Lucas is putting out the Special Edition Star Wars flicks on DVD. Finally – when it can make him the maximum amount of money.
Keeping the your-mom joke lively – my mom and I went to see Episode IV when it was first re-released as a Special Edition on the big screen. Neither of us were impressed.
Greedo shot first. The only character we can all dig gets castrated him before they even left Tatooine.
Terrible.
When I first got started in 3d-rendering tech, all shapes were created by a process called “extrusion”. Improvements in technology eventually brought “primitives”, giving artists the ability to insert things like spheres, cones, blocks, stars and teapots. Current tech allows primitives to be sculpted like stone and rapid application of smart textures that remove the need for detailed mesh modeling.
But this was before we had that fancy shit. A block is the easiest extrusion – start with a rectangle of length and width and give it height (generally along the z access – the line pointing at you), leaveing the shape alone throughout the raising process. Voila. A sphere is a bit trickier. Take a circle of zero diameter, give it height and increase diameter in a non-linear but simple curve until the midpoint and then reverse the rate of change as you decrease the radius to zero again.
Of course you can imagine how difficult it is to generate truly complex shapes via extrusion. I made the linked guitar body using graph paper and an estimated curvature on a rough six different slices spread throughout the extrusion. Software took care of the interpolation making the transitions smooth. Were I to lathe the actual guitar (like printing a drafting in 3d), I’m sure the low resolution of my work would have been highlighted.
PovRAY doesn’t have extrusion. PovRay, as I know it, doest not have any drawing whatsoever – it is pure math. Geeky. Neato.
The previous post’s fancy generated fractal shape renders quickly at low-low resolution but takes a few hours at standard size. I tweaked the colors used and that worked. I tweaked the input numbers and the shape disappeared.
I’m curious if any of you can get some interesting shapes out of the template. Povray is free software – google for your flavor (nix/mac/win32) and give it a shot!
Math-made-shapes. Now in 3d!
Found via computerlove.
As the clock approaches midnight I am surfing the usual suspects and wrap up with hitting my own.
A thought rises.
My mom checks jokerbone.
Not every day, I don’t think. Just every so often she’ll reply to a completely unrelated post with a “call me”.
I haven’t, recently, to shame.
She may respond to this post, and be on topic.
Cute.
If you are the sort of person into the sort of things that I get into but not always around to see what sort of things I am getting into, you may want to go get a free book. I’m getting into it.
As with mp3’s, after a few looks you may be so inclined to buy the higher-quality dead tree version.
The cover art isn’t too shabby but I wouldn’t mind seeing a copy that doesn’t have the > and : around Doctrow’s name.
We get it already.
Computers are hip.
I’ve been guilty of the same crimes to much larger extents – maybe I’m just being picky.
I am the anti-spam guy. I know where it comes from, what it looks like, who is sending it, and why. I sell this knowledge to clients by setting up front-end servers running the shizzle open source OS which in turn run the bomb mail transport agents and the absolute efffing wickety whack spam filtering software.
I charge for the installation voodoo. The software exists due to the work of others but the wetware exists because for every 100 people, a few will be complete assholes.
I am refering to the senders of spam. Assholes. Every one of them.
People with “solutions” to the spam problem are like integrations of assholes. They are asshole-primes. Read more here for a quick test you can use to demonstrate that they have indeed failed to succeed where religion, drugs, etc have failed to succeed over and over solving the whole “why is there evil” problem.
Paul’s ancient Rio started having battery problems. He took it to the store, mentioned his three year extended coverage deally and they hooked him up with something of equal or lesser as a replacement.
A 20GB ipod.
So many people to be jealous of, so little time.
I’m waiting for the color-screen-havin-120GB-802.11i monster 😃.
Very interesting progression of drawings over the course of an entire trip.
If you are running osX, you need sofa. On my powerbook, I need all the real estate I can get. I’ve temporarily sworn off virtual desktops / pagers in memory of running enlightenment for two years and have actually gotten used to Expose; if only I had enough RAM to make it responsive.
Combined with Another Launcher, osX can kick some ass.