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A Treatise on McQuevian Hand-Painted Texturing Automation
by Olly Skillman-Wilson
Originally posted on the Big Robot blog, Gamasutra, Kotaku, and RockPaperShotgun.
What follows is an expanded take on what we touch on in that video. If that sounds good, read on!
Tölva's world and tone are exciting for a number of reasons – lasers, exploding robots, unfathomable space mystery and the phrase "combat archaeology", to mention but a few – but here we're going to talk about how we crafted that rich, screenshot-friendly visual style. We will try and understand the majesty of Mr Ian McQue's concept art, learn the fundamentals of 'splattery precision' and some other made up terminology, as well as comprehending the beauty of a clean normal map bake or efficient UV layout. You know you're in deep when you can appreciate UVs. We intend to go deep(ish).
So… Defining the look of Tölva was a process of looking at our inspirations and influences and breaking them down into their constituent parts. This way we could take what made a certain look 'work', and begin to create a process that we could apply to a variety of assets while maintaining consistency with one another as well as looking appealing in isolation. This meant taking Ian McQue's sketches and paintings and finding common shapes, colours, types of brush stroke, silhouettes, and starting to form a "McQuevian language".
Often robots, vehicles, or ships, were chunky with lots of rectangular protrusions breaking up their silhouettes. Layering of details was important, with colour often going from darker to lighter as the layers got closer to the exterior. Angles were often a few degrees off being parallel with each other but still consisting of straight lines, rarely curved. The dumpier a spaceship, the thinner it's aerials and wires: contrast from form.Often robots, vehicles, or ships, were chunky with lots of rectangular protrusions breaking up their silhouettes. Layering of details was important, with colour often going from darker to lighter as the layers got closer to the exterior. Angles were often a few degrees off being parallel with each other but still consisting of straight lines, rarely curved. The dumpier a spaceship, the thinner it's aerials and wires: contrast from form.
We could use these style guidelines to judge how well something would fit in the world, and how close it was to the source. I'd sometimes create reference boards using a tool called Kuadro, a convenient way of laying out image files on the desktop and storing their scale and position in a file. I'd be conferring with Jim at various stages throughout an asset's creation- he would direct the design, and mine his extensive and tasteful tumblr image library, or doodle thumbnails to illustrate specific requirements. Interpreting sketches from one angle and turning them into 3D geometry has been a particular challenge for me on this project, but following these guidelines, and practicing this approach has enabled me to get better at it through the course of the project.
The first step towards actually making something, once reference was set up, was blocking out a 3D form in Maya using simple primitives and keeping things low detail. Often if this stage went well the geometry could be reused for the final low polygon asset. Then I'd take this base mesh into zBrush and play with the shapes, maybe add things that were more awkward to create in Maya. If I was feeling really fancy, I might do a paintover.
Sculpting, Detailing, Baking
Once something is starting to feel like a strong design I can start to commit to adding details, again referring to the guidelines as I bevel edges, chamfer corners, and smooth any (rare) curved surfaces. Then come surface details that will be baked down into the normal map such as wires, nuts and bolts, screws, handles, cutlines. It's easy and enjoyable to go overboard at this point and fill every surface with greebly goodness but any artist will tell you that the eye needs space to rest. Not only are you looking for space to rest within this asset, but often you will need to look at the game as a whole and decide whole assets need to act as rest points devoid of any noisy detail, in making up the composition of the world.
At this stage I'm also starting to break up edges with wear and tear and damage where seems appropriate, this is one of the most satisfying parts- chipping away and scratching up clean surfaces requires little moment to moment decision making and I can let this almost therapeutic activity absorb my attention. It's important to split objects as I go into logical groupings based on their material types, I will use these later to bake a material ID map which is essential to the texturing process.
One of the of the recurring aspects of creating such a mechanical world is designing (relatively) convincing joints, paneling, and other robotic goodness. It was important to spend enough time look at machined parts or engines so that I could start to internalise where a cut line might occur, which panels needed screws, how a curved edge might be carved out of a larger piece. Manufacturing is often about starting with a form and reducing it from there, and the same approach works really well when sculpting.
Then comes a series of steps that are dull but very necessary to getting a clean bake but once that's done I can move onto texturing. A tight UV layout, good smoothing groups on your low polygon model, and a precise cage mesh all aid in a clean bake.
Generating an Automated McQue Texture process
Or: How to Hand Paint Textures, Without Using Your Hands.
Good modelling is essential and a stunning texture won't save a bad model, but texturing drives a lot of Tölva's look and helps distinguish it from other games. It's also what was most clearly imitable from the concepts. We were fortunate enough to be given access to the list of secret brushes that Mr McQue utilises most frequently and to such effect, and using these able to create an automated process that streamlined the texturing of hundreds of assets. We essentially created a system where I fed in my sculpts and a McQuevian texture was churned out for me to tweak and finesse. This worked by taking the right brushes in Photoshop and creating a tiling pattern with each, attempting to recreate a certain type of stroke or scribble that could be found in any given concept piece. With these 'master strokes' I could tile relatively convincing McQuvian patterns across a surface, tinting its colour, and using the pattern to break up the edges of masks in Photoshop. Daub, dash, splatter, speckle, spray, smear, squiggle, strokes, crosshatch, and grainy swirl would become my best friends over the next 2 years. Grainy swirl was great for organic or noisy surfaces like mud or concrete, while crosshatch had a natural galvanized metal flakes look. Each pattern came into its own as I built a library of reusable materials from these tiling patterns.
