oomer

Okay so I bought 4 things off that list already…

A CraftRobo plotter that cuts paper $319.99
A stainless steel rice cooker $74.99
An OLPC laptop x 2 (for my kid, yah that’s the ticket) $798
Houdini Apprentice HD $99

The CraftRobo will be used in conjunction with pepakura designer to make 3d paper fold up models. I really want a 3d printer but those don’t have enough resolution …YET.

The stainless steel in the rice cooker refers to the inner bowl and not the outside surface. I am quickly become non-stick phobic. SS probably releases trace metals like nickel but probably better than teflon in the tummy.

The OLPC was bought with the G1G1 program where one computer goes to some needy child in a third world country and I get one (or this this case 2 just because I can). I have a new baby girl and I really like the idea of this being her first laptop and naturally I have to have one to so she can discover me in her XO neighbourhood. I want her to play the free simcity, learn some python scripting, take pictures and make movies.

I already said I heart Houdini in a previous post so getting the HD version sans watermark is a natural step for me. I already used the compositor to easily tile 4 images for my 4×6 prints (need some wallet size pics!).

Okay so here are a few things on my list which are a bit pricier but still I’ve got the itch….
1. Nextengine’s 3d scanner $2495
2. NaturalPoint’s 6 camera mocap system $4999
3. Annosoft’s Lipsync Tool $500

I want to do some work on humans and 3d scanning hands, noses, heads. The Nextengine is the first low cost desktop scanner with professional quality resolution. (see my previous post where Rej and I made our own lo-res scanner).

The mocap system is a real breakthrough in price but I want more cameras to avoid tracker occlusion (I’m cleaning out my basement to make sure I have enough room to do kung fu kicks and full body slams). Maybe I should put some soft floor material on the floor…

I love listening to TWIT every week and I thought some non-listeners might prefer a youtube or appleTV version. I could take the mp3 files dropped by Leo and then feed it through Annosoft’s Lip Sync tool and wire it up to pre-rigged models of Leo Laporte, the curmudgeon, and guests in a sports talk like round table. Obviously I would have to streamline this workflow so I just feed it the mp3 and it automatically separates the speakers, puts in contextual body gestures, eyebrow raises, smiles, “dvorak.org/blog” popups and nice camera cut work. I like that Jason Calacanis guy, he’s a real character. btw I’m a real fan of Coaches Corner with Don Cherry. That is the driving visual dynamic for this animated version of TWIT

I haven’t done much with C# since I happily spend most of my time programming in Python but there are a lot of cool thing happening with C# like Microsoft Game Studio 2.0 and middleware like TorqueX and NeoAxis. I been trying to decide on the best program to learn about engine development and I am swinging towards neoaxis. It seems to be mostly the work of a single guy in russia, by the nick “betauser” and after downloading his demos along with resource editor and world editor, I saw a very powerful tool already. I liken it to something like UnrealEd but because it is not is c++, but in a garbage collected, don’t have to type variables language, c#, I can see myself spending time exploring the entire range of game development from tools to physics to art. I like the ability to weave between programmer and artist, which is probably why I like Houdini so much. The cost is also much lower than UnrealEd, including non-commerical acces, so those 2 wins give it the thumbs up so far. The rendering engine is Ogre3d. I had originally been exploring PyOgre but I think I want more middleware and less framework.

I was first shown Side Effect’s 3d Software called “Action” about 15 years ago (this turned into Houdini). I was straight out of art school and a 1 year 3d course and I instantly fell in love with this package. This is where luck comes in (since only maybe 5% of the post production houses in Toronto actually used this software) and I am eternally grateful to lady luck. The reason is that about 7 years ago I started using 3dsmax at work (Toronto is the headquarters for Side Effects so other cities has closer to 0% market penetration) and only switched back to Houdini last year. It feels like I’ve been in the dark ages for years…whew.

For the rest of the company, software like Max, Softimage or Maya all do a fine job but for personal satisfaction, only Houdini fits like a glove. The reason is that Houdini can be thought of as a 3d modeling package AND at the same time it is a programming language. Yes you heard that correctly and NO it is not craziness. Houdini is a procedural modeling and animation package and unlike most other packages where you actually push and pull vertices, I can say that in the past year I have not manually pushed or pulled a vertex at all and at the same time I have build complex buildings with portals and staircases.

Procedural modeling is not new and whether you call it the Modifier Stack or Construction History, people should pay homage to the fact that Side Effects has been a procedural modeler for 20 years. The modifier stack in 3dsmax is a not even as powerful as what I saw on my first fateful introduction to Action/Houdini, 15 years ago. Side Effects since then has become a totally node based procedural “operations” network and though they’ve paid the price with a smaller market share (procedural doesn’t equate to user friendly) they have also created an incredible programming language for 3d construction whose engine is heads and shoulders above the competition.

I worked in the tough business of TV post production in the heyday of SGI’s and big budgets. Houdini was my saviour back then because it allowed us to procedurally model and animate so that we could change on a dime to meet our client’s wants. You could walk, interject and branch the entire construction history and once you get past the initial use as an undo, you start using it like an Avid or Final Cut Pro for non-linear and non-destructive editing.

