A couple of years ago I joined the CGSociety website — a computer graphics website. Mostly so that I could read and, (very) occasionally post, in their forums. Computer modelling and rendering is very much a hobby for me, but I love to read and learn about it.

Periodically, CGSociety send out an email newsletter. Initially I read it with interest, but it wasn't something I had on my "must read" list and lately I've tended to just delete the notification emails unread (the site emails me when there's a new newsletter available). Today I received an email that said, in effect, they'd noticed I hadn't been reading (clicking through to) the newsletters in a while, so I've been unsubscribed. If I want to resubscribe there's a link available.

This is excellent. I hadn't actually bothered to check if unsubscribing was an option since, like most people, spam is a part of my life and this was just one more unread email amongst hundreds. But the site noticed for me and took a positive action. It saves them an email each time and it saves me from receiving pointless email. There's a small chance I will now forget about the website altogether, although in my case that's unlikely, since I browse it fairly regularly. In my book, CGSociety have just gained a lot of positive karma for proactive and much appreciated membership management. Well done.

Topics: software/graphics

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The UPS delivery man brought me my copy of Introducing Character Animation With Blender this morning. I've been hanging out for this book for months — ever since Tony Mullen started dropping hints (and then a clear announcement) on the blenderartists form that he was writing it.

Having taken an early lunch today — and spent a couple of hours this afternoon — to flick through the book and read a large portion of it, I think Tony has written a very nice piece of work. I obviously haven't worked through all the examples and tutorials yet, but the order in which he presents the information and his selection of material looks great.

(Read more...)

Topics: software/graphics, books/reviews

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After having a reasonably productive morning, I decided to do some random sysadmin tasks for my home setup that have been sitting on the list for ages.

What follows is some rambling from spending a couple of hours happily wrapped up in "new software" land. Mostly (only?) of interest to Linux users.

(Read more...)

Topics: software/graphics, photography, technology/sysadmin

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Whilst looking for something in the Blender forums tonight, I stumbled upon a reference to the latest CGChallenge competition. Creating artwork around Greg Bear's novel Eon. Cool!

I've mentioned previously that Eon is one of Bear's books that I like a lot. In fact, it is probably my favourite Science Fiction book. I clearly remember first reading it during mid-year vacation during year 12 at high school (so mid-1988) and I've read it countless times since then and still enjoy it. So this competition, particularly the competition to create a movie trailer for a hypothetical Eon movie, will be fun to watch. There's no way I will have time to compete, but hopefully some people who have read the book and truly enjoy it will be able to show off their skills (a lot of the forum chatter over there so far is from people who haven't read the book, which is a hole in their education to date as far as I'm concerned).

They've even asked Greg Bear to help judge the competition and he's agreed (along with David Brin). So the judges will have taste, too.

Topics: books, software/graphics

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Along with a few other Open Source projects (GNOME, the GIMP, Verse and Inkscape ), Blender has a booth in the exhibitors hall at SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston right now.

For those who don't know, Blender is an Open Source 3D modelling and rendering suite. Like so many programs trying to do complicated things, it has a fairly steep learning curve (along with requiring a certain amount of artistic ability to create stuff), but once you master the interface, it is a program of enormous power and usefulness. I tend to splash around in the shallow end of knowledge a bit, enough to appreciate the software behind the scenes and the results that people produce, without contributing anything much back to the project.

Something that the Blender group -- or, rather, one particular person -- are doing very well at SIGGRAPH producing and distributing daily videos of what is happening. Sitting in my office at home, half a planet away, I can see what is going on each day. I can pick of some of the enthusiasm and see how others are using the software. I can get ideas about what works and what doesn't when publicising projects like this.

These are well produced videos as well (each one is about ten minutes long). The sound and vision are both clear. When Bart is talking to people, they all speak clearly and interestingly about what they are doing (the trials of putting up the huge Project Orange banner on day three is a highlight here). In short, this is immediate publicity done well. Even is you aren't into graphical modelling and rendering, but just interested in how an Open Source project can sell itself whilst still being informative to those who are already "sold", it's worth a look.

The links below are to the relevant stories on BlenderNation, which contain download links to the daily videos.

• Day one: arrival
• Day two: BOFs (the audio in this one is a bit hard to understand at times.)
• Day three: Final preparations
• Day four: Tradeshow day 1

Topics: software/graphics, community/journalism

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I do not intend to become a "link blogger". Nothing drives me off the edge faster in the morning than scanning my RSS feeds only to find a bunch of posts that are 50% hyperlinks and 100% information free. Once in a while is OK, doing it regularly just makes me want to look up some GPS coordinates and hunt out the launch codes.

That being said (I feel so much better now!), a couple of random items I thought were worth sharing...

World Cup Football

I'm not a huge football/soccer fan, although I do kind of follow the English Premier League results throughout the year (more so than the Australian A League, strangely). With Australia having qualified for the World Cup for the first time in 30+ years (and their previous attempt resulted in 3 losses from 3 games with zero goals scored), it's a bit hard to avoid the media coverage around here at the moment. Most of the coverage is not that entertaining. One notable exception is Der Blog, written by an ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the US version) reporter who is following the Australian team. It took me a while to put my finger on why I was enjoying reading it, but his enthusiasm really comes through in most posts. Here's a guy having a lot of fun doing his job and writing articles you don't normally get to see as the event unfolds for a professional journalist.

Secondly, to see how an intelligent, enthusiastic fan might be spending these few weeks, go read Dave Mason's daily predictions (although you do have to actually know the results, since he seems to have slacked off a bit on post-match commentary).

Pretty Pictures

Often when you read about personalised newspapers in a science-fiction novel, they have a requirement or feature that you always get a little bit of random news you didn't ask for or that you might disagree with. I like the idea. I have a few random feeds in my aggregator and sites in my links collection that serve no real purpose other than to provide ideas.

One of the these is The Illustration Blog. Via this site, I have discovered the Photoshop Experiment, containing detailed play-by-play overviews of how some amazing illustrations are created in Photoshop. I'm no artist, but I like to play in the Gimp a lot. Seeing this website brings home (yet again!) just how fiddly really good art is to do. It's not just talent or luck; it's hard work. The main blog of Cory Godbey (the person behind The Photoshop Experiment) is worth a browse, too, if you like illustration.

Topics: art, sport/football, software/graphics

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