The tool tying all this together was the Quixel Suite's dDo, a Photoshop based texturing tool aimed at primarily at creating PBR materials very quickly, which we had employed for our own nefarious aims. Feeding the sculpt data from the bake (tangent and object normals, ambient occlusion, material ID, gradient, sometimes a height map) dDo could tell me where edges were, crevices, what was at the top of the mesh, what was only facing down or upwards. The amount granularity in terms of how you define the masking of a material is very powerful, and once I've made decisions about where a material should be confined to I can apply that as a preset to any other asset. "Here's my paintedMetalC material, it will have chips and scratches on the edges, sunbleach on the top, water damage on the undersides, and some lichen in the crevices."
I found the simplest way to structure a texture was to have a form layer at the top that brightened upward facing surfaces, and conversely darkened downward facing surfaces, with an edge brightening layer to accentuate the objects natural shape. Our ambient light in-engine is a single colour and so baking in some subtle lighting data helped objects have some shape even when in total shadow. Next, a weathering layer that universally affects the asset. Things like dust, stains, and other environmental effects go here. Beneath this all the materials are applied to their corresponding material IDs from the high polygon sculpt bake.
From this point I'll start to work in overlaid scanned details from the dDo library, these won't affect the diffuse channel very much (deliberately), but will add some physically based detail and reflectance values. The materials that make up Tölva and it's inhabitants are 90% diffuse covered and 10% specular, meaning they are largely matte looking surfaces with bits chipped away to reveal the metal beneath. McQue's style has very little exposed steel, or polished chrome and there is no glossy plastic, so I tried hard to match that. More on the PBR side of things later.
Once materials are assigned to the whole texture there'll be a lot of tweaking of the tiling pattern's intensity, colour, size. Material specific details will also go on, like rust that only affects metals. Then in some cases I'll add bespoke hand painted details like glyphs, diagrams, or bits of weathering that only appear where there's a pipe or something and that can't be defined by the automated process. But this is the only part of texturing where I'll actually paint a specific detail onto a specific part of the texture, everything else is controlled by dDo and my masking.
The colours we use are often collections analogous colours making up 60% of an asset, then it might have a darker or more saturated variant covering another 30%, and then remaining 10% has a bright or rich accent colour. Usually the best way to get a decent start with this is to colour pick directly from a concept and go from there, can't get more accurate than that. As we got further into the project certain palettes would mean different things to me about where they were in the world and who created them, making decisions about colour schemes much easier.
Once all this is done I can save individual materials as presets, or entire documents to be reused on similar assets, this is largely what facilitated us in getting the texturing done as a efficiently as possible.
Implementation: Make Everything Modular
Being able to cannibalise existing assets for reuse is an invaluable tool when you're trying to squeeze as much variation into the world as possible without burdening your VRAM usage further. The mileage you can get from an asset is often surprising in terms of reimagining it for other purposes. If you model things with discrete watertight intersecting meshes rather than combining everything and deleting interior faces, you can at any point split these out and reassemble them into a new variation of that asset.
This is probably obvious to veteran game artists but was something I was often in two minds about at the start of production, modularity vs bespoke detail. The other thing to bear in mind with this approach is baking with your meshes well exploded so occlusion data doesn't interfere with neighbouring meshes, preventing you from reusing that one piece in a prominent place because it has a massive shadow across one side of it. Meshes can be merged using boolean operations to merge intersecting meshes and create totally new shapes, which we did to create cliff faces comprising multiple rotated cliffs into one uber cliff.
Creating asset kits is a common technique in games utilised particularly well by the Bethesda teams. Tölva has less of a need for complicated interconnecting architecture but we were still able to get some use out of concrete piece kits that we made to build more industrial areas, and kits of damaged spaceship to decorate the space wreck debris that litters the world. Creating these kits for the environment team (er, Jim) took a sizeable amount of the art dev time. Another example of this kit-based approach are the weapons attachments, all modelled as separate items that could be rearranged and mixed together to create weapon variants.
Working in the sizeable world of Tölva meant pushing a lot of geometry onto the screen at any one time. Occlusion culling and culling regions far from the player helped alleviate some of this but ultimately we were going to have to create level of detail meshes for a lot of polygon heavy, or frequently used assets. This is a fairly simple process and its amazing what you can get away with when an object is at distance.
Expanding the look with Shaders
I have no programming skill or experience to speak of, but I found fairly quickly I was being limited by my ability to create simple shaders to achieve effects commonplace in games and desirable within our sci-fi aesthetic. Unity plugin Shader Forge became my go-to tool for solving these problems, it's a node based shader writing solution that is approachable but still crammed with maths terminology most artists have never heard of. Using this I was able to assemble and visualise shaders that had pulsing lights, tinted a material based on ID maps, did weird things with transparency, or just layered textures based on normal direction. This saved me using up precious programmer time – Tom was full time on the project, and Dan part-time, so their brain cycles were at a premium! – and gave me control over very specific parts of the look. This kind of autonomy is very precious when you work remotely and there isn't always someone on hand for you to pester with technical queries. Being a visual scripting system it does have the downside that when it breaks, I often had no idea why, or how to fix it. These issues weren't insurmountable but did lead to a day of debugging from our resident shader expert, Tom Betts.
