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Recently I have been fiddling with quite a few open source applications, and I'd love to share some of my thoughts. Maybe some of you would like to try a few of these trinkets of freedom.

Ubuntu 8.1.0

Ubuntu, which is a version of Debian Linux, is essentially a free and open-source operating system. No copy protection, in fact it is encouraged that you share the discs with your friends. The bottom line is that this is a free, popular (relatively), and powerful operating system that works pretty well on most hardware. There are versions for Power-PC and intel Macs, Intel and AMD based x86 and x64 systems, and I believe there is even a version that will install onto a Playstation 3.

I recently installed Ubuntu version 8.1.0 on my ACER notebook, and to my delight, everything worked right away. Here's a list of some of the cool things that were up and running immidiately after the install:

• Wireless Networking (802.11 B, G WiFi)
• Wired Networking (RJ-45 Ethernet Connection)
• Graphics Accellerator (Built-in intel X3100)
• Memory Card Reader (Texas Instruments)
• Sound Devices (Although the microphone is a bit weak and tricky to configure)

The desktop environment is awesome! It has multiple workspaces and really intuitive ways to switch between them. There are also a bunch of fun animations for things like minimizing and closing windows, and switching between workspaces. Overall, the environment is quick and snappy. The only issue I have with Linux on the whole is that software developers such as Adobe, Logitech, and many others have not put much effort towards making Linux versions of their applications. Popular multi-platform applications like Skype and Firefox are available though. Now I am just waiting for Google Chrome to arrive on Linux.

Something else that is noteworthy is the fact that you can install Ubuntu right on top of Windows. If you install Ubuntu on the second partition of your hard drive, it will install a boot-loader called GRUB that will allow you to choose weather you want to start-up in Windows or Ubuntu. When booted up in Ubuntu, you can even access your Windows files!

Audacity

I've got to thank my long time Tech-Mentor, Leo Laporte for turning me onto this little gem.
Quite simply, it's a small, portable easy to use multi-track audio editing program. One of its superb features is its ability to record whatever Windows is playing. I have not installed the Linux version yet, but I'm sure it's the same sort of feature set.

Cam Studio

Cam studio is a nifty little screen recording program for Windows. It's free, comes with its own lossless video codec, has features for tracking your cursor as you move about the screen doing things, and is very fast and light weight. You can even run it as a portable application from a USB Flash Drive.

Firefox Portable + Dropbox

Talking about portable applications and USB flash drives is a perfect segway into my next combo. Firefox Portable + Dropbox. if you don't know yet, Dropbox is a superb file management and backup program, and if you have not read my post about Dropbox, go do it!

Firefox Portable comes into the picture when you decide to place your installation of Firefox, along with any Add-ons, or Themes, Saved Passwords into your dropbox. Imagine closing your browser at home, then heading to work opening firefox there and resuming right where you left off. All your bookmarks, tabs from last time, and Add-ons can follow you everywhere when using this combination. However I will say that it might be simpler to just use Firefox Portable from a USB Flash Drive, but if you've got 3 or 4 windows computers using dropbox in your home, then why not?

Most of us have held an accelerometer in the palm of our hand quite recently. Can't figure out when? Still trying? iPhone. The iPhone and iPod Touch both use accelerometers to sense how they are being oriented. Need another example? How about the ever fun Nintendo Wii? The Nintendo Wii uses a 3-Axis accelerometer (In each remote) to sense how you are holding the controller.

Now an overpriced iPod or an entertainment console are not enough for me to call these little devices my favourite trick of '08. Thanks to the auto industry, the size, and cost of accelerometers has gone down, while the sensitivity and accuracy has gone up.
I recently got to wear a 3D Performance Capture Suit; this technology is used in video games and cinema quite extensively. Most of the systems out there are based on infra-red cameras and about 20 - 60 little white balls on a black body suit. The dozen or more cameras see the points of reflected infra-red light and some triangulation will give you a swirling point cloud of data that you can then extract the performance from. The suit I wore was different though... It was wireless, markerless, required no cameras, and was worn underneath my jeans and t-shirt. It was based largely on accelerometers.

