The Spirited Soul

The F1 magic...

2008-10-21T16:05:00.017+05:30

Most Indian kids had Sachin, Saurav and Dravid as their favourite sportsperson - their role models, but for me it was a bit different. For me it was Schumacher. Michael Schumacher.
Formula 1 - it's something I have been into for around 10 years now... I still remember the first race I saw on television, Silverstone,1999 the one in which Schumacher crashed out and was out for the rest of the season b'coz of injury. Since then I have been an ardent fan of F1. Did everything to make sure that I could get the television set free for me during those Sunday afternoon races. Oh! I used to love it!!

10 years down the road my love for Formula 1 is still strong. Although I cannot catch hold of every race I do keep myself informed of everything. Maybe it's the love for speed, or the beautiful tracks or the beauty and the technology behind the race cars which keep me hooked on to F1 even after so many years. If only I could have my own F1 car ! huh...

Well it's actually quite easy to have one of your cars :). Just design it in 3D! Sounds interesting right? That was the solution I had in my mind a few years back...but tried to realize it only a month back when one of my friends challenged me to do the same.

So here it is...After more than 20 hrs of modeling and several sessions with rendering and texturing it all stand like this (above & below).

As you can see it turned up quite realistic? Hasn't it? But the only problem I faced was that I could not add any logos/design on the car body...although I have one solution, it is quite a cumbersome process. So if you think you have the solution to this texturing problem please do help me out. I will be very thankful to you. And as always suggestions are always welcome so please do comment it's really helpful.

It's Half Time

2008-10-19T17:16:00.006+05:30

Finally! It's here! It's that time of the year when you can sit back, relax and enjoy - at least for 4 non-stop days. Yeah its OASIS time. it's time to inject in some vibrance into our otherwise '____' college life (blank intentional 'coz really u don't have any words to describe the condition of an average student).

After the gruesome test schedule, pathetic marks, rechecks and no checks, hours of meaningless digi labs and makeups, boring lectures on Turing machines and automation and some (God knows what's going on) unknown topics in Data Structures and Algorithms we, the future computer scientists of the country, truly deserve a break! No not a break when we can reflect back on the past two months and find out what went wrong (it never works afterall) but some days off from the usual schedule when we can recuperate from all the wounds of doing CDCs in BITS and appreciate the better half of our lives. And surely OASIS comes in as the manna from heaven.

So whats special this Oasis? Believe it or not out of the total expected out-station participants, which will be around 1200, more than half will be females...ahh what a relief to all of us hapless BITSian boys! Anyway...every year Oasis brings in so many events that it's difficult to choose from them. However a special one that has caught the attention of some A7 students - after some initial coxing by an A7 sponz guy (name undisclosed here) and about his experience of dancing with some babes during last year's Oasis every one seems interested..... only to find themselves in an even more critical situation - where to find an appropriate partner. Gosh, if only, we knew the answer!!!

Ahh prof shows. No... i can't tolerate high volume late night music shows in enclosed areas. That's why I keep myself away from most of the music night performances and the prof shows. If only the performances took place in the open. Anyways hope that all of those who signed up for the prof shows really have a good time out there!

Then there is Rocktaves, Fusion, Tarang.....Kavi Sammelan (I remember this one 'coz my wingie signed me up :) ).... NSS Stall yeah! my posters.....the dance floor, dominoes, nestle and lots more!!! And oh I forgot to mention the inaug - which I usually find to be the most interesting amongst all of these.

96 hours-too short a time to enjoy them all but surely good enough to bring in a change to an otherwise listless life. There you go - found the word to the blank above!!

My first Original Creation!!

2008-09-29T22:23:00.008+05:30

It has been a rather short journey. 23rd of April,08 just 1 week before Compre Exams last sem that I installed Autodesk Maya for the first time. Thanks to all those short movies by Pixar, my natural inclination towards modeling and animation and Aditya, 'that CCTV guy' that I finally tried out Maya and boy oh boy, what a great software it is. I got hooked up to it almost immediately. Going through all the Maya tutorials hurriedly instead of studying for Compre gave me greater pleasure!

That was the story so far. Going through tutorials certainly gives you lots of ideas but the bottleneck in the process is that you don't get to unleash your own creativity and neither do you realize the challenges involved in making the real thing! When we see movies like Spiderman, LOTR, Mummy how many of us understand that they are actually images rendered on a computer software displayed at 30fps? How many of us realize that all of them involve months of animation work that too just for some few scenes? But nevertheless they are outcomes of creative human minds and a very dependable software. And yet they are so real, so believable to the human eye. The process is difficult no doubt but the end results are rewarding. The mere thought that you have created something new, something that you can manipulate at your own will, something that is so unrealistically real gives you a feeling of immense joy and pleasure and lots of satisfaction.