I would approach materials very differently if I was starting this project from scratch tomorrow. Coming from a CG background pretty much everything is given a specific texture that uses the full UV tile, and that was pretty much my only option to get the look we wanted at the time. As my understanding of Shader Forge evolved I was able to create a sort of shader version of how my textures were set up inside dDo. I was limited to 4 masks (RGBA channels of the ID texture) plus a base layer, and I could tile and tint some of the McQue patterns within those masks. Each McQue pattern had the diffuse pattern stored in the red channel, specular in the green, and gloss in the blue.This allowed me to get good resolution on textures for assets that were 5, 10, 100 metres long. The ID and normal maps were still limited by resolution but the tiling worked very well. It serves well as a halfway house between a 1:1 mapped texture and tiling materials, but lacks the subtlety and detail of a 1:1 or the variation and fidelity of having a library of materials applied to submeshes.
Terrain texturing
Our initial approach to terrain textures was to treat them as purely two dimensional, abstract patterns. As the style developed it became clear we were going to need something a bit fancier to fit the aesthetic, especially given the fact that terrain filled the majority of the frame a lot of the time. I began sculpting tiling terrain materials in zBrush, creating quick sculpts that could be exported to Unity quickly to test tiling, detail, and blending between layers. It was important to use detail meshes like small pebbles and shards of rock that already existed to tie the textures to actual 3D props sitting on the terrain. This was the first organic thing I'd had to sculpt that wasn't a rock or cliff and the soft shapes weren't fitting the style at all. The solution ended up being to reduce the polygon count of the sculpt using zBrush's decimation tool to create a more faceted organic surface. Feeding this through dDo and using existing material presets was pretty straight forward. The height map was used by the RTP terrain setup to cleverly blend layers together based on depth, creating a much more pleasing blend that a simple fade.
Lighting/Rendering/Post Processing
PBR or physically based rendering has become a buzzword and marketing tool as it's adoption has spread, symbolising a graphical upgrade over traditional game rendering. Mwoar detail mwoar realism mwoar immersion. Much as I love all those things it's most important contribution from the artist's perspective is having a controlled environment within which to work where you can create a material and have it react to light in a predictable manner, not only between scenes and lighting setups in the game engine, but also between software packages.
Having this predictability is even more useful when your game has a full day night cycle and is going to appear in all sorts of lighting conditions. Even if your game isn't crammed with brushed metal and lacquered pine (highly reflective surfaces being a sure sign of a game trying very hard to get the most of its PBR) it can still massively benefit from a physical approach. Having a nice fresnel falloff on a largely diffuse material makes every object lit at a glancing angle look fantastic, materials are energy conserving so nothing washes out in a way that just appears like a white value being clamped.
McQue's paintings have naturalistic quality to their lighting, this is ideal for PBR. His colour palettes have a fairly limited range, there are few bright whites or really dark blacks, much like real world albedo colour values. This allows a PBR lighting model to really shine without being overpowered or limited by overly saturated or contrasting texture colour values. PBR is not a style, it's a tool. You can push your look in a number of directions with colour correction, lighting, and post processing- but you are starting from a well calibrated, stable, neutral position that is easy to control. Using PBR also means you can draw on nearly 200 years of photographic knowledge. Exposure, tone-mapping, HDR, colour correction, bloom, lens flare, chromatic aberration, depth of field, vignette: these are all techniques that have either been part of photography and film for a long time, or are simulating things that a lens does naturally. Also use linear colour space everyone, it has been VFX industry standard for forever, there's no reason not to.
Having this linear colour space PBR setup means we are generating accurate colour values in the render that, after tonemapping, exceed the screen's full brightness value. They are brighter than white, this is what makes the render high dynamic range. We use these values on our light emitting (emissive) materials particularly to trigger a bloom effect, but also to illuminate any dirt or scratches on the lens you're viewing the game through.
Nothing says sci-fi like bright blinking lights!


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10 Results found for Harry S. Truman
#7112: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: DIAMOND JUBILEE PLUS ONE
Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, Art Carney, Milton Berle, Arthur Godfrey, Bob Hope, Eddie Cantor, Maurice Chevalier, George Burns, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Morgan, Ralph Bellamy, Carol Channing, Henry Fonda, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Lucille Ball, Gertrude Berg, Nat King Cole, Richard Nixon, Harry S. Truman, Laureen Bacall, Sir Cedric Hardwicke
Arthur Godfrey is the host on this television special, saluting Eleanor Roosevelt on her Diamond Jubilee. Produced by David Susskind. Part of the NBC Sunday Showcase series.
#63: INAUGURATION CEREMONIES OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
Walter Cronkite, Charles Collingwood, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Edward R. Murrow, Howard K. Smith, John F. Kennedy, Nancy Hodgeman, Lynda Bird Johnson, Lucy Johnson, Averell W. Harriman, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Robert F. Kennedy
CBS coverage with Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith and others provide commentary on this eventful day. We hear the last 14 minutes of President John F. Kennedy's 15 minute inauguration speech. In addition, Nancy Hodgeman interviews Lynda Bird Johnson and Lucy Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and Gov. Averell Harriman. Charles Collingwood reports from the Mayflower Hotel where the inaugural luncheon is covered. There are retrospective original audios heard of Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower being sworn into office plus the oath of office taken today by President John F. Kennedy. Howard K. Smith commentary and analysis follows.
1961-09-17, WNEW, 101 min.
