As of yesterday, the big project for the Major Client was at 500 iterations and running strong. Amazing. A high detail model in just over six weeks. All it took was two senior engineers and one rookie working a gazillion hours of unpaid overtime. I sure hope the Big Boss realizes that this cannot be the norm in the future, or it'll be time to dust of the resume...

Last year I built a model of an F-18 for Lockheed-Martin for some studies they were conducting. It was a huge model and took a lot of effort on my part to get it going. Long before I got any meaningful results I was being hounded by people in our sales department for some images they could show around, presumably so that potential customers would think that we've all got huge penises. So I checked with the client and he said it was OK to show some pics. I passed a few on to the sales guys, with the instructions that they could show these pictures, but they were not allowed to leave them with clients.

Guess what I saw today. A picture of my model, emblazed across the cover of a brochure. A brochure! Jesus Freakin Christ. Now, Lockheed-Martin doesn't build the F-18, and I'm about 99% sure that the geometry data they gave me was stuff they got out of the public domain, so I doubt anyone will get pissed about this particular image. But I know for a fact that we didn't have anybody's permission to publish this in one of our documents, let alone on the front cover! It'll be a cold day in Hell before I let the sales guys see anything I'm working on without a gold-plated certificate from the client saying we can do whatever we want with his data, including submitting to Fark for a photoshop contest.

Getting close to the deadline on the big project for the Major Client. It sort of runs but not really. Spent all weekend at the office. Going in a couple of hours early to get more work done. I'm really tired of this damn thing.

Got a week of productive work in. Started assembling the meshes today (yes, working on a Saturday again). Made good progress on the dreaded box. Figured out how it can be generated after the debugging is done - makes it much easier that way. Trimming in multiple overlapping sections turned out to work very well. Much better than the vaunted es-parallel-flavor-of-the-month. Yea on me.

On the down side, time is running short. Got two weeks before I go on vacation and leave poor Sato on his own. Well, Joe's there, but he's still learning the ropes. That means we've got to get a geometry write done no later than Thursday. Eek.