Category: image

Intuitive 3D modeling with Smooth Teddy

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 Continue reading Intuitive 3D modeling with Smooth Teddy

Glest 2.0 released

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. Continue reading Glest 2.0 released

Art by Tucho

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 eloquent 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’ve 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. 🙂

Lego of Choice: Digital Designer

http://ldd.lego.com/

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!! 😀

Ice Age, The Meltdown: Afterthoughts

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 imminent danger… I feared that the upcoming movie would just aim to make 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 Continue reading Ice Age, The Meltdown: Afterthoughts

Medium

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.

Easy life through practical origami: envelope

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

Adrenalin

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… Continue reading Adrenalin

Groboto-beta: new videos

http://www.groboto.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