David Susskind, Harry S. Truman
An in-depth interview with former President Harry S. Truman. This was Susskind's second "Open End" program broadcast nationally. Subjects discussed included Red China, the Soviet Union, America's role in world affairs, Truman's days as Chief Executive and his philosophy for longevity.
#136: DUPONT SHOW OF THE WEEK: THE USO - WHEREVER THEY GO, THE
Jack Benny, Joe E. Brown, Harry S. Truman, Dick Powell, Debbie Reynolds, Danny Kaye, Frances Langford, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, Bing Crosby, Merle Oberon, Irving Berlin
Many stars from Hollywood give tribute to the USO units who since 1942 have entertained troops overseas. They include Dick Powell, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Benny, Debbie Reynolds, Danny Kaye, Merle Oberon, Frances Langford, Joe E. Brown, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bing Crosby. Included with these celebrity anecdotes, celebrating this 20th USO anniversary, is a clip of Irving Berlin singing his own song: "Until the Fifth Army Comes Home."
#241: HOOVER AT 88
Harry S. Truman, Frank McGee, Herbert Hoover, Jim Hurlbut
From former President Herbert Hoover's birth place in West Branch, Iowa, NBC correspondent Frank McGee is anchor for a live birthday celebration. Former President Harry Truman speaks words of tribute. The Hoover Presidential Library is dedicated. Former President Herbert Hoover's speech includes proclamations for a council for the world�s free nations. NBC News Commentator Jim Hurlbut summarizes. An unscheduled daytime NBC Special Report.
Gordon MacRae, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Rodgers, Herbert Hoover, Ed Sullivan, Steve Lawrence, Roberta Peters, Nancy Dussault, Peggy Lee, Cesare Siepi, Diahann Carroll, Adlai E. Stevenson
From Carnegie Hall, a Salute to Richard Rodgers with Gordon MacRae, Roberta Peters, Steve Lawrence, Nancy Dussault, Peggy Lee, Cesare Siepi and Diahann Carroll. Ed Sullivan reads telegrams in tribute from Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adlai E. Stevenson and others.
#937: CBS FIRST LIVE BULLETIN AND LIVE COVERAGE OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY'S ASSASSINATION AND FUNERAL
1963-11-22, WCBS, 150 min.
Walter Cronkite, Harry S. Truman, Richard M. Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Mike Wallace, Harry Reasoner, Robert Pierpoint, Dan Rather, Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Henry Whey, Roger Mudd, Nelson Benton, Eddie Barker, Eric Sevareid, John Connally, Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Von Fremd, Lyndon B. Johnson
"As The World Turns," TV soap opera, is interrupted by Walter Cronkite, who gives bulletins describing the attempt on the life of President John F. Kennedy. From KLRD in Dallas, Eddie Barker reports on the condition of the President: "He is dead... shot by an assassin." Cronkite continues coverage from the CBS Studio newsroom in New York; he confirms that 38 minutes ago at 2:00 PM EST President Kennedy died. Cronkite has a difficult time composing himself and after a brief moment continues his report. CBS continuous coverage of the assassination begins at 2:00 PM EST and the following broadcast excerpts follow the events as they happened. The facts reveal that Kennedy was shot at 1:25 PM EST and died 35 minutes later at 2:00 PM EST. At 2:38 PM, Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States. Dan Rather in Dallas, Texas, adds additional information regarding the assassination. Eric Sevareid talks about Johnson, the 55-year-old new President. The physician to Texas Governor John Connally, who was also shot, discusses his condition. Further reports are telecast from Dan Rather in Dallas, Texas, who refers to a possible suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald. Harry Reasoner continues his live reporting from CBS News headquarters in New York. From Andrew Airforce Base in Maryland, Charles Von Fremd reports coverage of Lyndon B. Johnson's arrival at 5:58 PM EST. On this plane arrives the body of former President John F. Kennedy, his mourning wife and the newly sworn in President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who gives a brief statement to the press and the public. Earlier in the day, Kennedy spoke in Ft. Worth. We hear his earlier speech. From KRLD in Dallas, Eddie Barker interviews the Mayor of Dallas, who reflects on this tragic day. On the street, interviews from a shocked Dallas community are reported by Nelson Benton. During the morning of Saturday, November 23, Mike Wallace and Dan Rather report. Rather profiles accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald is briefly interviewed. He denies shooting the President. There are comments from Martin Luther King Jr. and Harry S. Truman. Nelson Benton interviews the Dallas Chief of Police. There are requests that anyone who took pictures during the motorcade should come forward with evidence. Charles Von Fremd reports from Washington D.C., as does Robert Pierpoint. There is a brief statement from Richard M. Nixon. At police headquarters in Dallas, information is given as to the further interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald by District Attorney Henry Whey. From Washington D.C., Roger Mudd reports from the rotunda where the bier which was originally built for Abraham Lincoln and which will support the coffin of JFK is being prepared. There is an interview with Judge Hughes who gave the oath of office to Lyndon Baines Johnson. She discusses the experience and reactions of LBJ and Jacqueline Kennedy. President Johnson addresses the people of the United States proclaiming Monday, November 25, a day of national mourning. From Houston and Elm Street in Dallas, directly across the street from where the assassination took place, Dan Rather describes the scene.
