ABOUT ME
Jon Parkins
Lots, professionally my main stay is IT Support and Management within the entertainment industy. I’ve worked in TV and film as well as game development. Not just limited to IT though, I’ve done VFX work on a couple features, and the show Supernatural for Warner Bros. Lighting on episodic TV earlier in my career and currently tech art in game development with Unreal at the studio I currently work for (as well as remotely managing all things IT!)
Outside of the professional stuff, in my spare time, when I have it! I like to wander around taking pictures, scuplt, attempt to draw, paint mini’s, and play games both of the digital and table top variety!
This site will mostly feature all the above randomness in some fashion or another!
ABOUT ME
Jon Parkins
Lots, professionally my main stay is IT Support and Management within the entertainment industy. I’ve worked in TV and film as well as game development. Not just limited to IT though, I’ve done VFX work on a couple features, and the show Supernatural for Warner Bros. Lighting on episodic TV earlier in my career and currently tech art in game development with Unreal at the studio I currently work for (as well as remotely managing all things IT!)
Outside of the professional stuff, in my spare time, when I have it! I like to wander around taking pictures, scuplt, attempt to draw, paint mini’s, and play games both of the digital and table top variety!
This site will mostly feature all the above randomness in some fashion or another!
Latest Flickr Posts!
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Latest From The Blog
Random Posts
Break Waters
Another from the day trip to Brighton, waves crashing on one of the jetty’s. A fine 15C+ day in the middle of October! Global warming has it’s perks I guess? But the south of the UK is pre...
Buskerville
Needed to do some street photography for a weekly challenge I do for 52Frames. Wandered the Embankment during the evening snapping random things and people my an old 50mm prime lens that I have. Big c...
Gary the Spider
It is spider season, damn things are everywhere! I hate spiders a lot, but I didn’t need to get near this guy, I just used my 200-500mm lens and stayed well away! They make for a nice photo and...
Touring Nunhead Cemetery
Bit of a slow weekend, but it was also a dry day on Sunday after the UK getting a months worth of rain in about 36 hours from Storm Babet, so I decided to go out and get some pics at the local Magnifi...
Tech Art Posts
Building the Walkie-Talkie, So I Can Knock It Down!
I want to bring down the Walkie-Talkie in London for a fracture shot (digitally, I promise!), and for that I needed a model of the building that an RBD setup can actually use. Looking right isn’...
Skin Weights with ngSkinTools
Basic concept using this tool is structuring things in layers. The layers will preserve what is under them, just like working in something like photoshop. Masks will allow you to set your blends betwe...
Advanced Skeleton Rigging Tool
My quick notes for using Advanced Skeleton, this greatly sped up my rigging learning process and setup. Can even easily change up and use existing rigs from auto riggers to apply to different models....
Learning to Rig!
Just some notes I took while going over basics for setting up a basic rig so I could work on fixing up some auto generated rigs from Mixamo for some quick prototyping in Unreal and mocap that I captur...
Tech Posts
Good Bye VPN, Hello ZTNA!
Zero Trust Network Access isn’t exactly the new kid on the block, but it it starting to gain a lot more prominanace, having run different implementations of VPN over the years both at home and i...
Zabbix Infrastructure Monitoring
Having changed a bunch of my homelab infrastructure from VMWare over to Proxmox, and depriciating my old VPN and moving over to a ZTNA solution with Twingate, I needed to put some monitoring in place....
Proxmox Notifications and You!
Once I had the Proxmox server setup, and basic backups running to my NFS share that I had setup for the inital migration, I figured getting email notifications running would be a handy thing. I woul...
To Proxmox, and Beyond!
With Broadcoms acquisition of VMWare, and the subsequent killing of the free EXSi license, not to mention where licensing costs look like they are being driven too with also killing off the perpetual...
Dev Posts
Ack Ack Attack! Mission Complete!
Back in my Milestone Two post I said I’d like to have everything finished before the end of December, and that hopefully I wasn’t being too ambitious doing it all on my own while targeting...
So Long Slider Revolution, Hello JP Photo Carousel!
The photos across the top of my homepage have been running on Slider Revolution since 2023. It’s a paid plugin, and the only thing I ever used it for was that one carousel. Updates always seemed...
MTG: Deck Builder, From the Desk to the Table!
I play a fair bit of Magic: The Gathering, mostly Commander, and I’d been keeping my decks in a small Django web app I wrote for myself. That was fine at a desk, but not much use at the table, w...
JStreamer: Plex in the Front, Party in the Back!
I’ve used Plex for years and I really like the way it browses, but the playing side has gone downhill. The latest Plex player chokes on H.265 files, its HDR tone mapping doesn’t look the g...
Recipe Box: Organising my OCD!
My recipes were all over the place, emails, bookmarks, PDFs, photos and screenshots, you name it. I wanted them all in one spot that works on both my Mac and my PC, and that I could pull up on my phon...
Milestone Two, Complete!
Well that is a wrap on the M2 Milestone. It was a busy month and a lot went in this month to flesh out the basics and get something that was playable. While still a rough implementation, I have a basi...