I myself have worked on quite a few scenes and even a 30 sec animation. The latest one being the one on a steam locomotive. Gone are the days when you can catch a glimpse of these monstrous but lovable machines. But that's not a problem cause you can always build your own loco using Maya. And so did I, almost I guess! This one is special for me coz', this is the first model that involves such a realistic look and a complex design and that too made almost entirely without any 'external' help (of course thanks to Google image search that I atleast got to start off with a reference image:) ).

Building the model of the steam engine itself took me around 4-5 hours. Then came texturing in which you "dress up your model".(You put different types of materials on your model so that they look 'real' - for example the reflection off the boiler surface or the sunlight reflecting from the front of the boiler) Then came creating suitable lighting pattern based on the background I was using. Rendering - it's the final stage where you get the actual output like the image above (actually all the processes are interlinked and rendering is generally done time and again to have an indea of how your model is going to look finally) And voila you get something that is so nearly real!! The whole process took me more than 10 hours over a span of 2 weeks. So much for just a single image. Just think how much is required for an animated movie!!

(A wire frame view of the engine - shows how complicated matters are over here!)

I hope all of you like it. Surely lots of improvement can be made on this. But I think as a first timer with so little experience I have done quite well. So what do you think?? Please leave some comments. Feel free to criticize and suggest improvements. It will be very helpful for me.

That's right !

2008-09-25T12:10:00.005+05:30

It's been quite a while since I last posted. So here is a combo of all that has been going on-

A few facts/concepts that I picked up over the past few weeks...
-> Inflation has been inflated a bit too much in our mess (You pay in double digits to get a plate of cold french fries !!)
-> You can always come second in a race where you were the only one competing! (Believe it it has been proved in Pilani! )
-> Getting Average is much better than an Average - as it's psychologically much satisfactory :)
-> A fat,bald headed person with a huge tummy behaves like a fat, bald headed person with a huge tummy (Only for those who had waited for more than 2hrs to catch a glimpse of such a person on 16th September)
-> Doing a formal project under a prof involves meeting too often only to decide when the next meeting will be held and nothing else
-> Writing a Resume is easy provided you know all those insignificant tiny little information/achievements that you don't even care of
-> Debugging a program is easier than bugging it
-> Realized that I was in the most unlucky wing in the most unlucky bhavan on Campus where even Google finds it too difficult to search pages

My last post? Maybe...

2008-09-10T11:25:00.008+05:30

Picture this - A DIY Blackhole kit as a birthday gift or Mr O'Reilley's Black Hole 2.0 for Dummies or a new course in your college ' Black Hole Techniques II' ( like MT II). Seems like science fiction? Well back in 1659 when Ferdinand Verbiest first gave a design of a prototype car, guess what, the scenario was the same and yet today we are all so familiar with the car!!

Most of you might be knowing by now that today, the 10th of September 2008 is a 'RED LETTER' day for scientists at CERN and around the world. The day when human beings will start fiddling with Black Holes in their Labs and maybe accelerate the death clock of our planet which has already been kept ticking by global warming. By the time I post this, a few infant black holes may be already 'out there' interacting with earthly matter(s).

So how did scientist do this? Well just Google it and you'll have lots of pages giving information that will be too overwhelming for you or check this out. So is the earth at risk? Probabilistically speaking - No... But let's first have a sneak peak of the " A Black Hole ate me" situation. Let's say that the black holes do turn out to be stable instead of the type that were predicted by the scientists (According to them their size and mass will be too small and the temperature too high for them to sustain a lifetime of anything more than a miniscule fraction of a second) . Surely you'll have more than 24 hrs to live. Maybe you'll live your entire life and nothing happens. Why? In case some black holes do tunnel out (remember Chemistry I??) of CERN today they will be in a quiescent state for quite a long time - their gravity will be too weak to gobble up anything. The black holes will get attracted towards the centre of the earth (due to earth's gravity) sit over there for (some) time satisfy the hunger for mass (in the form of sub atomic particles) and grow in size. And then these refugee black holes will merge together and start eating up faster and greater volumes of the earth. And zzzzuuup Earth succumbs in a few seconds becoming flat and then vanishing into thin 'space'.

