http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/java/smoothteddy/index.html

You can make round 3D models such as teddy bears quickly, and paint them in an integrated environment.

Smooth Teddy is a small, yet highly amusing program by Takeo Igarashi. A sort of “3D playground”, it allows you to fiddle with 3D models by scribbling shapes that are automatically given volume. Once you have your first amoeba on screen, adding pseudopods is just a matter of painting shapes over it: once a secondary shape is given volume, you can displace it over the first one, clone it if you want, and finally merge the two into a single piece. Modeling in this way becomes an intuitive process, and though it is not very precise nor very quick, the program has a high cuteness factor which will Read the rest of this article »

Is there a gene for Evil? Or maybe do we turn wicked due to life´s circumstances? No; I’m not going to be serious. Not today. This was only a way to introduce today´s review on bad guys in films. Because, does anyone ever ask himself/herself why bad guys Read the rest of this article »

http://www.glest.org/

In case you haven´t read my previous articles on it, Glest is a Free, open-source 3d Real Time Strategy Game, designed in a way so that it is easy to customize and expand. Glest has been in continuous development for several years, and has received awards in the Art Futura and Mundos Digitales spanish international festivals. Finally we have released the official 2.0 version, which includes many add-ons that we hope will enhance gameplay. Read the rest of this article »

http://www.artbytucho.blogspot.com/

A few days ago my good friend Tucho Fernández opened his new blog, “Art by Tucho”, where he is regularly posting samples of his drawings and 3D models. Tucho and I worked together in the Glest project and he is now also working for the video games company Traganarion Studios. As for his art, the quality of his paintings is elloquent enough. I would add that he´s especially talented for drawing things of an organic nature, especially fantasy creatures and dinosaurs, but in my opinion that´s only because that´s his preference. I have been trying to make him draw robots and spaceships since I first met him, though, and the Battle Machine is the best example that he is equally skillful at drawing almost anything.

This is the latest fashion which is being all the rage in China, a country rushing to get rid of Mao suits: wedding pictures where the bride and groom are naked. Since pornography is forbidden in the asian giant, the models hide the most compromising spots with veils, bouquets or small leaves á la Adam&Eve. A complete “book” can get up to more than 3000 dollars, pleinly justified if we pay attention to this statement from a chinese girl which has succumbed to temptation: “It´s a way to retain our youth. When we show these images to our grandchildren, they´ll understand them better and find them funnier than our parents do”.

This article has been contributed by Miguel Ángel Barroso. Miguel Ángel is a professional journalist currently managing the sunday supplement of the spanish ABC newspaper; he also writes poetry and short stories.

editorial: the picture above was taken from this site, which shows many interesting facts on the relationship between the evolution of chinese society and its attitude towards dressing.

http://www.lego.com/eng/factory/

With the free Digital Designer software you can build absolutely anything with virtual LEGO bricks right on your computer. Then you can buy the real bricks to build your creation and you can share it with thousand of other LEGO fans.

One of the problems I used to face every time I wanted to make my own lego models was that I never had enough bricks of the kind I was needing. It must be one of those “murphy´s laws” that the brick you just need is the one you lack!

Until now, there was a partial solution to this issue: the L-cad program allowed you to design your model in the computer so that you could afterwards order the pieces you wanted. This walkaround was (is) very useful, but if there were an easier option to custom design-custom order models which was backed by lego, that would be amazing, and if it were user friendly… whoa!

Well, so a big WHOA! to lego, since they have done exactly that. Besides giving the users an easy way to design models on the computer, they have made it just as easy to order those models as custom sets. Again, WHOA!!

http://www.iceagemovie.com/

The Ice Age is coming to an end, and the animals are delighting in their new world: a melting paradise of water parks, geysers and tar pits.

I liked Ice Age, the first movie, very much. That´s why I was a bit worried when I watched Ice Age: The Meltdown´s trailer for the first time. There was Scratch, the squirrel, searching again for the unattainable seed, there were the same ol´chaps from the first movie escaping again from an inminent danger… I feared that the forecoming movie was to be a sequel made to make some cash by using and abusing all the things that made the original famous. Now I that I finally saw the movie, I´m happy to Read the rest of this article »

http://www.nbc.com/Medium/

Allison DuBois is probably one of this year´s best fictional characters (the other one may be doctor House, but I run away from hospital plots as much as my cat does from water). Allison travels at daybreak to the sewers of terror, and then, when she wakes up, she finds her husband´s look, a saint in strict sense, still half asleep, her children and the daily chores. The way in which she intertwines the threads of panic and life is amazing, as much as the ability of the scripts to extract credible stories from her incredible powers. The chapters hardly last for 45 minutes, a juice with no spare pulp.

