parker’s desk

What…a…freaking…day!

It was one of those “get up and go” days, non-stop  from start to fin­ish.  This is lit­er­ally my first chance to just kind of “bleh.”

Started ridicu­lously early, I had to pick the kids up today to cover for their mother (who had a work engage­ment she could not miss, and my studio’s flex­i­ble) so I got to work a lit­tle after 6 am to make sure I at least got 8 hours of work in!  I actu­ally quite like get­ting in so early, I usu­ally get a mas­sive wave of work done before I real­ize it’s noon…maybe a carry over from early morn­ings in the Marine Corps, who knows.

My work (lit­er­ally my work, not work itself) was a true test in my patience though…I had a lot of light­ing work to do for a cin­e­matic sequence in the game, specif­i­cally for actors.  The engine we use (Infer­nal Engine) has a cap on how many actor lights can affect a game char­ac­ter at one time on the Wii (off­hand I want to say 3 total), and I quite lit­er­ally spent four hours trou­bleshoot­ing why actor light­ing wouldn’t work on the main char­ac­ters fea­tured in the cin­ema!  It started out promis­ing, there was some­thing like 12 lights affect­ing actors…I whee­dled that all­l­l­lll the way down to just four total lights, only 3 pos­si­bly affect­ing any actor at any one time, and it still wouldn’t work! So then it becomes lit­tle tweaks, set­ting flips, pray­ing to var­i­ous deities, cross­ing fin­gers and even­tu­ally sac­ri­fic­ing live ani­mals hop­ing it’ll work to no avail.  I kid about cross­ing fingers.

Next thing I knew it was 2:35 PM, I needed to be out of there 5 min­utes ear­lier to be on time so I race off to pick the kids up.  Then it’s the excite­ment see­ing them/them see­ing me, try­ing to braved HEB (local gro­cery store here) with what I have know learned are the after-school masses all shop­ping, and then mak­ing it home with moron dri­vers doing their best to smash into my piece of crap Kia.  Get home, clean up, 10 min­utes later it’s time for food and then movie time with the kids right on after!  I’m vol­un­tar­ily giv­ing my night with them tomor­row up so I can try to get as much into our upcom­ing mile­stone as pos­si­ble (Fri­day), so I wanted to make sure we all had a great night…we ended up finally con­clud­ing the Matrix tril­ogy tonight, accom­pa­nied by dis­turbingly large por­tions of ice cream while cud­dle up together on the couch.

Pol­ished the evening off won­der­fully with a cute bed­time story, Library Mouse, and I wisely dis­cov­ered the third option in the eter­nal bitch­ing between my two off­spring as they fight over what room we’ll be read­ing in…

“Daddy’s bed, younglings.  Move it.”

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