#559: CBS REPORTS: THREE PRESIDENTS ON THE PRESIDENCY
Walter Cronkite, Harry S. Truman, Edward R. Murrow, John F. Kennedy, George Herman, Sander Vanocur, William H. Lawrence, Eric Sevareid, Lyndon B. Johnson
This unscheduled special highlights past conversations with Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Shown are Harry S. Truman interviewed by Edward R. Murrow in 1958, Dwight D. Eisenhower by Walter Cronkite in 1961, and John F. Kennedy by three correspondents including William H. Lawrence and Sander Vanocur in December of 1962. Moderator is Eric Sevareid. Reporters are Harry Reasoner and George Herman. President Lyndon B. Johnson is heard at the conclusion of the telecast.
#700: THIRTY-FOURTH DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION, THE
Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lynda Bird Johnson, Mike Wallace, Harry Reasoner, Warren Magnuson, Bill McQueen, Adlai E. Stevenson, Roger Mudd, Lady Bird Johnson, Eric Sevareid, Robert Trout, Henry Jackson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Robert F. Kennedy, Jim Jensen
A film on the career of Lyndon Baines Johnson is shown at the Democratic National convention with commentary from Eric Sevareid. Robert Trout and Roger Mudd anchor this 34th convention. Coverage includes a speech by Washington State Senator Henry Jackson who praises John F. Kennedy. N.Y. State Chairman Bill McQueen is interviewed on the floor by correspondent Mike Wallace. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy is introduced and is given a huge 14 min. ovation during which time there is a commentary from Trout, Mudd and Eric Sevareid in the CBS booth. Robert Kennedy praises his brother in a brief 9 min. speech. Pennsylvania's Senator, Democratic candidate Genevieve Black introduces ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, who speaks for 12 min. "Happy Birthday" is sung by the convention to Lyndon Johnson. Warren Magnuson of Washington State introduces the Vice Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, who gives a 24 min. acceptance speech. Harry S. Truman's telegram is read to the convention floor. Hubert Humphrey introduces President Lyndon B. Johnson who gives a 36 min. Acceptance speech. Mike Wallace gets reactions from Lady Bird Johnson and Lynda Bird Johnson. There is a final commentary from Robert Trout. There are also additional reports from WCBS and Jim Jensen and from Harry Reasoner.
#1097: A 1970'S RADIO BROADCAST ADDITION: THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS OF RADIO
1970-11-00, KDKA, 294 min.
Jack Benny, Rudy Vallee, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Garry Moore, Edward R. Murrow, John Daly, Arthur Godfrey, John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover, Bob Hope, Eddie Cantor, W.C. Fields, Ed Wynn, George Burns, Henry Morgan, Douglas MacArthur, Winston Churchill, Tommy Dorsey, Victor Borge, Eleanor Powell, Wendell Willkie, Ben Grauer, Charles Dickens, Irene Wicker, Gracie Allen, William B. Williams, Bruce Morrow, Stan Freberg, Rod MacLeish, Fibber McGee & Molly, Bing Crosby, Amos 'N' Andy, Barry Farber, James Melton, Kay Kayser, Lanny Ross, Walter Winchell, Will Rogers, Charlie McCarthy, Fanny Brice, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Agnes Moorehead, Jack Armstrong, Ben Bernie, Sybil Trent, Mary Livingston, Ben Gross, Jimmy Wallington, George Hamilton Combs, Jack Bogut, Warren Barber, Al Smith, Harry Lauder
A fiftieth anniversary of Radio Broadcasting, 1920 to 1970, with narrators Ben Gross, Jimmy Wallington, Henry Morgan, George Hamilton Combs, Garry Moore and Jack Bogut. Tracks include Warren Barber, Rudy Vallee, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Al Smith, Amos 'N' Andy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Lauder, Will Rogers, Ben Bernie's Orchestra, Jack Benny and Mary Livingston, Arthur Godfrey, Charlie McCarthy and W.C Fields, Victor Borge, Herbert Hoover, Bob Hope, Ed Wynn, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Agnes Moorehead, "The Lone Ranger," "The Shadow," Irene Wicker, Jack Armstrong, "Young Dr.Malone," "Mary Noble Backstage Wife," "Sybil Trent, Eleanor Powell, Ziegfeld Follies with James Melton, Lanny Ross, Ben Grauer, "The March of Time," Huey Long, John Daly, Walter Winchell, Winston Churchill, Kay Kayser's Orchestra, Command Performance, Wartime Songs, "Your Hit Parade," Harry S. Truman, "Stage Door Canteen, "Dwight D. Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, Bing Crosby, Princess Elizabeth, Edward R. Murrow, General Wainwright, Wendell Willkie, Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, Bruce Morrow, Stan Freberg, William B. Williams, Rod MacLeish, Barry Farber, Death of J.F.K., radio fluffs and commercials.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Sacrificing studies for software
A massive new management information platform is costing Chico State—and its students—dearly
By Richard Ek
Senior liberal-arts major Jennifer Hopper says she is "frustrated" by the difficulty of obtaining the classes she needs to graduate. She was surprised to learn that a huge new software program was siphoning off millions of dollars that otherwise would go to hiring teachers.
"The situation is really, really frustrating."
Those were the words used by Jennifer Hopper, a 21-year-old, self-supporting senior liberal-studies major and music minor from Redding, to describe her experience over the past three and a half years trying to get the classes she needs at Chico State University.
It's been especially tough this semester. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't get signed for more than nine units. Finally, on Sept. 25—the fifth week of the semester—the instructor of a required upper-division class decided to let her enroll. She had a seat in the already-full class and had attended since the first day, taking all the quizzes and participating in class activity.
