you would call petite. We started off in the parking lot there, then climbed all these stairs and then walked around a mile along the ballast to take a picture of a mechanism that slings grease up under the train to keep it running smoothly. Walking on ballast is like running on loose sand, except it bruises the bottoms of your feet.  Oh, that greasing unit, yeah, we found another one on a flat piece of land, right next to a tower we had to photograph anyway.

Sure, that's not a huge hike, but for fat boys like us, it might as well have been Mt. Everest.  Each time I do one of these things I lose about 10lbs, then swear to myself that I will go to the gym immediately in order to capitalize on the progress.. then I get back to work and sit my butt down for another 12 hours of talking to my square headed girlfriend.  That's what my wife calls my computer.

There ya go, I have shown the good beer and the beautiful women ( at least one ) and now all you have to do is wait for the announcement to see the fast trains.

Good Beer!!

Later, I will post the beautiful women! 

Then eventually you will see the fast trains!

-Porter

Man have I been busy.

I knew that once I got back from the research trip I would have lots of work to do, but I didn't think it would be this much.

It appears that I am not going to get the space I need for the video tutorials, and I haven't been working on them past 3 or 4 I haven't released.  I am formulating another plan, which I hope will be agreeable to everyone.  It will probably take me a while to do what I am wanting to do, but you will be getting the information as soon as I can cement the idea and get the buy off from "upstairs".

In the mean time I am busy getting stuff ready for the sim and making sure everything looks great!

We should be putting more renders up soon, I hope anyway.  I have a few more renders to do so that they have many images to pull from.

The other thing I have been doing is helping out with the scenery assets while my counterpart in the scenery area is out on vacation.  I have to say, the scenery is going to be amazing.  I am surprised by the detail that we are able to accomplish for the high detail routes.

Once we get this bad boy in the can, I plan on completing what I set out to accomplish, the 3 locs in 3 separate modeling packages.

I will have more updates soon. 

Thanks for sticking with me!

-Porter

One of my co-workers pointed out this new feature in Photoshop CS3.  There are two new tools called Auto-Align images and Auto-Blend images.  These functions lie in the Edit menu.

These two tools take images that are placed in a .PSD as separate layers and does some sort of voodoo to get them to align together.. Then if that wasn't enough, it does some other sort of voodoo to blend them together.. The result??

MathMagic!

Ok, here are the images I used:

Here is the result of Auto_Align:

Here is the result of Auto_Blend after I used the Auto_Align function:

That's it.  I put all of these pictures into one .PSD file with each picture became a layer in the file.  Select all the layers, hit the Auto_Align button and it will have several options.  I picked the first option which was Auto.

Once I hit this button it takes care of the calculations and repositioning of the layers into a stitched picture.  The blend function doesn't have any menu for previews, however I don't think it really needs it.

This is really helping me out right now.