Downloads
Posted on May 31, 2004
I posted/reposted a bunch of downloads, which is something I had been meaning to do for a while. I think part of it has to with my finding out about blenderman.org and part of it has to do with the website redesign I am planning. I have some other stuff to put up as well, but is very late at the moment, and I am a bit tired.
Check it out.
Blenderman
Posted on May 29, 2004
I was checking out the MakeHuman site earlier and noticed a link to Blenderman. I had heard of Blenderman before, but I never actually went there. However I went there today and was surprised to see they have an area for free Blender model downloads. People make the models and submit them to the site for other people to download. Pretty much like what I do with the downloads section here, except that the ones I have here are just my models. I will probably be submitting some of my models to their site shortly. Maybe it will even drive some traffic here :-)
Been awhile…redux
Posted on May 22, 2004
Once again, it’s been a while since I’ve been here. I’ve still been having problems with SBC and my DSL. Instead of ranting, however, I actually kept myself fairly productive. I’ve been fooling around some more with Sodipodi and with MakeHuman and actually started doing some projects.
In Sodipodi, I started making some icons. They are mainly for different MIME-types, and at the moment they are mostly 128×128 in size. A bit big, but they can be resized. The problem is when they get resized, they are also harder to discern. Oh well. Yet more stuff to work on. I started resizing some them, but I still have a long way to go, especially since there are over 100 different icons, and there are 5 standard icon sizes in KDE and Gnome has its own standard sizes. I did figure out how to make an icon theme though, so that’s pretty cool. It will be even cooler when I get them all done…plus the icons for actions, devices, etc.
In MakeHuman, I’ve mainly been fooling around with creating characters and using it to design clothes. Long way to go in that regard, but both Blender and MakeHuman have been getting more and more sophisticated lately.
And finally, I scarcely want to mention it, but I am also working on a redesign of the site. It’s still a clean look, but…well, it’s more of an idea at this point, but something I’m going to experiment with to see if I can get it going.
Been awhile
Posted on April 6, 2004
Wow, it’s been about a month and a half since I’ve updated. Not too much going on, however, there were a few things…
I won my first Weekend Challenge over at Elysiun. W00000+. The theme of the challenge was the Olympic Torch, and there were a few really good entries. I was actually surprised that I won because a lot of work went into some of the other entries. The challenge and voting can be viewed here while a version of my entry can be seen in my gallery here and can be downloaded here.
Along the lines of the paragraph above, Blender 2.33 is due out in a few weeks and MakeHuman 1.8 is out – with auto-skinning and auto-rigging. This means it should be easier to come up with textures for the MakeHuman models and it should be easier to pose them. Blender is ceratinly hiting the big time. :-)
Some new stuff
Posted on January 8, 2004
I changed the Downloads section from ArkiDB to PAFileDB. It’s not too big a deal, and they look and act very similar, but PAFileDB allows people to download without logging in. It doesn’t allow sub-categories (as far as I can tell), so under Blender there is a whole slew of categories. I also added some new tarballs, and I will be adding the old ones back in soon. The plan is to take advantage of my new found global illumination skills and the new raytracer in Blender to come up with some better images – especially for the glass and chrome-like files.
Also, the old packages were licensed under the LGPL, which is good, but I am re-releasing them under the Creative Commons ShareAlike License. Creative Commons’ licenses are geared more towards media and content rather than software, so it is a closer fit for a Blender file than the LGPL.
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I’m Back…
Posted on January 4, 2004
I’m back from visiting some of the family in Colorado. While I was away for about two weeks, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t busy. I read a few books and worked on some more tutorials for Blender, etc. I will be putting those things up in the next few days. I have to catch up on two weeks worth of email and two weeks worth of snail mail, unpack, etc.
Some Updates for the Holidays
Posted on December 19, 2003
I will be leaving Indianapolis tomorrow for Colorado, where I will spend the next couple of weeks with family. So right now I’m procrastinating on packing by installing Linux Mandrake on my ancient IBM PII 300Mhz notebook. Earlier today, I realized that I usually do some projects (mainly to do with the website) over the Christmas break. Since I will be out of town, away from my PC, and probably away from any computer, I decided to bring my laptop with me so I can do some work, although it ay have more to do with the new Blender, and less to do with the website.