My friend Covadonga sent me a very nice step-by-step guide to making this origami envelope, originally attributed to Frances Levangia. She writes, “I made these diagrams based on paper models because otherwise I would forget how to make it, so when I like something, since I have no idea of how to diagram, I do it in this way”. Thanks Covadonga!

While searching for information on the envelope, I came across this site, where you will find a very nice collection of letterfolds and envelopes diagrammed by John Cunliffe. This same model is included among them; for those who are learning how to read diagrams, it could be interesting to compare it with Covadonga´s instructions to see how the drawings translate themselves into foldings.

Related Article: Origami cd case

Masculinity can be defined by two aspects: the cocktail adrenalin+ testosterone added to the liking for shooters.

Shooters, generally on a coin-op platform, were a dominant genre in the realm of early videogames. It´s easy to recall Galaxian, or Tempest, one of the first games to bring deepness to game mechanics. I would like to highlight one among them: Robotron 2084, the first game I ever knew that needed two joysticks to be used simultaneously, one for movement and the other for shooting.

Of course, the genre never died. People everywhere, especially asians as it seems, keep on devouring one shooter after another: Ikaruga, Bangai-O, Radiant Silvergun… Read the rest of this article »

http://kilroytrout.blogspot.com

The antialiasing is real-time and perfect (no really it is) while the textures use conformal mapping which means no stretching or mapping artifacts like you get with typical projective mapping.

Jeff Anderson has updated his blog with some new videos showing Groboto, the 3D organic art program, in action. It seems that the hopes I showed in my last article on the beta are being confirmed. The interface proves to be friendly and powerful; you can rotate the model effortlessly at any moment, and manipulating the seed (the little shape you start with) or the lighting is also very easy. Everything casts shadows over everything, and the textures have a crisp look due to the special kind of bump mapping used.

There are still many things about Groboto that remain a mystery: will it feature predefined shapes like the previous version? will it have a genetics lab? what will the export options be? When the beta testing is open I´ll be able to answer those questions. Until then, the expectations are getting pretty high

Related Article: Groboto 2.0 in the works

Related Article: Groboto-beta: new screens

Who is Paul Greengrass? He is the director of two films as different as excellent: the brutally real “Bloody Sunday” and the more popular “The Bourne Supremacy”. Our target today will be the second title I’ve mentioned, perhaps the best action film (in my opinion) since “Die Hard”.

Action movies usually have a bad press, due to the dreadful quality (it´s true) of some of these products. Many of them attempt on the audience’s intelligence: We are fed up of watching bad guys killing lots of people with great precision, only to become true idiots when it´s about killing the hero. “The Bourne Supremacy” fortunately respects our capacity of thinking.

When Greengrass was hired to take up again the character of CIA agent Jason Bourne, after the great reception obtained by “The Bourne Identity”, he found himself with some questions to Read the rest of this article »

This past Saturday I took the bus to Montreal, Quebec for the 4th annual BASSOON DAY. I got a chance to try out different bocals and instruments, as well as shop for bassoon accessories including everything from mandrels and awesome reed cases to bassoon pliers and several different types of cane. The day also included a free master class with Laurent Lefèvre (principal bassoonist of the Paris Opera) and the “Bassoon Extravaganza” concert which included the ensemble comprised of the bassoonists in attendance. I even got to have lunch with 8 other bassoonists! I have to say that the highlight of the day was trying out the mini bassoon (I would like one for my future children, please)!

This article has been contributed by Stephanie Briana Unverricht. Stephanie is currently studying music performance (Bassoon) at the University of Ottawa in Canada, and she´s also our editorial advisor, who proofreads the articles and corrects every mistake and typo with endless patience.

Some time ago my friends in the Origami Group showed me how to make a box model originally designed by Clemente Giusto. I found it interesting, especially since when folding it you have to use a “twisting” technique that afterwards, when the model is finished, allows you to open and close it without needing to make a second matching part.

The fact is that the flaps of paper on top of the box made it look kinda strange, as they were really big in comparison to the rest of the piece. Therefore, I started fiddling with it to see if I could Read the rest of this article »

http://www.arcadeflyers.net/

a repository for arcade related promotional flyers that are used by the arcade industry to promote the sales of their games.

The product of a fusion between two already big flyer collections, the Arcade Flyer Archive is, since 1999, an evergrowing showcase of arcade flyers and a paradise for the video game enthusiast.

In wandering through the many images available (usually there are several flyers for a single videogame,) you will find amazing artworks covering the entire story of arcades from 1971 to almost yesterday (the database is constantly updated). From an aesthetical point of view this is enough to Read the rest of this article »