A hand in blender!

Ouch! No, not that kind of blender. The blender 3d application.

This one is based on following Peter Ratner's "Modeling a Human: Part 5: Modeling Male and Female Hands" from issue 18 of HDRI 3D Magazine. This link does not take you to an online version of the tute, I had to buy a paper copy of the magazine to get it.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright's controversial 9/11 sermon

I haven't heard the whole thing yet, but there's so much buzz about this sermon that I thought I could do a service by helping spread the word about it.


powered by ODEO

An open-source movie

Here's the trailer to a movie that is being made in free, open source software and will be available for distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution license.


Big Buck Bunny - Official Trailer from Andy Goralczyk on Vimeo.

Mancandy blender figures finally come together.

Here's a tip on how to add characters to blender. I bought the "Mancandy FAQ" DVD tutorial. In that DVD, it is suggested that the best way to add a Mancandy figure to a scene is a method that I don't even think works! They tell you to go "File", "Append or Link", then "Link" the character from the "Group" in the mancandy file, then, "Add" a "Group" of mancandy. This does not yield a posable figure, as far as I can see.

A way that DOES work is to simply "File" "Append or Link" and then "Append" the file. You will have a working mancandy figure, if you simply realize that the mesh and the armatures are on layers 2 and 12.

If that sounds too confusing, simply look at the two embedded youtube videos. The first one works and the second method does not.

Appending a mancandy works!


Adding a linked group doesn't work.

Obama's speech on race.

Heard a lot of folks talking about it.

Disturbingly graphic video of beef slaughterhouse.

There's been some buzz about this video from a slaughterhouse. Apparently some schools canceled beef contracts with this supplier over it.

This issue for me raises an issue of the moral sufficiency of the marketplace. The slaughterhouse engaged in wanton cruelty, that's for sure. And everyone was buying their meat. But does that mean the marketplace encouraged this activity-- that the market provided incentives for those houses who would take any kind of animal, no matter how sick? OR does the marketplace also include the schoolkids who see this video and demand that they stop buying the beef? That's the rub. When libertarian activists say they want the marketplace to solve the problems, I think they mean that everyone should just leave big business alone, and turn off their moral judgment in choosing products. But that's not how the marketplace REALLY works.

Not originally intended to be so creepy

I was playing around with ways of modeling a head from a subdivided cube, and then extruding faces to make eyeholes or mouths. I think combined a "mist" with a toon edge detection method. No, I really don't know what I'm doing here yet!

Fattened mancandy waves to ya!

I took the Mancandy model which is freely available for blender. I opened the file. Selected the body. Went to edit mode. Hit Alt-S to scale along normals. Then Added a Shape to save this new mesh as a shape.

Voila! I'm not sure what the practical purposes of such would ever be, but I thought it was pretty cool that I could do this! Thanks to PapaSmurf on the blenderartist forums for pointers.

Pete Seeger's soteriology

"My Father's mansion has many rooms,
with room for all his children,
as long as we do share his love,
and see that all are free.
and see that all are free to grow,
and see that all are free to know,
and free to open or to close
the door of their own room."

Pete Seeger, "My Father's Mansion Has Many Rooms", Pete Seeger: Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

Yikes! Who could be saved under such a scheme?! I just heard this song recently. At first it sounds like some kind of everybody-goes-to-heaven scheme. Then there are limits, Then there are big limits, big burdens. Burdens so big I would imagine that any living of "an examined life" would send shudders down one's spine if this were the actual criteria for salvation. Where is the room to fail? Where is room for grace? Where is the final forgiveness of those who didn't even try all those good deeds?

My point is that liberal theologies dreamed up to replace traditional Christian theology often aren't any nicer or compassionate.

Superimposing 3D characters on photos

I was thinking about brushing off my online comic and producing some more images. One thing that I was thinking about was a simpler way to make it. I was reading a book about digital comics and saw a mention of the use of layers. So I rendered a character on a white background, and then pasted it onto a beach scene. I don't think I have found any magic formula yet. The biggest problem was the white or aliased border around the character. I tried rendering with a really large number of pixels, doing a color select, and then shrinking it by one pixel. I'm beginning to wonder if that would eventually save any effort in the long run.

One thing that frustrated the use of povray in making an online comic was that I was spending too much time fiddling with the camera in order to get all the figures into the scene. Still thinking.