Seems like a Hollywood sequel to Frankesnstine or War of the Worlds? Well scientists have been trying to convince the world that the chances of such a situation arising is negligibly small but never the less it isn't 0 right? CERN people have already received death threats from concerned civillians. But no one can stop scientists or man's craze for knowledge specially when the knowledge pertains to something as important as the Big Bang theory.

So if you are reading this post, be afraid, be very afraid, coz the future may never be the same and neither can it be 'system restored' to its present state. If the black holes are there they will be there-no one can stop them from vanquishing the earth. That justifies the title of this post - if something does happen today then its over and out for everything.

P.S. - I am not a particle physicist and neither do I claim that the chain of events mentioned above are even scientifically possible or not. Everyone is welcome to argue for or against what I wrote.

Nightmares

2008-08-30T12:49:00.006+05:30

One can generally associate nightmares with dreams, last moment test preparation or the test itself, his/her's first date...and the list goes on. But I bet most of you out there haven't heard of Birthday Celebrations being tagged as Nightmares ?? Or did you? If you belong to the first category then ahem...! welcome to the world of college birthdays.

Birthday Bum(p)s, GPL whatever you call them, be it in BITS or in the IIT's ( what's GPL?? keep guessing or ask some IIT'ians to enlighten you :) ) are an integral part of college life. Earlier your birthday was the 'only' day that you would eagerly wait for the entire year thinking of gifts, loads of them, great food and fun. Over here, it's the day (rather it's the night b'fore the actual birth day) that you dread the most. You do get the birthday cake in the end but what you have to go through before that can put even the animal rights activists to shame.

And the end result?? You have a boiling hot 'back' side to take care of, an oily piece of cake smeared on your face rendering you out of recognition, some strongly guarded secrets being divulged as confessions and last but not the least some newly invented postures for sitting, standing and lying down that even the australopithecus man wouldn't have considered seriously.

But common it's just part of college life. Something that one can be proud of and brag about once he leaves college...( Yeah I got kicked 40 times this time so and so!!) . And boy don't you enjoy when you get to kick some one else? Well I just celebrated mine b'thday to day, the third and maybe the last here in Pilani. Every year was different and I still think my first year 'celebration' was THE best. Now my time of receiving it is over - you are next!!

P.S. - In case you are apprehensive about all this, I would suggest you to have some ice-skating experience. It would be specially helpful if you have never been on skates before. Believe me, from my personal experience i can guarantee you, it really helps when you fall on the ice, hard on your back!!

It’s indispensible…at least for me!

2008-08-18T21:50:00.002+05:30

Cut off from civilization some 200 kilometers from Delhi living in the midst of some desert ... those were the only images that I could dream of about how it would be like living in Pilani 2 years back when I joined BITS ( apart from the premonition of being dragged along by the education system over here ). But luckily there was something else over here, something especially for me, an answer to a dream which seemed like the only glistening silver lining to an otherwise hopeless dark cloud. It was the Astro Club, neither the most popular nor the most glamorous of them all in, here but surely the one that I had been waiting for such a long time!

But for me it was different. My childhood had seen me watching many television programs on various fields in astronomy, and even I had a chance of seeing Saturn through a telescope before I was 7 years old. Some topics on my World Book Encyclopedia was the only source of information (there was no internet back then...remember?) and a pair of x1000 Binoculars the only way of observing the heavens.

And it all changed. Over here there was this grand old telescope of 60 years, an 8'' diameter Galilean in excellent condition (a bit of exaggeration but considering its age it really was). It was love at first sight. First year second sem, I proved my mettle at star gazing/tracking and got almost unhindered access to the telescope. Quite an accomplishment I believe!! But the best was yet to come - thanks to a generous alumnus we had at our disposal a brand new telescope, a fully automatic Schmidt Cassegrain with a beastly 11'' diameter reflecting mirror system. For the first time we could make out the rings of Saturn and the gas belts on Jupiter or confirm for sure whether these tiny green men from Mars were up for some sort of sinister tricks or not!! (Although most of my friends believed, that the new telescope being a portable one, might come handy to discover the inner intricacies of Meera Bhavan :) ). With the new telescope there was a vista of opportunities - the one closest to my heart being Astrophotography. Third year, and myself being the Prez of Astro Club, brought some new responsibilities. With the Astro Club blog up and running quite well (a first of its kind in Pilani) and Astro Photography adding a new dimension to both our club and the photog the future really seems bright.