The suit I am raving about is a spandex (ouch!) suit that has modules the size of camcorder batteries in pockets on each limb. One on your forearm, one on your upper arm, a few on your shoulder blades, etc... in addition, a module is strapped onto your head (using a standard headband with a pocket sewn onto the back of it.) and there are modules on your hands and feet. Seriously, once you get over the crotch hugging spandex, you can barely even feel it on you.

I was one of two lucky students who got to wear the Moven inertial based motion capture suit. We filmed the whole thing, and eventually we will put together a nice (definately funny) video of all the things my schoolmates made me act-out in this suit. Once I have more media to share, I will surely create a more lengthy post with all the details and a few videos.

I first heard of Stack Overflow on the Boagworld.com podcast. While not really 3D related, it is a very nice concept. It's a community based, user-contributed questions and answers site. It is like Yahoo Answers, but it is focused on programming languages. Everything from C# to Ruby to PHP and CSS. I've been a member for only a day or so, but have already gotten a few answers to a tricky Rails question, and contributed to two other questions.

If the best way to learn is by teaching / helping others, then this site looks to be promising.

Recently, I was given a Maya 6 book. I thought it might have a few useful tips and tricks that were useful back when version 6 was all the rage. I was pleasantly suprised when I started reading it and found that the book contained a few really cool techniques and explanations.

I now realize that all the newest features of software usually dominates the newer books, but if you have the time and or patience, it pays to go back to the beginnings. 
In this little screen-cast, I will briefly show how two of these tools, Align and Snap Align are useful to me.

Click the fullscreen button to the right of the time-slider for fullscreen in HD

A while back, I started writing a little how-to on creating panoramic images from a sequence of shots. I had just learned to use Hugin and Panotools (some open source panorama tools) at the time, so it seemed like a good idea.

I've finally finished writing the tutorial (months later), and I would like to supplement it with a video tutorial, so look out for that. In the mean time however, feel free to read the tutorial and be sure to comment on it. Let me know if it was useful, understandable, or if I got anything wrong.

But anyway, Here is the Panorma Tutorial.

Converting videos for your Zune is pretty straightforward if you have one of the newer Zunes that support the Windows Media format as well as the .h264 format, but for the older first generation Zunes, it's slightly more complex.

The 1st Gen. Zunes will only sync WMV3 encoded files with certain dimensions, bit-rates and codecs. These are easy enough to make using loads of tools out there, but if the settings are not exactly as the Zune software needs them, it will need to re-convert the files upon importing. The solution I thought of first was to use VLC to transcode some QuickTime files into .wmv in the right format. This works, but transcoding WMV3 from VLC crashes the Zune 5-10 seconds into the video.

The solution is this little program called Any Video Converter Free as its name implies, it converts "any" video file into various formats. The free version will convert most formats into a Zune sync-patible (that hyphenation was a stretch) wmv file. It has a batch encoding queue as well.

Simply drag your dozen or so files in, set the format options and a destination directory, then click the encode button. It may not be the fastest, but it will turn .mov files into .wmv files that sync to your zune in seconds instead of minutes, so that's good enough for me!

The software also has a few really simple yet useful options such as Audio Normalizing and or Level Adjustment. No more need to crank the volume up to maximum just to hear the audio. Just boost it in the software before converting. Be warned that this is a global setting!

Just for the record, here are the specifics on the wmv format for the First Gen Zune:

• 320 x 240 pixels, up to 30fps
• WMV3 (aka WMV9) video codec (VBR or CBR) up to 1.5mbps
• WMA up to 192kbps and 44.1khz

Dial these settings in and the Zune software should simply sync instead of converting the video before syncing.

Interacting with a 3D model has always been the most fun part of 3D design, but usually only the creator of the model has that ability. The viewers of the 3D work are usually left with an image or an animation. We can do better than this...

The Plattform body wash bottle I created uses some 3D presentation software called Wirefusion (the free edition) and allows the user to navigate around the bottle right in their web-browser.

Link to the Plattform Bodywash Bottle

As always, comments are welcome.

