I’ve found a more elegant way to customize Photoshop’s user interface: custom Flash panels.
While making the panels is not utterly simple, they fix almost all shortcomings of the AutoIt based, keystroke sending, standalone toolbar.

The download link and installation instructions are on the project page.

I’ve updated the Photoshop toolbar so it can take command line arguments to define its starting position. (So there is no need to edit the script for this.)
The new pack is here, the updated docs are here.

During the last few days I was working on a customized toolbar for Photoshop:

You can download it (with source code) from the project page: My Photoshop Toolbar.

I’ve finished my programming task on schedule, a standalone Lua application which provides utility functions for processing data coming from Unreal. (More on its features in a later article.)

I also started making a custom animation tree and learned much about Unreal’s animation system in general. The animations will be outsourced, and since this part of the project is going to be the most expensive, I really need to get everything right on my end. I must ask for the right animations as I can’t afford redoing anims over and over again.

Fortunately - if everything goes well - I’m going to get help from a technical animator with this whole animtree thing, so there is hope yet that it will be done on time/budget and at a high quality.

Speaking of high quality, my beloved Dollhouse has ended. After 26 episodes split between two seasons, it was canceled. I’m not happy about it but it’s still better than overdoing something until it’s squeezed and disfigured but still sweats money. (I’m looking at you Stargate… )

Fortunately my sci-fi needs are still well fed: Mass Effect 2 is simply awesome.
Fun to play, looks nice, runs at 60 fps, has great music and last but not least, the story is interesting. I though as much after playing ME1, so I stopped reading any kind of news about ME2 to avoid the marketing machine and similarly retarded forum users spoiling the story for me.
Same goes for Bioshock 2 and any game from Bethesda Softworks. This article on Kotaku is about this is issue, and I totally agree with the author.
I mean, it’s really shocking when Shepard discovers that she has a Geth twin sister, but it just wouldn’t have the same impact if you knew about it beforehand.
Oh..erhm… oops…

An acquaintance of mine, Sahak, found me with an interesting challenge: he wanted me to get his “Virtual city of Oslo” map to a presentable form.

He imported simple buildings from City Engine to UDK and made a map of the city.
Problems with the City Engine -> Unreal Engine asset pipeline and the sheer scope of the project led to an interesting task specification:

- The city barely fits Unreal’s “world", which is a roughly 10x10 km area.

- 4188 unique buildings made up the city. No instancing at all. Each building had its pivot at the world origin.

- No textures or proper UVs.

- I had 48 hours to finish.

After the two days, I came up with this:

The more technical, “behind the scenes” stuff is after the break.

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