Not being signed up for 12 units, the minimum full-time-study load, meant Hopper's Sierra Pacific Industries four-year scholarship went on hold, and she had to pay out of pocket for $400 worth of books and $1,100 in tuition. Since she is self-supporting, these unplanned expenses meant more in student loans, which she said totaled $5,000 through the end of last year. She doesn't look forward to paying off the debt that will surely rise by several thousand dollars before she's finished.
Hopper worked 20 hours per week during her freshman and sophomore years but has cranked up to 30 hours per week since then, still managing all A and B grades through three years except for two Cs. She's looking to graduate in maybe four and a half years, although that doesn't include finishing her teaching credential work and her year of student teaching. Meanwhile, the tab keeps running up, while hard-to-get classes have put her life on hold.
"I don't want to come off as an oh-poor-me sympathy story. I'm talking about a real problem," Hopper said. "I know it's a lot more [students] than me—a lot more." There are 10 or 11 Chico State students where she works, she said, and they nearly all complain about the class situation.
What Hopper didn't realize was that a good part of the reason she had such a hard time getting classes this semester was because the university has embarked on one of its biggest projects ever, installation of a huge and sophisticated new computer software platform called the Common (or Collaborative) Management System (CMS).
The project, created by PeopleSoft Inc. to assist with nearly all management tasks from accounting and personnel to student admissions and grading, will link all 23 state university campuses. Total cost: $400 million over the next five years. Chico State's share: at least $15 million.
The problem—besides the sheer complexity of installing and learning to use such a complex system—is that the state Legislature has not allocated special funds to pay for it. As a result, each campus must squeeze its "assessment" out of its regular budget, 80 percent of it from instructional funds. The CMS budget at Chico State this year calls for a $2.8 million bite, with $2.24 million of it coming out of instructional money—this at a time when the university has experienced an unexpected 1,000-student fall semester enrollment bulge.
The provost's office is on record as saying that an increase of 1,000 full-time students would require 50 new full-time faculty members. The $2.24 million of instructional funds would go a long way toward paying for that number of new hires—if the money were available. Unfortunately, it's not.
When Chico State University President Manuel Esteban delivered his convocation speech to the faculty opening the new academic year last Aug. 23, he touched briefly on the CMS project and said it would mean "a lot of sacrifice by a lot of people."
Asked later to identify the people who would do the sacrificing, Esteban replied they would be mostly Chico State technical staff responsible for implementing the system because they must literally work two jobs, their regular job plus a new one at CMS. Since their union contract does not define a minimum or maximum workweek, they must put in many overtime hours not for money but for compensating time off when it's available. Sixty people are so involved at present in the new CMS quarters in the Meriam Library.
What about the students and the big sacrifice they must make? Esteban gave a forthright answer:
"Look, any time you have $2.8 million you are setting aside for a project, no matter how useful or needed or important the project is, that's money that could be spent some other way."
Asked if "some other way" meant instructors and classes, Esteban said, "Right. That money would normally go to hiring new faculty, and that's going to happen once CMS is implemented and money is released."
Esteban said that every effort has been made by deans and department chairs to individually counsel with students who say they must have certain closed classes for graduation to determine their status so they can be shoehorned if possible into already full classes or into some newly opened sections. "To the degree we have been able to mitigate this situation, we have been doing so," Esteban said.
Provost Scott McNall said a lot of new classes had been created this autumn insofar as qualified part-time instructors could be found. That's a problem because the small, shallow local talent pool can't plug all holes in all disciplines. That task would be easier in the Bay Area or Los Angeles, where all manner of talent abounds.
David Ernst, assistant vice-chancellor for information technology, put CMS in perspective when he said, "A project of this magnitude is going to challenge the CSU as it has never been challenged before." To avoid chaos, he added, challenges must be met as they arise along the way, which is what is going on now.
The chancellor's representative said he had tried but failed this year to secure an appropriation for the project from the state Legislature.
For her part, Jennifer Hopper came to Chico State with the reasonable idea of getting her degree in four years so she could move on with her life and also hold down the student loan debt load. It didn't work out that way.
Although she got all 18 units of classes she wanted during the first semester of her freshman year because of new-freshman preference, the class availability thing has gone downhill ever since. The following semester she finally gathered the desired 18 units after her first experience with adding classes.
She came up with 15 units—all she could get—both terms of her sophomore year. Then came her junior year and two semesters of 12 units each, again all she could scrape up through adding. The present bleak first semester of her senior year has truly tested her patience.
"I thought it would be easier to get classes the farther I went along, but it got harder instead. It seems like it's backwards," Hopper said. "It's so frustrating because there is this big demand for teachers in California. It's really sad when people are trying so hard to better themselves. It tweaks you."
Hopper expressed surprise when told about the Common Management System and how it siphons off instructional money. She thought it was "really sad" because she couldn't see the big administrative project contributing anything to her education.
The reality that the campus-borne cost of CMS is negatively affecting the educational mission of the university also troubles Amber Johnsen, the Chico State student body president, who emphasizes, however, that Esteban is not to blame because he is only following orders from the CSU Chancellor's Office in Long Beach.
"The No. 1 complaint of students this fall is that they have not been able to get the classes they need. Students are unaware—totally oblivious—of the fact that a big part of the reason they have been unable to get classes is that the money is being spent elsewhere," Johnsen said. "It's not right that students have to wait for classes, and it's mismanagement of money. It's not right because it [CMS] does not in any way translate into a better education for students."