Now, for all those people out there in the dark, who have the faintest of ideas of what it’s like looking through a telescope into the skies above, I think you are missing something big. You are missing your chance to look in the past, the future, the beauty of creation and destruction, the supernatural power that unites the Universe, the Earth, you and me! Astro physicists may not explain Dark matter, but let no such Dark Energy keep you away from the wonderful field of Astronomy. With the International Year of Astronomy (2009) fast approaching it’s high time to add this new dimension of Astronomy to the already overflowing dimensionless hypergraph of life!!

The Indian Story @ 61 Years

2008-08-15T11:31:00.000+05:30

At the same time I am writing my post, it will be a very worried Prime Minister addressing the Nation on her Independence Day from the ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort. India may have just turned 61 but she is still suffering from the age old problems – economic, corruption and in recent years – terrorism.

India may be growing at a steady rate but of late inflation has taken its toll on her. With crude prices skyrocketing it’s no wonder the prices of all commodities have gone up bringing nightmares to an average Indian family. The Sensex has shed thousands of points and the Indian currency has been already dubbed unstable. The RBI may have introduced monetary controls and higher interest rates but the fact is that the Indian Government hasn’t done its bit in softening the overall impact of all this on the common man.

India in recent years has succumbed to too many terrorist attacks. With a neighbour who cannot be trusted one can expect the number of these attacks to only rise in the next few years. Post 9/11 when all the major powers in the world have special anti-terrorist forces India has been caught napping. Our stock response to every attack being condemnation, slogans of zero tolerance and compensation for the families of the victims. There haven’t been any concrete measures that have been taken.

Next let’s look at the plight of Indian Politics. The UPA may have won the acrimonious trust vote but we still don’t know the true story behind what really happened on the floor of the parliament on the fateful day. What we know is that the country has witnessed a race of shameful political opportunism. With lust for power being the only motive for most if not all the political parties one is forced to ask the question – Who is really bothered about India?

And last but not the least one point I just had to the list above – reservation. The government is just not satisfied enough with implementing the new quota limits. It’s also proposing reservation for faculty in premier educational institutes in India. This year saw the IIT entrance cutoffs plummeting farther and many of the seats meant for the reserved going unfilled. Since V.P. Sing’s era in the 90’s one has seen a somewhat similar picture with all the governments. One just cannot answer the question to what extent is the education system in India needs to be degraded and compromised to satisfy the hunger for vote banks.

But should we only worry about the dark clouds and forget about the silver lining? Even after inflation has reached its highest in 15 years our economy is still progressing at a brisk rate. After the lull in the monsoon rainfalls the rain Gods are back and may be a good enough harvest will bring down the inflation to some extent. With the Nuclear Deal finally off the blocks it really looks promising for India. The TEACH INDIA campaign of the TOI has been a victory in the national interest and just shows a changing face of the society. And who can forget India’s recent progress in the field of Science – the contributions of ISRO in the last year being the most significant one. Last but not the least - with a bronze, silver and now gold at the Olympics India has finally proved that she has what it takes to reach the top.

So my friends I wish all of you a Happy Independence Day. Although our country is having a tough time facing many gripping problems I’m proud to be an Indian. What about you?

Back to the Blog Beach...

2008-08-15T03:59:00.000+05:30

" I'm going to post something - I swear " well that was the story with me after I started my first blog on Blogger 8 months back. So why am I back?

The Answer to this is simple. In my first try as a blogger I was inexperienced. I would often think of possible topics to post and then when the time was right to key it down I would forget!! I could only type in a few sentences which were nothing more than gibberish. Trying to remember whether this was what I thought or it was something else. And every time this happened I found myself frustrated. This went on for quite sometime. And as the previous semester progressed, I drew myself farther away from blogging...defending my stance by playing computer games and convincing myself that 'One cannot find time for everything'. Eventually it occurred to me that 1 post in 6 months was just too much a disgrace and I decided to go off the Blog Roll!

But very recently I started to write once again. This time for the Astro Club Blog for my Astro Club. And believe me I enjoyed posting!! There was a different approach - this time i would note down topics, jot down points and even researched items before posting. With positive feedback from my readers I got pretty much encouraged and decided it was the right time to be 'Back to the Blog Beach...'

I know there will be some friends of mine skeptical about my efforts, and I also know that there will be some who'll find something funny about the way I've named my blogs and whatever... But personally I don't care. I've already missed, posting about many events that occurred in my life last semester and I don't want that to happen with me again.