The Dorsoduro engine has been completed (mostly). You can take a better look at how its coming along at the Dorsoduro Project Page and leave a comment or two.

Use the Sin Deformer to ripple a Plane

To create cloth with a sliding constraint.
Select Vertices on nCloth object, Choose > nConstraint > Slide on Surface.

More details here: Duncan's Blog at area.autodesk.com

Originally posted on: September 7th, 2008

The new file management application Dropbox - (Link to a Screencast of someone using it) is really one of those tools that makes you wonder how you put up with file management before. Dropbox (in a nutshell) keeps your files synchronized across multiple computers (MacOSX, Windows XP or Vista, and Linux) while securely backing them up online.

That sounds great enough as it is I know, but there's more. The system keeps track of revisions (every time you save, move, rename or delete a file) and allows you to step back to almost any revision of that file since its been in your Dropbox. The dropbox guys also say that the files are encrypted when they are stored on their servers, so even if there was a security breach, your files would be private.

Here's how it works (If you haven't already clicked the screencast link above):

You install the client application on your Mac / PC and it prompts you to create a new account and / or link the computer to your existing account. Once that's done, the files you had online (or some sample files that come with new accounts) are instantly downloaded to a local folder on your computer. That's it, they are there. Locally. Even if you unplug the net after that, you still have access to your files. This is great and all, but that's just like a fancy FTP account right? Wrong! The files in your dropbox folder are now under the careful watch of the Dropbox versioning system. If you delete a few files, rename a couple and work on another, you can still go to the Web Interface (Basically a web site version of your drop box with a blog-like layout) and restore previous versions or undelete files. Dropbox will even sense when only a small part of a file has changed and can upload and sync only that part of the file to save bandwidth.

If the following morning you get to the office and install the Dropbox client there, your files will be downloaded once you link your account to that computer and then everything between those two locations of your Dropbox will stay in sync. You can even create shared folders between yourself and other Dropbox users or provide a web link for non Dropbox users.

The entire project is still in beta, but I have not had any issues whatsoever. The good news is that if you get a beta account, you will have more storage on a free account than the free accounts after launch. Right now the beta accounts are 2GB.

Updated on: September 27th, 2008:

The project is now in open beta and anyone can sign up for a free account. It seems that (in their normal generous spirit) the Dropbox team has chosen to give everyone the 2GB of free storage that the late-stage beta testers had.

The Linux client is now in full swing and I have tested it on my Ubuntu installation - It's seamless.

You can now purchase paid plans with increased storage space: $9.99 / month or $99.99 / year will get you 50GB of transparently synchronized, backed up, secure, versioned storage.

I recently added a comment feature on my site, allowing user-submitted comments on my projects. It has been met with a little bit of success (not really; I don't have that much traffic).
Even more recently, I added a small super-simple blog to my site, and it has proven to be a... "cute" extension to the functionality of my site.

All you lovely people checking out my site can now leave comments on both projects and blog posts. So go ahead and let me know if it's a cool feature or basically unnecessary.

What's next? A table of contents for the blog? Ability to leave comments on images? Email notifications for comment posters?

Creating a Soft Body Flag

1. Create a NURBS Surface with a few divisions.
2. Create Flag Pole
3. Select Flag and choose: Soft/Rigid Bodies > Create Soft Body.
   Choose Duplicate, make original soft, check Hide non-soft object, and Make non-soft a goal
4. Select the Particle object under the soft body, then add a field to it eg: Turbulence, Wind
5. Select the Particle object, right click and choose particle, then select a particle at the corner. Shift-Click the pole, and right click it to access CVs or Vertices. Select the corresponding Verticies.
6.  Choose: Soft/Rigid Bodies > Create Springs. (The option box contains an option to add the new springs to an existing springs object.)

Adjusting the Goal Weight and Goal Smoothness will allow you to tweak the flag motion.

To make the air field motion more realistic, we can use the following MEL Script:
(The following is assuming that the flags particles are being acted upon by an airfield named airField1)

airField1.translateX=sin(time);

frame is the current frame of the scene.

time is the current frame of the scene divided by the frame rate.

