Character Head Modelling

Modelling a cartoon style head. Useful lessons in character creation with Blender3d by Paul Caggegi
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Inkscape 0.47 is out

Inkscape 0.47 was released on Nov 27. Inkscape is my favourite vector graphics app and 0.47 has features that are absolutely mind blowing. Here’s what their release news had to say.

“This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features, some of which are as follows: timed autosave, Spiro splines, auto-smooth nodes, Eraser tool, new modes in Tweak tool, snapping options toolbar & greater snapping abilities, new live path effects (including Envelope), over 200 preset SVG filters, new Cairo-based PS and EPS export, spell checker, many new extensions, optimized SVG code options, and much more…”

Inkscape’s new Spiro splines concept…

One of my favourite new features is a new effect that simulates hand drawn lines…

There’s loads of new stuff for me to explore. I’m especially excited about Spiro splines. Will keep you posted about my experiments with this banging new version.

Open Source Chess Engine – GNUChess

There’s a really nice chess engine called GNU Chess which I’ve been fooling around with recently. First started in 1984, it’s one of the more popular and revered software programs that open source has helped create. Download and try it. Windows users, should download Winboard which allows you to play the GNU Chess engine.

All truth is one – Clifford Stoll

Late last night Cats Jellicle sent me a link to shapeways, on whose blog I discovered the Klein bottle. From what I understand, the Klein Bottle is a non-orientable surface. Imagine a surface that does not have a clear ‘inside’ or ‘outside’. Googling the trail of this fascinating object led me to ACME Klein Bottles.

The final Gambit

I came across this wonderful little chess story by Karah Pino. Her observations on spontaneity  are beautifully written and are an ideal to pursue. Her writing also exposes a clarity of thought that cuts right through the bull. Here’s an excerpt.

“One of my most valuable lessons from that time was the discovery that trained reflexes could create a weakness as detrimental as a complete lack of knowledge or skill. There was a certain incalculable advantage in maintaining a pure level of spontaneity. The joy was in riding the edge of the fractal equation in its shifts through sets of variables. The challenge was to pull back just as the pattern turned from Complexity into Chaos…”

PDF link: Download the pdf from Godess Chess

Goddesschess is a really cool resource. I also found a nice article on GO, the chinese game of strategy and why it’s far more difficult for a computer to compute GO moves.

oh happy day!!

Gsculpt is back! Geoffrey French has released alpha version 0.99.47 of his wonderful little 3d modeller – Gsculpt. It’s been a long long time since new updates have been released and this is some good news indeed. Visit the site and download gsculpt here

Microsoft kills Truespace

After buying Caligari’s Truespace last year (presumably a counter to Google’s purchase of Sketchup for Google earth) Mircosoft has just announced that they will no longer develop or support Truespace. Truespace was one of the innovators in the 3d arena. While many people may have thought it’s interface to be weird, Truespace was truly innovative.

The software has been free for download for a while now, so perhaps you should grab it before Microshaft decides to discontinue it altogether.

My respects to Roman Ormandy and the rest of the Caligari team. You made wonderful software and CG computing history. I look forward to your next project.

Say hello to DURIAN

The Blender foundation has just announced it’s next Open Source movie. After the success of Elephant’s dream, An arty, dark and moody sci-fi story, Big Buck Bunny, a cartoony, furry revenge story, Durian claims to be a fantasy story complete with dragons, castles and a girl hero. As always the team will use entirely open source tools to (perhaps) deliver a 5-8 minute film in 4k resolution.

From the Durian info site…

“For the entire creation pipeline in the studio, we will only use free/open source software. For 3D graphics, compositing and video editing we’ll obviously use Blender. For imaging and drawing we expect to use GIMP and Inkscape a lot. Next to these, we’ll explore the very promising paint programs MyPaint and Krita. Render output will be in OpenEXR. Scripting will be done in Python. Studio database storage will most likely be in SVN. The workstations in the studio will be equipped with 64 bits Linux, distro and desktop environment is to be defined later. We intend to build our own render farm this time, for which a free software solution will be required as well.

Since we’ll work with external providers for music, sfx and mix, we can only recommend them to include free software in their pipeline, but won’t put stringent demands here.

Bottlenecks in past projects were especially for DVD authoring and high quality video and sound (5.1) encoding, for which we’ve partially used non-free programs as well. Hopefully we can solve it this time with free software solutions!

Obviously we’re very interested to be in contact with free/open source projects of any kind, to check on what we can do together.”

Wolfram Alpha – Hello World!

It’s coming! If all the talk about Stephen Wolfram’s Wolfram Alpha is true then the internet is about to take a major leap in a whole new direction. Alpha is presumably a brand new type of search engine that doesn’t provide search results but computes answers to your questions!! Can you even begin to imagine what that will do to technology? Where existing search engines like Google attempt to provide you with results based on concepts like Page Rank and popularity levels, Alpha will apparently just answer your question as completely as it can.

The obvious erasure of lag between question and answer, which is search result and the associated manual filtering, is completely knocked out. Will this mean the lightening of content load from school syllabi (Why mug answers when it’s available at the push of a button for he rest of your life?).

Read about Alpha o Wolfram’s blog!

And sign up for release info here!

The absurdity of Patent Trolling

Microsoft, known for filing close to 10,000 patents so far (Last year they patented Page Up and Page Down keys for document scrolling) recently lost a patent case to Uniloc and has been asked to pay $388 million in damages. Uniloc’s patent is about : “A registration system that allows digital data or software to run in a use mode on a platform if and only if an appropriate licensing procedure has been followed…” and it goes on to describe a system that anyone who uses shareware or trial software already knows to be a generic system of license management.

I personally thought that it’s like someone trying to patent ‘gravity’ or ‘basmati rice’. So I looked around, and what do I find?

Ta dah. IBM trying to make money of people’s patents through a patent.

See why all of this is a huge roadblock to technology innovation in general?