See that raised arm-- I did that!

Mesh modelling with blender.

I have been playing around with the Creative Commons-licensed character "Proog" from the movie, Elephant's Dream. While I think the movie is hopelessly creepy, suffering from too much "student gloom", I am delighted that they have made available these scene files for folks to play with.

I got this file from a CD included in the August 2006 edition of 3D World magazine, in an article by Bassam Kurdali.

My dream is to turn this creepazoid into cartoony supers. We'll see if it's possible. Right now I'm pleased to make a solitary arm bend. I was also trying to make an extra flappy sag of fabric under the arm-- a gratuitous mesh edit-- but it didn't show up in the render.

Yet another soft body simulation in blender

Another soft body simulation in blender
Uploaded by pterandon

Here's another animation done with blender. I'm having fun playing with the soft body simulation in its physics section. The only problem is that I have so many things going on that I am seriously stressing my old clunky box with the "baking" of these simulations.

mancandy

A quick test render of the sample blender character file supplied by the Orange project. It's called mancandy, in honor of The Manchurian Candidate.

Blender Soft Body test

Blender is a great app-- I endeavor to learn as much as I can of it. It is not however an app you can just pick up and use right away-- the labelling of the controls are not the most intuitive.

Test post of listening history at last.fm

Blog housekeeping: removed NSFW link from "blogroll"

There was a blog that I stumbled across which at the time appeared to me to offer a theologically conservative Lutheran critique of fundamentalist nationalism. I wanted to stay in touch with this blog and endorse it by way of adding it to my blogroll. Just checking on it today, I saw that the blog at this address apparently had an entirely new theme, and it was Not Safe For Workplace viewing. I have removed it and apologize.

Ubuntu 6.06.1 Install Checklist

I have now installed kubuntu and xubuntu 6.06.1 (Dapper Drake), respectively, on two boxes I own. I am impressed with how well it worked. The install process sucessfully and automatically recognized a back-up hard disk drive that I had plugged in to the system, something neither SUSE nor Knoppix did as well for me. I hope that this blog posting can be a reference for newbies as to the things you'll most need to know. The following at least were the quirks of ubuntu which sent me to the forums looking for answers. Here's a list:

1. Root password. When you install ubuntu, you will set up a password for the primary user. This password will also, when you first boot up and until you make a change to it, be your root password.
2. Wireless. Wireless should work out of the box. If you have an encryption key set up for your system, check this post in the ubuntuforums for the most succint answer on how to set up your network interfaces file.
3. New software repositories.Most people are going to want to add new software other than the programs that come with it. Both times I installed ubuntu, I found myself googling until I found this piece of advice.
4. Flash. If you want to install the Flash player for your system, you first have to get firefox. (Do this using adept after following the advice in the previous bullet). Then go to some site with Flash content. It should give you a link to downloading the flashplayer-installer. Follow those directions. The only problem I found is that I had to type
   /bin/sh flashplayer-installer
   to start the installation process, the instructions that Adobe gave were not working with a fresh ubuntu install.

This list is neither comprehensive nor tabulated by someone who REALLY knows what he is doing, but it should nonetheless get you going to do what most computer users are interested in doing. Good luck.

Bono vs. the church

This past weekend, a Willow Creek Leadership Summit featured an interview between Bill Hybels and Bono. Hat tip to Jeremy Del Rio and the U2 Sermons blogs for eventually bringing this to my attention. My quote is ultimately from here.

Hybels: Why is the church so late to help in Africa?
Bono: "The church has historically been behind the curve...I think it's because the church is afraid of politics and I understand because all kinds of people have tried to use the church...but we're not about politics...that's what the ONE campaign is all about.

This has been my sociological gripe about the church. Late to the table in speaking on the fruits of original sin. But it's actually worse. Sometimes I feel there's two camps of Christians out there:

• Wavers of the flag of orthodoxy who are doing a fine job of holding to the tradition of the church historic-- the kinds of folks you want to run your kids' catechism class, but who have indifference and or sarcasm to the church speaking out "early" on things that touch the heart.
• Those who wear their heart on their sleeve, in being at the cutting edge of things like calling racism a sin long before it is acceptable to do so. They are the folks who in a sense perform an apologetic service to the church over the course of centuries. It is also the case when they say, "Conservatives worship at the graves of dead liberals," they are talking abou these folks. However, too many in this camp are the last ones you'd want to teach the fundamentals of the faith.

I should stress that not every person in one camp is a cruel meanie nor is every person in the other a flaming heretic, but the trends are there. Ask Bono! You might say that one camp needs their hearts in the right place and one has their heads in the right place. I say they need each other and the church needs both of them.

Buddy icon, in colored ASCII, courtesy of Toogle.

Enter a text here at Toogle, and you'll be able to see a google image search item displayed as ASCII.


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