We often find that dynamic attributes in 3D simulation software come in pairs. One attribute may control the stiffness of a spring, while the other may control the dampening force on that spring. These two forces can be used in certain amounts to counteract each other and make the motion more believable.

Springs

• Rest Length
  This is the length that the spring tries to attain. Think of this as the length of a spring that has no load on it.
• Stiffness
  This is the actual resistance of the spring, as well as the power the spring exerts.
• Damping
  Applies a constant resistance to the stiffness force. These two try to overpower each other, eventually blanacing and coming to rest.

Geo Connector

• Resilience
  This reads like Bounciness
• Friction
  This reads like Stickiness

Fields

• Magnitude
  This reads like Strength. Note that fields usually use constant acceleration.
• Attenuation
  This reads like Strength over Distance. Think of a black hole. The closer you get to the event horizon, the stronger the force is.

Goals

• Goal Weight - Bias
• Goal Smoothness

Spring Constraint

• Spring Stiffness
• Spring Damping
• Rest Length

When rendering particles in Maya using the Clouds(SW) method, it can be a challenge finding the right settings to make the intersections between the clouds more defined.

The Default Maya Cloud Shader

Diffuse Coefficient Adjusted

Diffuse Coeff: 0.5
Color: Black

Notice how the shadows start to appear.

Surface Color Adjusted

Surface Color: White

Notice how the highlights start to appear.

Density Adjusted

Density: 10

The intersections are now much sharper.

What the hell is threaded optimization? nVidia says it allows the GPU to take advantage of multiple Cores or Processors, but know this about it; if you are experiencing strange graphics glitches in your 3D software and have a recent nVidia GPU, it's probably this setting that's causing problems.

I'm not one of those guys who boasts about his Crysis or Battlefield framerate. I like when my 3D software performs well, and even when threaded optimization is set to Auto I get flashing view ports and strange redraw errors that hinder any progress. The auto setting is supposed to be there to decide weather it should be on or off, but doesn't seem to detect the situation correctly.

After trying different drivers, and the whole troubleshooting shebang, it finally came down to turning this option off. Yes my processor is Dual Core, but if my GPU flickers then it's not much use to me is it? For now it's staying off.

A simple demostration of a few selection tools in Cinema 4D that I really enjoy using. The interactive feedback of the highlighted faces and or edges makes seeing your selection really easy. In addition, some of the more unusual tools like the edge path selection really make the normally tedious task of selecting edges into a painless one.

Click the fullscreen button to the right of the time-slider for fullscreen in HD

We all love Firefox... I hope! And we all Hate IE6(Internet Explorer 6)... I'm sure of it! So, I've been following the all too slow demise of IE6 as its poor technology is eventually phased out. I've grabbed some of the latest data from the W3C's browser stats page (which I'm sure isn't 100% accurate) and combined it with a chart from Google's Charts API:

And if you haven't tried Firefox yet, you've got nothing to lose. It's free, open source, fast and ultra modern. Oh yeah, and it's not made by Evil Microsoft or "becoming more evil every day" Apple. Even better, it runs on MacOSX, Windows, and Linux.

Finally, after many many months of this project being shoved to the back burner time and again, it's done.

The new Kawasaki ZX-6R Ninja 3D model is all wrapped up and can be seen at the 2008 Kawasaki ZX-6R Ninja page. Please share any comments you might have on the model / renderings.

My main focus these days has been on learning the Ruby on Rails web development framework, but I have blocked out some time to finish up my latest 3D Bike: The Kawasaki ZX-6R.

While my Rails progress has been steady, I am realizing more and more that Web Development and 3D design exercise different parts of my brain and I need to be more disciplined about when I do Web and when I do 3D. After some more Rails progress has been made, I'll shift focus to the Dorsoduro 3D model.

The new 2007 / 2008 ZX-6R that I've been modeling since... well, 2007 (it's been on the back burner) is almost done. Technically speaking, the actual modeling is done, and I am currently UV mapping the finished model.