Who is dreamsgate?

I do have a small online presence. Over the years I have created various websites that have mostly all died a sad death due to neglect.

My last surviving website, ThruDreamsgate has pretty much been abandoned as well. The only reason it is still up and running is I use it to store Blender resource files. I have a number of free low poly models as well as Blender games I have created over the years.

On the upside I figured out how to put RSS feeds on the front page so that it doesn't look too abandoned. Although Google has informed me that their adsense program has changed, so now I need to go fix the ad spaces to be current with their new program.

UPDATE (Oct. 8, 2008):
So I went to update my adsense info and discovered that the whole google pages experiment is going to be discontinued later this year. But google is now offering free googlesites. Which oddly enough is a pretty similar deal to the googlepages site.

Yep, and here it comes. I went brain dead and created yet another website that I will all too soon ignore.

For the perpetually curious, (honestly, it is pretty much like my old site, although not near as pretty), here is a link to my new site.

Blenderart Magazine is an ongoing project started by me and my friend Gaurav Nawani. We decided that we didn't have near enough to occupy our non-existent free time and so launched Blenderart Magazine. Over the last four years we have published 23 issues and are still going strong.

Our success is due in large part to the blender community itself. The community supports our endeavor in many ways. The biggest being by contributing articles, tutorials and images to be published in each issue. We have some wonderful members who mirror our magazine for us as well as a dedicated staff of volunteer proofers who work very hard to make sure there are no mistakes.

LOL, I got my first computer with the sole intention of writing the next great fantasy novel. Honestly, I didn't realize there was any other use for a computer at that time. I actually did start my novel, and have ten chapters of it written. It was named of course "Through Dream's Gate.

A couple of years later, I decided to brave the scary realm of the world wide web, but I was terrified of getting my identity stolen, so for the first six months or so, I used the name of the main character from my novel as an alias and took my username from the title.

Now most people I know have numerous usernames. But anytime I have signed up somewhere that needed a username, I have been lucky enough to be the first to use dreamsgate. So I am dreamsgate everywhere I hang out online. Kind of makes it easy to remember, but on the other hand, I have been dreamsgate for so long that it has actually become part of who I am. I am just as likely to answer to dreamsgate as I am to my given name.

Most everything I have discussed and written here seems to lead right back to Blender. At first glance it would appear that dreamsgate either doesn't have a life, or her life has been fully engulfed by Blender.

LOL, actually it only appears that way. Dreamsgate only exists on the computer, and the greater majority of the time, that does mean Blender.

In fact my daughter (yes I have children, didn't I mention that? I thought I did) has been teasing me lately that all I think about is Blender. While not entirely true, there is some truth to it.

Between managing Blenderart Magazine, working on improving my artistic skills in Blender, working on various Blender related projects and writing articles, I do seem to spend alot of time thinking about Blender.

You would think from the number of projects that I have going at any one time, that I must surely have unlimited free time.

Not hardly!

In fact, I am often amazed at how much I actually do manage to get done considering that my free time is pretty much non-existent.

Enter the BAD HABIT.

It would seem that the less free time I have, the more projects I devise to torture myself with. The torture being, trying to figure out exactly how I am about to go about finding time to complete my new project. Especially in light of how many projects are already in progress. Which often translates out to starting the new project, getting it to the stage where I really want to devote all my time to it and then realizing I don't have any time to devote to it.

Yep, you guessed it, time to add another project to my ever growing list of unfinished projects that crawl along at the speed of molasses.

About now I'm betting you aren't quite convinced that it's not all that bad. I must be exaggerating. Yeah well just check this out. And this is just the list that I am willing to admit to the community at large that I am working on.

My Current Projects:

Bumper Bash
Captain Blender
Lighting Studies

There are actually far more projects in various stages that haven't even rated a place on the "Official Project List". These are of course in addition to managing an online magazine, maintaining a blog, getting sucked into a wild squidoo lens building frenzy (I never even saw that one coming), taking care of a house, kids and husband as well as my love of crafts and making handmade gifts (I have an entire "craft" room stocked with some of the most fun tools and supplies that I don't get to spend nearly enough time playing in).

And enter yet another "project", although in my defense this one is actually related to my Lighting Studies. I have started working through the Lighting Challenges over at CGTalk. The challenges have been going on for a while, but it is set up so that you can join in at any time and start from whichever challenge you want. So I am starting from challenge 1, there are 16 of them currently. Which I'm guessing means I will be at this for a while.

So I guess I need to go get busy, I have so many projects that need to be worked on...

...must be time to start another one.

I did it, I did it. I actually finished a project. I completed the first challenge of the Lighting Challenges over at CGTalk.

You can see a bigger version of my amazing render by clicking below in the Flickr set "Lighting Challenges". And if you wander by occasionally, you might even see the other challenges as I finish them.

I am so proud of myself, not only did I complete a project (now I can start more), I even wrote a really big blog post about it covering all that I learned in the process. Cool, huh!

Since the post will fall off my Blog feed here within in a short while, I'll just post a nice little link so you can find it if you are interested.

Lighting Challenges: "Fruit Bowl"