Yesterday, I created a tutorial on creating a simple armature in Blender. An armature is one of the ways to make things move in Blender, but figuring out how to set one up was a bit of a pain, so I created the tutorial to remind me how to do it if I forget, and help others who might have a similar problem.
Speaking of Blender, they have a new version out 2.31a, which includes a raytracing renderer. One of Blender’s shortcomings was the lack of the ability to realistically render transparent objects, like water or glass. This new feature takes care of that. It also adds to Blender’s ability to render reflections. Previously, reflections required creating a “reflection map” for an object. The raytracing does it automatically. The downside is that using the raytracer adds quite a bit to the render time. In the article announcing the raytracing feature, Ton Roosendal (Blender’s creator) said this, “The algorithm has been optimized and is now ten times faster. Combine that with a PC that’s fourty times faster than in the early 1990′s and raytracing is almost usable.” When Mandrake is finished installing on my laptop, I plan on installing it, even though the processor is the flower of 1997 (?) technology. I did create a very simple image on my PC to test it out, and was somewhat impressed. I just did a glass sphere over a marble plane. Nothing fancy, but the plane did reflect off of the sphere.
Well, Mandrake is about done istaling, so I guess that is my cue to get off my ass and start packing.
The Epiphany with Sodipodi
Posted on December 4, 2003
Okay, Sodipodi isn’t actually a 3d program, as the story category might suggest, but the image I created below was based on an idea I had for Blender/MakeHuman…and it has the Blender logo.
I have this idea for a surfer girl, and since I want to make it in Blender, I figured I would give her bathing suit the appropriate logo. Now in the past, when I designed clothes (I have a bachelor’s degree in Apparel Design and Production), I would create the technical drawing with the Adobe Illustrator 7 Academic Edition. Now that I am out of school, and running Linux, I can’t use this because Adobe is for Windows only (I believe they stopped making Mac versions) and even if they had it for linux, I doubt I could afford it.
There are a few programs out vector-based drawing programs out there for Linux, and in my experience, most of them are fairly lacking. While I don’t necessarily expect an Open Source program to have the functionality of Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw (vector-based drawing programs for Windows), I do a certain amount of functionality. I have tried xfig, Kontour (a/k/a KIllustrator), Figurine, and Sodipodi. All of them have given me a large amount of frustration, but I kept in mind that I had a long hard battle learning Adobe Illustrator as well. In keeping with the idea of coming up with technical drawings for garments in a vector-based program (I can’t fathom trying to do it in the GiMP), I decided to give Sodipodi another try.
I don’t know what happened, but last night it all more or less clicked into place. I was able to make the drawing in a few hours. It wasn’t without problems, but the ones that arose, I was able to work through fairly well. One of the things Sodipodi has going for it is that uses the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format, which is an international standard like JPG. It will also export to the raster-based PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file format, which is also an international standard. The image above is the PNG file, which can also handle transparency, as above.
Of course, Sodipodi has some faults, too. I am using Sodipodi 0.32, so maybe some newer versions will have more functionality. Anyway, one thing that I find a minor annoyance is that it can only export to PNG, and not JPG. I like PNG, but JPG is more common (though lacking some functionality). Today, I just tried to print this image out, and it popped up a little window asking if I wanted to print by pixel or by page, and then Sodipodi crashed and died. At first I thought I maybe hit the wrong selection, or the wrong button, but I tried it a few times with the same result. I ended up using the GiMP to print it out (note: use the “Line Art” setting, not the “Photo” setting). Another shortcoming IMHO, is the lack of a layer control tool. You can move selections to the front, to the back, etc, so it acts as if layers are there, but there is no separate window to lock certain layers or hide them from view. This is something I used fairly often in Illustrator, and I still use in the GiMP, and even Blender. Another thing, that I can’t remember if it was an issue in Illustrator or not, is the eyedropper tool doesn’t seem to want to work when objects are “grouped” together. What I did for the image above was just memorize the RGB settings for each color. More complex images though, might require writing down the settings. All of these problems are more annoyances than anything. I can work through them at the moment, but it is still nice not to be bothered by them.
Overall, I think I am going to like Sodipodi. It was nice to be able to do some designing again, and I know I will end up doing more. It might be nice to put a new section in the gallery/porfolio section of my website. Maybe I’ll convert some of those old sketches from school and put them in the portfolio. We’ll see. I would put this image up, but at the moment, Gallery is giving me fits, saying it can’t find ImageMagick on the server, which is needed to turn the huge images into thumbnails. I’ll play around with it a bit to see if I can get it working.
