Blogs and Machinima Explosions

Everyone should check their blog links on this page and put a comment to this post with correct URLs for those not working.
Those who dont have a Machinima Explosion linked into their blog yet, need to get that done ASAP and I would encourage everyone to re-evaluate what they have written about their chosen video. I want to see some real thinking about why you have chosen the explosion expressed, think about the visual (and audio etc) language of explosions what about your choice makes it have importance for you.

Throwing Garry's Mod on at home

To get Garry's Mod installed at home you need to run through a process something like this:

• In the labs, go to this folder (C:\program files\steam\steamapps) in there you will see a heap of .GCF files. The safest way is just to copy all of them onto a portable drive or big USB key to take home (if you skip this step then you will need to download these via your home net connections).
• On your home machine (and or laptop) go to the Steam site and download the steam installer and run it.
• Once steam is installed, launch it and login with your nice new steam account. Once it does any updating you should close steam down completely (including the system tray bit)
• Now you can copy the GCF files from your portable media into your version of the steamapps folder.
• Fire up steam again and the My Games tab should now let you launch GMod without requiring the downloads and off you go.

• Note that you dont need all these .GCF files and if you are running out of space you should be able to remove some depending on which version of GMod you have or other games you want/need.
  Some of the sets you may be able to remove (or not copy in the first place are):
  Unreal Tournament 3
  Portal
  Episode 1
  Episode 2
  Team Fortress
• If you have trouble with this method try deleting the winui.gcf as well - steam will re-create it for you.

• For the Mac powered people you will need a copy of windows running in a bootcamp partition, then just start up in windows and do everything like your a windows user.

• Dont forget you will need Fraps as well.
  

Then if your looking for help on GMod itself just check the main GMod homepage and its Manual/Wiki.

Here we go

The first tutorial today and exploration of the GMod environment.

I have linked in the blogs for those who were there, make sure your blogs have your chosen explosion and the written component that describes the qualities of your choice, what makes it important or special, what about that particular explosion do you find engaging?
It is important to think this through as you will be referencing this explosion over the duration of the course.