These days, I use Houdini Object Template Libraries as reusable “classes” of objects and scratch my head to try to figure out when I first realized it WAS a programming language…

I heart Houdini

So here is my review so far

motostorm - awesome, I play six axis and it is awesome fun
-remote play, stuttery should extend to games
-folding@home - cool , leaving mine on 24/7
-flow - excellent game for working out on the bike, just enough brainpower to avoid workout boredom but not distracting like a movie.
-playstation store - not bad, redownload a good thing
-yellow dog linux - it really rocks that sony let us do this! I plan do try out some cell programming soon.
-sixaxis - always loved the ps controller from ps1 days, motion gyrometers and bluetooth wireless are great
1.6 firmware backgrounnd downloads work great
-God of War2 plays great
-being able to move backups from HD to memory stick great for save games

things I might like
-bluetooth headphones, since I have a pair and I can sync with the ps3 and play without distrubing my wife and receive calls at the same time.
-psone games on the psp, my 512MB mem card was too small to hold crash bandicoot, gotta get a bigger one
-sony wants us to swap the hard drive, so I have to get a 2.5 pata drive real soon
-gotta go out an buy a blu-ray movie

things I dislike
-playing a simple game like flow stops my background downloads
-kinda loud and hot
-no psone emulator on ps3
-my h.264 encoded videos work in itunes but not on the ps3 (audio only)

things I hope for
-ps1, ps2 anti-aliasing of games, I would go back and replay Ico without all the simmering pixels
-ffmpeg optimized for cell for blistering h.264 encoding
-psp remote play over the internet

http://www.papervision3d.org/demos/seahorse/

Just got a request to write down how I got ShadowFang Keep .3dxml to .obj format, so here goes.

1. Once i get the .3dxml file from 3d printscreen, I rename it .zip and then open it up like any other zip file.
2. Inside will be a manifest.xml and an ascii 3dxml version of your captured 3d data which you can open in notepad
3. A cool feature is that all the bitmaps are stored in the xml instead of a directory full of bitmaps, this makes it easy to keep track of and reference later on.
4. Easy so far since all we have done is open a zip file
5. If I was really making a proper .3dxml to .obj convertor, I would need more documentation which I think you can request from the company. Instead I just did a brute force search for triangles and faces using python2.5 and the elementtree xml module to create the simplest of .obj (no uv coords, no normals, no smoothing groups although all that data is there). I assume .3dxml has support for nurbs and other cool stuff but I assumed that any opengl snapshot would only ever see triangles and triangle strips.
6. Obviously my converter is very simple and no different than trying to convert from .wrl to .obj or .3ds
7. Hopefully I will get around to adding uv coords and smoothing groups some time in the future.
8. Chad, let me know if this is enough hand holding or not. I can go into more detail.

python with the win32com module allows it to control apps like Excel, anything i can do manually, i can script

For best compatibility one needs to also generate the constants like xlColumnWidth that are used in macros. There are some extra downloads to help win32com achieve this but I find out that the activestate pytton 2.4 IDE has the generator and the module built in.

So far I’m studiously converting the csv data i get from the banks and front office billing software to help me take care of bookkeeping and though it is a lot of frontend time I know it will pay dividends even in the short term to help me organize my books.

Trying to extract this model from WOW into obj format

After spending several unsuccessful hours trying to use OGLE the Open GL extractor which takes a snapshot of the vertex buffers in opengl memory from any app., I gave up. The WOW model viewer for characters worked fine in generating .obj files, but viewing a level gave totally garbled results. This might be because of the vertex programs that move the data and the extractor doesn’t sneek in at the right time.

I then checked out from www.3ds.com for a free (onerous EULA methinks) program called 3d printscreen which does the same as the above and was able to dump out a full textured level into their modelviewer. The catch is that they a backing a open(?) file format called 3dxml which is a zip file which a manifest.xml and an ascii model xml. After some massaging with python’s 2.5 elementtree I was able to convert basic triangle data over to .obj format and load it into Blender.


import xml.etree.ElementTree as et
ns = '{http://www.3ds.com/xsd/3DXML}'

for each in tree:
if each.tag == ns+'GeometricRepresentationSet':
print each.tag


I gave both VMware and Parallels a chance at being my virtual server software for my wife’s office.

This means running windows xp in a virtual machine inside another copy of windows xp. Sounds complicated but is way cool and provides some awesome maintenence features that are gold.

VMware looked like it would have the lead since it is for servers and Parallels is only for workstations right now. The only difference is that a server version will allow a headless os to run in the background while a workstation version must have a user logged in. Suprisingly I decided that even though VMware is free , paying $50 for parallels was a better solution for me. If the virtual server ever goes down I can substitue my macbook pro in place for awhile. I got a acer aspire E380 which has an AMD chip with the new virtualization hooks that allow for 90% native speed inside a guest virtual os. The entire os lives in a single file that when compressed can be under 3 gigs which is great for burning to DVD.
A week has gone by and the receptionists have not complained and it seems to be running like a champ so I’m pretty happy. There is no way you can tell that there are not 2 physical machines on the network. I will be using more VM’s in the future especially for security.