Input
Posted on October 19, 2003
It’s been awhile since I’ve written in here, and a fair amount of cool things have been happening, so here’s the lowdown:
After my last post, I took off to see my cousin Nicole get married in Massachusetts. It was great because I got to see so many relateives that I haven’t seen in years…if at all. I finally got to meet Melanie and Michelle, who are two cousins of mine from California, whom I never met before. It was great. They were posing together in front of the church for their father, Steve. Recognizing them from the picture my grandmother showed me, and wanting to get a picture of them myself, I went up next to Steve and pulled out my camera. One of them said to the other, “Who’s this guy taking our picture?” I take the shot and say, “I’m your cousin, Mike.” It was great. The wedding was at a very nice church in the woods, and the reception was just over the border in New Hampshire.
Just before I was getting ready to leave for the flight, my father gave me a very nice Pentax 645 camera. It’s 20 years old, but it takes pictures on 120 or 220 size film, which is around twice as large as 35mm film. The idea is that when you get the photos blown up, they don’t look as grainy. So far I’ve probably gone through about 6 or 7 rolls of film, not counting the first roll I put in it, which I loaded backwards and totally messed up before even taking any shots. Someone at work who is familiar with these kinds of cameras said the 645 is formatted to fit an 8″ x 10″ print. Most of the photos I’ve been taking are… so-so. Mainly its a matter of remembering that I should have the sun at my back, and that kind of stuff. What I see with my eye isn’t necessarily what’s going be captured on film or seen in a print. However, I do have some pretty good photos, and I still plan on taking some more. The idea I have is to get a fair amount of good shots to choose from, then get them blown up to 8×10′s and send them out as Christmas gifts. Of course, the hard part is figuring out what kind of photo each person might want. I think getting 3 8×10′s of one photo is cheaper than getting one 8×10 each of three photos.
Also, I’ve once again been playing with Blender, but this time I’ve been playing with animation. It didn’t take a lot to figure out how to do the animations, but its not like there weren’t problems either. At first, I was getting the animations, but the AVI files would be huge, like 100MB for a 10 second animation. I tooled around at the Elysiun forums, and posted a question, to which somebody suggested saving it as an AVI-jpeg instead of AVI-raw. I tried that and got the file size down tremendously…from a 100+MB file to a 4MB file.
The first animation (815KB file) is just simply lights turning on along a fashion show runway. I did this by starting all of the lights on a different layer, and then bringing them onto the visible layer one by one. The second animation (4MB file) is a test of a flying camera. Basically, the objects in the scene stay where they are, but the camera moves around them, which in this scene is kinda cool, because I used some chrome spheres and a cone, so as the camera moves, so do the reflections. Of course, the camera isn’t visible, but it’s only a test, so it doesn’t really matter. I did these for the first couple of animations because I wanted to be sure that I could actually animate the camera and the lights. I knew it was possible to move the meshes and stuff around, but I wan’t so sure about the camera and lights. Apparently, it is also possible to use more than one camera, but I haven’t figured that part out yet. Its food for thought though.
Blender stuff
Posted on February 10, 2002
Yesterday, I went and bought a book called “The Art of 3D Computer Animation and Imaging,” (see the Reviews Section for more on that), and it gave me some additional motivation to get off my butt and work some on Blender. So today I worked with it a bit and I added some Blender files to the downloads section, and added the appropriate images to the downloads area of eGallery. I also added a tutorial to the Blender Forum. I have a few goals with Blender, some of which will involve this site. First, I want to make a library of sorts of Blender objects that I can cut and paste between scenes to use as props. There is already a lot of this on other websites for programs such as Poser and 3D Studio. Since I finally figured out how to cut and paste between Blender files, this makes it more worthwhile.
As far as the site goes, I want to add tutorials, if for no other reason than it will help me remember how to do certain things in Blender, and it also helps me a bit to put these things in my own words to reinforce the idea in my head…if that makes sense.
I also plan on adding the library of Blender files to the downloads section. This will pass on what I have to others, and hopefully, it will encourage others to do the same. I will also add pictures of what I produce to the eGallery section, so people who want to download something can see what it looks like before they download it.
And finally, I want to do the logo and/or themes for this site in Blender, so this provides additional motivation
