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djotaku's twitter feed
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- http://www.gnu.org/fry/
- Clinton Supporters: Are you really such sore losers that you're prepared to screw us all over for four years just because you lost?
- More Christian Tech Goodness: http://tinyurl.com/6c8587
- When I was a kid, I played some corny Biblical video games. Now this comes out: http://tinyurl.com/5mxczl Will it sell?
- From now on all LPGA players must pass an oral english test. Who cares if you speak english if you can swing a stick at a small white ball?
- I thought my blog looked a little weird and then I remembered that I had ad blocker turned on and my google ad was therefore missing.
- Foobar2000 the strangely named audio player with the neat features
- I'm annoyed that my Civ 4 BTS hasn't been auto-updating. Just had to download over 300 MB of patches just to play Fall from Heaven 2.
- @ASPwizer: Nothing wrong with you, Honda Elements are the cars that winners drive. q;o)
- Also, sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/sets/72157606917571613/
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Aug
29
Giving Nick some Backbone!
Category: Blender, Sugar | 
3 Comments
I’ve used and created a few rigs now for my different animated shorts and test animations and I’ve had my share of frustrations with the process. First off, it can be quite tedious to create even a mediocre one. Second, it’s hard to create a good one; forget about how hard it is to create an excellent one! All of my rigging experience post “Penguin Flight” have come from a tutorial I read from the Blender Summer of Documentation. Even then, I didn’t do it from the rigging tutorial (which is incomplete in the most interesting of places) ; rather I did it based off of the Character Animation tutorial (which is quite, quite good and got me started after “Penguin Flight”. In fact, you may recognize it as the source of Raul Domingo).
This time, however, for the sake of creating a good quality animation and saving myself some insanity while animating, I decided to use my recently purchased “The Essential Blender” to read their chapter on rigging. I only read the intro tutorial, but it was enough to already change the way I think about rigging from now on. Although I have yet to put the rig I created through its paces, it already seems to be working much better than any I have yet built.
The first two new things I did were to add knee controls to keep the legs from bending in strange ways and creating layers of bones. Here you can see my full rig.
You can see the knees if you look in front of the yellow bones, they are tiny little bones in front. Another thing I did, which you can see there, is to have an Inverse Kinematics (IK) chain up the legs and arms. (That’s why those bones are colored instead of having a simple grey color) I’ve done the IK thing before, but I never really saw the power, and now I’m starting to understand it a lot more, although I still don’t fully understand the benefits/reasons behind it. I do see some of the benefits such as being able to pose the legs and arms from the extremeties rather than from the inner joints of the body. I believe this is also more in line with the way we move so, as I gain more skills over time, I expect this will yield more realistic movements. While I’m on the subject, something I had never done before is to create a body IK chain. I made these, according to the book’s instructions, in order to create reaching motions and times when the entire body has to lean into the hand/arm. That’s pretty exciting too.
So, as I mentioned above, I created layers of bones. This is because, for the first time, I created, and understood the purpose behind, control bones. Before I had been doing animation in a very amateurish way and now I have controls that control the legs and arms along an IK chain. So, here’s how things look with only the necessary bones showing on the visible layer:
Finally, I discovered something VERY, VERY important in “The Essential Blender” that may just save my sanity when creating rigs. All this time I had been doing a very tedious weight painting of each bone on its own. I just finished doing this for another project and it is SO, SO painful! Little did I know that there was a command that would automatically weight paint the bones according to the envelope with which it was casting on the mesh! From there it is only a little bit of tweaking to get things working the correct way. I’m now in that phase, so there won’t be any pictures of Nick posing just yet.
Finally, the book mentioned something I had read here and there, but never really had it click. Rigs can be designed to be used on all of one’s characters. I have to figure out how this works and if it can save me a lot of the tediousness. I have created, what seems to me, to be a pretty capable rig and the idea of having to recreate it for every bipedal humanoid is almost enough to turn me off to this whole business of animation.
So, back to Blender, my wife, and work. I also have a few more modifications to make here such as that necessary to move the eyes and some other things.
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Aug
29
Top of the Line IRC Clients
Category: Linux | 2 Comments
Read the latest Linux Format Magazine and I was delighted to find out that the two IRC clients I use were each awarded a 9/10 in their IRC client roundup. When I’m in KDE I use Konversation and in Gnome I use gnome-xchat (although it was vanilla xchat that got the 9/10). Both were praised for being approachable by tyros while at the same time having features for the experienced.
Getting particularly low marks was Pidgin. This makes sense since I’ve tried using IRC with these all-in-one clients such as Pidgin or Trillian and they were definitely sub-par. There are times when it works to bundle functionality and times when a dedicated program can do that one thing really, really well.
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Aug
29
The Method Appears to be Correct
Category: News, Politics | Leave a Comment
Looks as though my method of figuring out which Congressmen are gay is correct. Just look to see who is working the hardest to restrict gay rights. For example, Senator Larry Craig. He pleaded guilty to basically trying to solicit sex in a men’s bathroom. He’s now claiming that he wasn’t guilty and he plead guilty to get people off his back.
Sorry buddy, but that’s pretty weak and it’s hardly a good defense. After all, if that’s true then you are admitting to perjury and that, in and of itself, is enough to end your career. That WAS the charge brought against President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
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Aug
27
I can’t freakin’ believe it!!
