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Published: April 18th 2002
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City Center Milton Keynes
It's all indoors - this is the outside of it. After spending a few days in
Milton Keynes I'm started to get a feel for the place. It's large - everything has been given a great deal of space. I arrived at Milton Keynes central rail station and walked the mile up to the city centre to explore. The city centre is basically a series of huge intercontected malls and car parks.
The city has been described as a series of endless roundabouts - from my point of view it was a series of endless underpasses. To be honest walking around Milton Keynes was no where near as difficult as I had expected, the walkways and cycle paths are combined and it seems possible to get to any other point in the city without having to cross (or cycle on) one of the many dual carriage ways that link the roundabouts - which is just as well - the alternative would be dicing with death.
My trip to Milton Keynes was to visit my Uncle Simon. Simon works at the
Open University managing software development for the Arts Faculty. I spent a day looking at all the really cool stuff that is going on at the OU - DVD development, video
The Open University
Part of the campus, look no students. editing, graphics, animation and modelling amoungst other things.
I was lucky enough to be shown one of the top end animation and modelling packages - Maya by
Alias Wavefront - by Geoff. Maya is capable of some really fantastic things - some of the top films use models and animations produced by it. In the Computer Graphics magazines I've been reading Maya was advertised at around $15,000 - but recently was reduced to $2,000 - I don't know of any other packages that have seen such a dramatic price decrease. Geoff said that the reason for this is to capture more of the gaming market which has until now been dominated by 3D Studio - it definetly makes sense as apparently most of the copies of Maya in use aren't actually legite anyway. Another great thing is that a personal learning edition is available for download on the web, the downside is that it needs Win NT, 2000 or Mac OS X to run - I have Linux or Win 98 😞 Oh well - I like the idea of getting a Mac ... maybe not something that I'll be able to cart around the world though.
I've really
started to enjoy playing around with modelling, rendering and animation software. I've put some of pictures on a
website - I've set most of them up in a format that can be used as desktop backgrounds.
We spent the evening watching "24 hour party people" at the flicks, the story of the Manchester Indie scene in the eighties, Tony Wilson, Happy Mondays and the New Order all presented by Steve Coogan. Very funny - and some great gig scenes. We rounded the evening off with some renditions of The Police's greatest hits - Simon on the piano and myself on bass - which was great fun. I have had a great time in Milton Keynes - I didn't find the concrete cows though.
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