Students don't realize, she continued, that the gargantuan administrative project is being funded by tax money and by tuition and fees. Nor are they aware that, because of it, everything students pay for on campus—she cited the increases in health service and on-campus housing as examples—costs more.
Phyllis Weddington is an outside expert hired—at $105,000 a year—to direct installation of the PeopleSoft program. The program is expected to cost Chico State $15 million over five years, money that will come from the operational budget, 80 percent from instruction.
The main purpose of being at Chico State is to get an education, Johnsen said, adding that students pay 30 to 40 percent of the cost of their own education through tuition and fees. "If we are not getting the classes we need, are we getting our money's worth for that 30 to 40 percent? I think not."
Across the board, students are not being treated right, she added, and they are the customers who keep the university in business. She agreed with the suggested analogy that if Wal-Mart treated its customers the way Chico State treats its student customers, the huge chain store would soon go bankrupt. She offered a second analogy: That if visitors to Disneyland had to stand in long lines but still could not get on the rides, they might demand their money back and not return to the theme park.
The student body leader said that when she first came to Chico State five years ago, classes were small to moderate in size. Students had a good opportunity to get to know their professors and spend time with them, which is too often not the case anymore.
Where benefits to the students are concerned, Assistant Vice-Chancellor Ernst said the CMS system "was never touted as providing better teaching and education." Instead, it seeks to provide better and more efficient services to the students and faculty. Ernst acknowledged that no return-on-investment or cost-effectiveness analyses had been done for CMS.
Further, the enrollment bulge this autumn has brought the campus to 14,800 full-time students, said McNall, which is 800 above the long-accepted ceiling of 14,000, but he added that no plans exist for new buildings or classrooms. Over-enrollment earns new money from the Chancellor's Office, but new full-time faculty hires from the funds mostly keep pace with retirements.
Esteban said in an August campus publication that "strong and unanticipated growth will tax our facilities." The president revealed that the chancellor now wants 15,000 full-time students at Chico. He added that if the campus seeks to earn state money to renovate and expand existing buildings, it would first have to demonstrate need by cramming another 1,500 full-time students onto the campus in the next 10 to 15 years. That means years of many students milling around in search of unavailable classes.
Asked if the university is fully using its plant by offering classes at unpopular times such as 6 p.m., 7 a.m., or even Friday nights or Saturday mornings, McNall said Chico State is an in-residence school where students would not attend such classes. He might have added that tenured faculty would not want to teach them, although such scheduling has been used at some big-city commuter campuses.
In an ironic twist, the administration has told the Associated Students that it needs to pony up money to help fund CMS, the program that's taking money needed for their education. Understandably, the pay-up request—first issued to the A.S. last year—has so far gone nowhere. This year another request came in from the administration for an unnamed amount of money, Johnsen said, but Esteban followed up after a couple of weeks by saying the A.S. need not pay this year but would have to pay next year.
Last year the A.S. met the original request for an unnamed amount of funds with an A.S. Board of Directors resolution that concluded: "The Associated Students will not support the CMS system financially or accept any mandate requiring it to implement CMS."
In the "whereas" section of the resolution, the A.S. in effect stated:
· that the A.S. was an independent California corporate structure that had, and would honor, a 1999 contract with Chico State running to 2004 to pay $500,000 per year to support the university's "academic mission";
· that the A.S. had "no common interest in incorporating into the CMS system"; and
· that it would be illegal for Chico State or the CSU to "interfere in the internal management decisions" of the A.S. corporation by trying to impose a mandate to "implement or financially support CMS."
Queried about the standoff, McNall said, "It is appropriate for anyone who benefits from the CMS system to help support it." By that he meant that the A.S., the University Foundation and the Research Foundation are all so-called "auxiliary organizations" under state law, and that they would all run on CMS when it is implemented. Presumably Esteban meant that the A.S. would have to pay next year because by then the financial-affairs module—the first of several CMS modules—is scheduled to be in place.
It's difficult to predict what will happen next year when a new student body president and Board of Directors take over. Because the A.S. legal structure is unique among student body organizations on the 23 CSU campuses, a forceful attempt by the administration to pierce the A.S. corporate armor to extract money over and above that provided for in the contract presently in force could produce a court test and probably a public-relations disaster for the university.
The CMS project began in 1996, when the Chancellor's Office issued an order that each of the 23 campuses would adopt the same computer software to handle core university business applications in three so-called modules: financial accounting and management, payroll and human resources, and student services.
The total cost for technology services in the CSU of the seven-year formative period—the last two and the coming five—would be $800 million to $1 billion, with $400 million of that going for CMS, Ernst said. So far everything is on schedule and within budget, he added.
About $56 million over the five-year development span will go to the centralized CSU statewide outsourced Unisys data processing center in Salt Lake City, Utah, where the PeopleSoft operating software and hardware (computer) operation support services are located. For example, if Chico State wanted a payroll task performed, it would access the Unisys data center via its own "client" software, communicate the task request, and receive the task performance answer on a dedicated connection.
The existing or so-called "legacy" system, which the Chancellor's Office considers "outdated, unworkable, and costly," soaks up $100 million in taxpayer money a year systemwide to run, and it continues to operate side by side with the new state-of-the-art technology as it is put in place until full transition takes place five years from now.
