Author: tim

Investigation

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.

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

http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=216011#216011

Beef Up Your Wireless Router

Josh Kuo posted an interesting [blog entry] describing the open source project [OpenWrt] and then he details a list of Linux services that protect the network. OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for embedded devices. Essentially I plan to use this to load extra usb drivers in my wireless print server to load two 500GB iBooks. That way I can have a wireless-mirrored storage system to keep all my files safe. I should also be able to load drivers for a wireless usb quick cam and possibly drivers for a scanner. Maybe even drivers for a USB hub could be loaded. If that happens I can connect more than two devices to my Netgear wireless print server.

Intel Game Demo Contest 2007 (May 5th-August 15th)

“Contest begins March 5th, 2007. Registration Forms must be received by July 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007. Community judging to determine finalists will begin July 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007 and run until August 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007. Executables of finalists must be received by August 15th, 3:00pm PST 2007. Winners will be announced at Austin Game Developer Conference on September 5th, 2007, and published on the contest website the same day.”

Visit the [2007 Official Rules ].