On my way to implement a particle system on the gpu (either glsl or opencl but I would prefer opencl) I made the Game of Life from John Horton Conway (wikipedia) to improve my abilities in shader programming (which are kind of poor at the moment). Lesson was how to work with a shader and a texture, especially how to save the results of the shader in a texture to work with them in the next iteration. The code starts with a noise texture which was generated in Photoshop and saves its results in a new texture which will be used in the next step.
Particle system with cinder
During the holidays I did the “Welcome to Cinder” series and that’s my result. It’s a bit sloppy because of the screen recording. Next step will be to run the calcutlations on the GPU with OpenCL.
Fix __MyCompanyName__ in XCode – The easy way
Changing __MyCompanyName__ in XCode to something useful was always a bit stupid, like configuring it with plist editing or on terminal. Today I found a very easy and sensible way to get things right. Just edit the company of yourself in Address Book and XCode will insert this company in your files. Solution was found here (german).
Installing Bonus Tool 2010 on Windows 7 x64
I failed on a clean installation of the Maya Bonus Tools on my computer till I found the solution from Stefano Bolli: http://stefanobolli.blogspot.com/2010/06/installing-bonus-tools-for-maya-2011.html
Maybe this helps others too, big thanks to Stefano!
Nixon Wristwatch Wireframe
Everyone loves wireframe renderings, so here is one of my latest project! Sad but true, Blender lacks of a easy & fast method of wireframe rendering ( I know three: duplicate of the object with a slight scale and wire material, 2 material slots for one object & texture baking of the wire) if you have more than one object so I had to make this with Maya & mental ray. I really like Maya, I think I will do some textured mental ray shoots too.
By the way, the “nixon” and the logo are looking messed up because they were made with curves and then triangulated.
weekend project – Wristwatch modeling with Blender — Project finished
This weekend project is done. I like the result, but it isn’t rendered with luxrender though. I had some problems using luxBlend, especially with textured materials like leather and plastic. They use procedural textures from Blender and I was not able to figure out how to use them with luxrender. So it’s rendered with Blender Internal Render and some compositing (just defocus node & RGB curves adjustment). As you may notice there is no glass on the watch. This is because I had some bad shading issues with Blender Internal which I wasn’t able to eliminate. Luxrender had no problems with it so I don’t have any clue what could cause the problem.
The project was nearly completely made with Open Source Software! I just had one useable picture of the watch (besides the watch itself ;-) ) and I prefer to model by reference images. So I made references with Inkscape which is pretty awesome. Some textures are made with GIMP but for the main texture I had to go with Photoshop (mainly because of my lack of GIMP knowledge).
That’s it.
weekend project – Wristwatch modeling with Blender — Modeling finished
Modeling is finished, some minor touches at the wristband will be done but all in all it’s done.
weekend project – Wristwatch modeling with Blender — some progress
As you can see, modeling is nearly finished. There is still some work on the wristband but this should’nt take so much time. I think I can start on the textures tonight and make some nice renderings tomorrorw but now some other things will get done… :-)
Oh and by the way, the Solidify Modifier have some shading issues on the edges of the wristband no matter if high quality normals are activated. Further investigations are needed!
weekend project – Wristwatch modeling with Blender
I started a new project for this weekend, the recreation of my watch with Blender. I hope to get the modeling done by tomorrow so I’ll have enough time for texturing and rendering. I decided to give Luxrender a try, seems to be an impressive piece of open source software. Besides that I will check out camera tracking with Blender which is needed for an upcoming vfx project at our university. I already found voodoo tracker which works with Blender but this is all new to me. Enough work for today, time for some L4D2! :-)
over and out…
Hello Kinect!
I finally got some time for some experiments with the kinect. At the moment I just got some simple hand detection. In the next days I will try to do something useful with it, but for now it just works…
I am using the openKinect driver with the C# wrapper from EisernSchild (link) and AForge.Net for image processing. Hopefully the official C# wrapper from openKinect will be released soon.