According to 1999 Chancellor's Office literature, the student services component or module would include timely information on admission requirements, on-line admission and checking of admission status, electronic grade reporting and course transcripts, electronic access to financial-aid information and status, timely grad checks, and instantaneous information about course prerequisites, required reading, texts, and other materials along with links to vendors that would accommodate electronic purchases. Faculty would have tools and timely information to use in advising students.
Bids went out, and PeopleSoft won the contract, which was signed in 1998. Since then, work has continued apace. Phyllis Weddington, a software and computer expert who installed the PeopleSoft system at Central Washington University, is the resident project director and an outside hire. She came to the Chico State campus last December at a yearly salary of $105,000 to oversee operations.
A project manager hired off campus works under Weddington, but calls to Weddington seeking the manager's name and salary were not returned.
After the system is up and running efficiently, Weddington and her manager could be cut. If not cut, they would represent a new layer of expensive management that would continue to drain money needed for the educational mission.
(The California Faculty Association, the union representing professors, last year expressed concern about diversion of money for what Beau Grosscup, the local union chief, called "an extraordinary buildup of campus administrators." He also said, "The number of CSU administrators increased by more than 125 percent from 1975-76 to 1998-99. During the same period, the number of full-time … students grew by 16.8 percent and the number of faculty increased by approximately 6.8 percent. The impact of this diversion has meant an increase in class sizes and the cancellation of courses needed for many majors.")
Weddington said some of the people now in administration at Chico State would be "uncomfortable with the new system because they are uncomfortable with change. Also, some don't endorse technology, but for the most part, those [administrators] involved will see the benefits" once the system is in place.
She added that the financial module should be up and running in initial form by next July 1 and the human-resources module the following December. Weddington also noted that the system could forecast an enrollment bulge such as surprised Chico State administrators this year, "if you want to use it that way." The software, however, would not "sniff" e-mail.
Bill Post, director of Chico State's Meriam Library and the local project sponsor, said "it is up to us," meaning Chico State people, to make the big and complex project work. He noted that CMS money goes to three groups of people: outside hires, transfers on campus and consultants. Installing upgrade versions as required by the PeopleSoft contract will represent a continuing expense for consultants. That's equivalent to, say, using Windows 95 but updating to Windows 98 when the later version came out.
To the extent that Chico people learn and adapt quickly to the system, the local group will rely less on outside consultants, PeopleSoft included, at $285 per hour. He said 42 companies are presently trying to get on the CSU consulting list.
"When everyone sees the benefits in a few years, nobody will remember the pain," Post said.
That remains to be seen, of course.
For over eight years, local theater company the Blue Room has gradually made its way up the ladder to become number one.
Best of Chico 2001
Results of our readers' votes on the Best of Chico—and our editors weigh in with their own (sometimes outrageous) picks.
Best of Chico 2001—Reader's Choice
Results of our readers' votes on the Best of Chico.
Our Best of Chico
Our editors weigh in with their own (sometimes outrageous) picks.
CN&R photographer documents a day for some participants in Chico's Farmer's Market.


The Security Council votes on a draft resolution on Syria.
Amid the risks of the situation in Syria "spiraling out of control," the United Nations chief has appealed to the five permanent members of the Security Council to break the current deadlock on reported use of chemical weapons in the war-torn country.
"I have also been closely following developments in the Security Council and regret that the Council has so far been unable to reach agreement on this issue," Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement issued late Wednesday night.
"Let us not forget that, ultimately, our efforts must be about ending the terrible suffering of the Syrian people," he added.
On Tuesday, the 15-member body voted on three separate draft resolutions in response to recent allegations of a chemical weapons attack in the Syrian town of Douma. None of the texts garnered enough support.
The first draft considered today – penned by the United States – which would have established a new investigative mechanism for one year, as well as identify those responsible for the use of chemical weapons, was rejected owing to a negative vote – or veto – from Russia.
Similarly, a competing draft – penned by Russia – which would have established the mechanism for one year as well but would have given the Security Council the responsibility to assign accountability for the use of chemical weapons in Syria, was also not adopted.
The Council rejected a third text – also proposed by Russia – which concerned the work of the fact-finding mission of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the implementing body of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which entered into force in 1997.
Despite the deadlock in the Security Council, OPCW has said that it would shortly send a team to Syria to "establish the facts" surrounding the incident.
On Wednesday, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said that it has received reports that an estimated 500 patients at Syrian health facilities have exhibited signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals, after the shelling of a Damascus suburb over the weekend.
WHO has demanded immediate unhindered access to the area to provide care to those affected, to assess the health impacts, and to deliver a comprehensive public health response.
Days after an alleged chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburb of Douma, the United Nations Security Council failed to adopt two competing resolutions that would have established a mechanism to investigate use of such weapons in Syria, as well as another concerning a fact-finding mission in the war-torn country.


This blog is not primarily financially driven. I put it up to share my thoughts that others may find helpful, fun, interesting, engaging, distracting, or agitating.
First, the obvious: I am a founder, CEO of several companies including Heat Health, LLC, NED LLC, and Scriptis LLC. These companies promote and sell products and services.
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Make your own decisions about where to put your hard earned money. I am not a financial adviser and this is not financial advice. If I really need to tell you this then it's best to keep your money under a mattress anyway because when you lose it you'll only blame other people for your mistakes rather than yourself.