Category: News, Politics | Leave a Comment
Alberto Gonzalez has resigned as Attorney General. The guy who Bush said wasn’t going anywhere is leaving! I haven’t been able to to catch the news at all today as I was in training, but I saw a little headline on Tv in the lunchroom! I am so curious to find out what caused this to occur. I am even more curious about what he’s sitting on. What did he do that was worth pushing him out. Even more strangely, people seem to be abandoning ship like rats. You know that old saying, (paraphrasing) “you know the ship’s going down when the rats flee”.
Wow….
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Aug
25
Activision Follows up Guitar Hero Success with Sousaphone Hero!
Category: Video Games | Leave a Comment
Sales have been low however. Read about it in this fine newspaper.
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Aug
23
what a long week….
Category: Me | Leave a Comment
I’m glad the weekend is fast upon us…..
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Aug
23
Hear your IP Address Moaned to You?
Category: Internet, Linux | 2 Comments
WTF is this world coming to? From the digg “horny nerd” files, comes this website: http://www.moanmyip.com/.
Interesting things I learned on this site are how web servers and websites see me. Here’s what it says it thinks it knows about me:
YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM AND BROWSER
Linux / Safari
YOUR USER AGENT INFORMATION
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux) KHTML/3.5.7 (like Gecko)
YOU CAME HERE FROM
http://digg.com/security
I think it’s interesting that it reports as Linux Safari when it clearly knows, from the next line down that ti’s Konqueror. I know that Konqueror and Safari share KHTML/Webkit for the backend, but I think ti’s strange that it shows up as Safari in one field and Konqueror in the next.
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Aug
23
How I feel about Guitar Hero
Category: Video Games, webcomics | Leave a Comment
This Penny Arcade comic sums it up perfectly.
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Aug
22
Being a little more Cinematically Correct, or How to use Depth of Field in Blender
Category: Blender, Sugar | Leave a Comment
In the world of computer generated cartoons and images, we have a very awesome trick we can do which cannot be done in real life. We can have unlimited Depth of Field. If you aren’t a photographer or involved in filming, you probably have no idea what that means. Well, in real life lenses cannot have everything in perfect focus from the front of the scene to the back. This is controlled by the f-stop. The bigger the f-stop, the more everything is in focus from front to back, the bigger the depth of field. Although, the f-stop is expressed as a fraction, so technically it is smaller numbers that are in higher focus. For example, f/2.8 will have your main character in focus and the rest of the background blurry. This is very useful in photography to force the viewer to focus primarily on your subject while having the background just provide some color. For a landscape image, a photographer may use f/11 to make sure that a large portion of the image is in focus.
Well, that’s a basic primer and you can look it up some more if you’re really interested. However, in computer animation, we are not dealing with real lenses so we can have infinite depth of field; in other words, everything is in focus. This is awesome because you don’t have to worry about f-stops and all that (and in real life there’s a trade-off as f/11 lets in less light than f/2.8 so you need more lights) and can just count on everything being in focus. However, this is not realistic and so you may want to be able to emulate it. The most recent version of Blender has simplified doing this. By the way, Disney simulated this for the first time in a feature film in The Lion King when you first see the ants in focus and then the animals going to Simba’s birth ceremony.
I was having some problems doing this in Blender and it took me a little while to figure out what I was doing wrong so here are the steps. First, select your camera, go to Editing, and edit the depth of focus distance. You’ll want to turn on limits so you can see where this depth of focus is going. Then you need to go to the node editor. Add->Filter->Defocus Then connect image in “RenderLayer” to Image in “Defocus”. Connect Defocus’ output image to the input image of “Composite”. Connect Z from “RenderLayer” to Z in Defocus. Now if you render, it will look like nothing happened! What the heck?
You need to go to Scene then click “Do Composite” under the “Anim” tab. Now render and after the render it will apply the filter. Yay!
Here are some examples from “Sugar” - to get the full effect you may want to click to get the full size render.
here’s the normal scene:
and here it is simulating f/2.8 - a common large depth of field:
Now, obviously there’s some more tweaking which could be done because the f/2.8 render is a bit too blurry around the character’s outline. But those are optimizations that you have to figure out on your own. I’m anxious to get back to work on other things and I’m not sure if I’m going to return to this in the future, but at least I know it’s there and I know how to do it so that I can play with it when it will help the mood of the film.
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Aug
22
What makes mytoons.com so awesome is the fact that they truly do care about their users. Due to what I wrote about my experiences with my “Shrodinger’s Cat” video on their site, I’ve had their lead web support guy email me and we’re actively working on the problem right now. That and getting the comment on my blog from the President is pretty sweet. I’m very happy with this experience as it shows they truly care and are truly working towards having the best animation site on the net. It’s like being in involved in an open source project where they accept your constructive criticism as input towards improving the product instead of something that needs to be swept under the rug.
Views-wise, my videos are doing pretty well. They’ve got about 30-something views which is in line with other videos uploaded at approximately the same time.
Here’s a really great animation I found by a portuguese animator. It looks like it’s hand drawn, and if it is, that’s a pretty awesome accomplishment. It’s an abstract or conceptual animation - there isn’t a true plot, per se, but it’s pretty neat. Check it out:
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