For the past 4 weeks, I’ve been hearing helicopters flying overhead. I finally went out to find out why. It turns out the county is logging the cliff side using helicopters. I’ll have to get a closer look when the weather turns better. I’ll snap a close-up then.
Month: April 2007
Video Camera with Ogre
I was browsing the Ogre Add-ons when I came across a [Web Camera plugin for Ogre]. Just one of the many cool features of things you can do with the Ogre library.
CEGUI Wiki
I can’t seem to find any documented information for CEGUI 5.0 that describes the properties that can be set for Layouts and Windows. Therefore, I have created a CEGUI Wiki page for [SetProperty].
Vertex Monkey
My import and export scripts were added to [VertexMonkey]!
Modo Import/Export Script (Ogre3d Mesh and Ogre3d Mesh XML)
As far as I’m concerned the top artists tools that I have access to are Modo, ZBrush, and Blender.
The only reason that I use Blender is that it has pretty good import and export scripts to Ogre. I’ve seen faces, normals, UVs, and bones export perfectly out of Blender. That said I can’t really model in Blender. The interface doesn’t like me. And I haven’t found very many video tutorials on Blender to describe all the things you can do with it.
http://blender.org
That said, ZBrush3 is coming out May 15th. I expect it’s going to be cool. However Pixologic probably won’t provide many details on their SDK, so I don’t expect an importer / exporter soon. They have awesome artists post video tutorials and they have a decent community. ZB2 only shows one viewport at a time, I don’t like that.
http://pixologic.com
And then there’s Modo. Probably not as well known as XSI. The Modo interface is plenty easy to pick up. Luxology has over 3GB of video tutorials on every aspect of the modeling tool and they give out the tutorials for free. Modo supports as many viewports as you want to add to your layouts.
http://luxology.com
I prefer viewing models in Modo, detailing in ZBrush, and exporting with Blender (only because I have to).
Anyway, I wanted to enhance my pipeline by importing/exporting to Ogre directly from Modo. I now have an import script that runs inside Modo that can handle verteces and faces. I plan to convert it to an exporter. You can follow my progress in this thread.
http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=16386
Ride in a Shoe
I think if I ever went on a hot air balloon ride, I would prefer to ride in a shoe.
Boost Libraries Conference 2007
If you plan on being in the Aspen, Colorado area, don’t miss the [Boost Libraries Conference] during May 14-18!
Over clocked XPS
April Snow
April 2 we awoke to a surprise inch of overnight snow.
Animation Sheet
Gimp has a [Layer Grid] plugin to handle slicing up an image into layers or converting layers into a grid. Simply copy layergrid.scm into the C:/Program Files/GIMP-2.0/share/gimp/2.0/scripts folder. The script can be executed from Scripts->LayerGrid… when an image is open.