This past summers participation in Googles Summer of Code has really revitalized the K-3D project to some degree. Especially with the realization that we1 need both more regular users as well as developers, to keep interest in the project alive and as a reason to continue development.
One of the suggestions was to create demos of K-3D as screeencasts. In my own experience a screencast tell me more about an application and the work flow than a screenshot or tutorial ever will. Over the previous week-end Joe Crawford2 really applied himself to the task and spent ten hours making this quite impressive introduction to K-3D.
My apologies for the poor quality. Google Video resized and transcoded the hell out of it while Joe’s original TechSmith video is razor sharp.
1 I haven’t contributed to the projects for years, but will again once I get my new workstation.
2Joe Crawford teaches 3D at VanArts in addition to running his own studio and serves as “superuser”-consult to the project.
I’ve just released PyFTGL which makes it possible to take advantage of FreeType and FTGL to render text in OpenGL program using TrueType, Type 1 or OpenType fonts. PyFTGL wraps the functionality of FTGL into a Python module so it can be used in conjunction with PyOpenGL.
Note that the bindings are still in alpha: they will work if you use them correctly, it’s just the error checking that’s currently missing.
I seriously don’t know how I could lived this long and used my Gentoo installation without enabling anti-alias for the rendering of fonts. For a long time I have admired Konqueror (or KHTML to be precise) for its beautiful renditions of web pages compared to Firefox, text rendering so soft and clear, thinking it was a KHTML thing. Turns out that all I had to do was to edit some files and restart X.
I can’t figure out why the PNG transparency wont apply to the artwork in my previous “Redesign Chronicle” when viewing the post in IE6 — despite the fact that I’m using Dean Edwards IE7 script and the files end in -trans.png. Arrrgh!
Update: I’ve cracked it! Turned out that it was the PNG files themselves. The illustrations were drawn with Inkscape as vector graphics (SVG to be precise) and rasterized as PNG with the softwares own bitmap exporter. However, Inkscape seem to produce PNG files that Internet Explorer doesn’t like and the transparency bugfix can’t do anything about. But the solution was simple: just open each PNG file in Gimp and re-save it. Of course, I could also have opened each SVG file in Gimp and saved the PNGs from there.
I wrote a simple header image rotator today to be able to substitute the boring blue “thing” with a 4th of July photo. The script is a variation on the header-img.php script included with the Kubrick 1.5 shipped with WordPress as default theme.
I must say that Wings 3d are THE polygon and subdivision mesh modeler. It have been on my radar a long time, but the trouble of getting Erlang and compile everything have put me off of trying out the software before. Wings 3d came up once again during our work on K-3D’s next generation user interface when Joe Crawford told me that its user interface is regarded as the best for modeling of all 3D software out there.
Finally, a couple of weeks ago when I was in desperate need for a texture mapped polygon model I sat down with the notion of really trying to learn how to use it. I must say that there are few programs like Wings 3d where you go from total newbie to create quite good models in less than an hour. Possibly some text editors were you at the end of the hour have authored the first chapter of your new novel, if you’re creative enough to write a novel. That’s what I think Wings is, it is to a 3d artist what a text editor is to an author.