Macro Feature Rediscovered

I was playing around with the camera yesterday and re-discovered the macro option on my Canon Power Shot SD550. I got some quite unexpected results. You never know what you will get when you get up close to something. Like my biology class when I entered high school playing with the microscope was fun.

Some interesting things I discover from the naked eye flowers look great but some of the flowers in the slideshow you will see the flowers have some sort  of damage due to time, insects and weather.

Since I am using macro feature of the camera it gives of some times the effect of tilt shift for some picture which is cool. (more information on tilt shift check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt-shift_photography). The photography here is mostly macro photography which takes picture of small objects as opposed to tilt shift which is basically taking picture of large landscapes creating a illusion of small. for more information on Macro photography check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_photography. Anyways enjoy



By the way the pictures in the slideshow are Creative Common Licensed so use them for your personal use in every way you can think of. let me know what you do with them.

New Blogger Template Designer

While I was drafting the next blog yesterday I decided to tweak the template a little on blogger and found that the blogger just put in a new template designer removing the old template tab. I then found a the information on the Googleblog check it out here. I decided to update my blog design after I saw the templates. Let me know if you like it or not.

Edit: Forgot to mention that you will need to be http://draft.blogger.com to access this feature

Upcoming Projects

It has been a while since I blogged last. This has been due to a lot of work that I have been doing and planning as well. Here is the work I will doing and blogging. Also I will be soon be launching my YouTube Channel that will showing tutorials and showcasing my work online. Once the name is decided I will do a separate post for it with the details.

Support Factor - This will a series of posts about support. Basically every week I will be writing about what things you should consider on how to better support your online projects and work. Things to consider like what if something happens what you can look into. I will applying my experience here as I have been a support Technician for more than 10 years now and showing things may be you have never considered and some that you use that you might now have noticed as bad habits or good habits.

Front Yard Tree – I was trimming the front yard and then I started to work on the tree cleaned it up. I will show you what I did on the front yard. It will be about do's and don't's when working on such a project. This is a DIY project you might want to consider.

Intro Video for YouTube Channel – I will be starting a YouTube channel but I need an intro for the videos so I will be creating that and I will document the whole creation in Blender 2.5. I will post it on YouTube and provide you with the channel information.

Intro to Carving - This will be my way of introducing carving. My work flow on how I go on to design things as well what to look out for. One thing I will introduce is designing with and without computers.

Walking/Hiking Stick – From the tree trimming I got nice piece of stick that I will be using to carve out designs on for using as a hiking stick or walking stick. I will be doing a blog spot as well as a video. I think I will attempt to design it in blender 2.5 first and come up with something feasible in making as well as using it when done. This post and video will be needed to be done in parts as I continue to work on it.

Here is an small example of my work I will be showing an updated version of the same work during the intro to carving. These are all long term posts and may be covered over 2 or 3 posts and video. I should be able to post at these a little more regularly on this so keep track.




This was an elephant head was craved on a Medium-density fiberboard (MDF) of 3/4”.

Blender Benchmarks on Windows 7 64bit

To test how good my desktop was I did a render Benchmark with Blender this past weekend and got some interesting results. The Benchmark was done using blender 2.49 and new alpha 2.5.2 both found on the download page at the blender 3D website. I wanted to know what my new PC will tell me about blender and its performance so here is a test.

Desktop Configuration:

• Dell Studio XPS 9000
• Intel® Core™ i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache, 2.66GHz) X58 Architecture
  
• 12GB DDR3 SDRAM AT 1066MHZ-6X2GB,
  
• NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 260,RIOS
  
• 1.5TB SERIAL ATA 2, 7200 RPM,DIM,X
  
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
  

Blender File was taken from http://www.eofw.org/bench/

Blender Version 2.49 64 bit build at http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

Blender Version 2.5.2 64 bit build at http://www.blender.org/download/get-25-alpha/

The Render settings are as per the blend file states. Then I did rendering with 4 CPU threads and with Full 8 Threads of my CPU.

Here are the results in the Table and Chart for both blender 2.49 and 2.5.2.

	Render Times
CPU Threads	2.49 (hh:mm:ss.00)	2.5.2 (hh:mm:ss.00)
1	00:02:05.0	00:00:54.3
4	00:00:40.7	00:00:17.2
8	00:00:26.7	00:00:12.0

 

The table the and charts show 2.5.2 takes less time to render the same file with defaults or with added CPU Threads in rendering. Good news but how does the image rendered look like? Well, see for yourself below.

Rendered in Blender 3D 2.49

Available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/elephantatech/4562660929/

Rendered in Blender 3D 2.5.2

Available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/elephantatech/4562660959/

2.5.2 gives user better results than 2.49. It seems that the quality is similar to what we can get if you used LuxRender or Yafaray. Does that mean we no longer need install external renderers? Not quite actually as rendering goes it is not the only 3D aspect that blender does therefore it is not a complete solution as a good one. The external renderers give more options and give you results that can far exceed what blender can do since they are focused on rendering purely. So I am looking forward to when we get the Stable version of blender.

Whiteboard Creative Mess

So here I have my latest creation. The entire drawing was done between December 2009 and last week. Each time I passed the whiteboard in the office I added a stick figure. slowly it built up to something interesting. Enjoy the Flickr slideshow.





all the pictures are Creative Commons licensed Version 3.0 see Flickr page for details http://www.flickr.com/photos/elephantatech/sets/72157623858515341/show/with/4574366309/

Blender 3D Pictures Channel in Flickr

I just started my Blender 3D page with all the Images captured created in Blender 3d the application found at blender.org. Currently I only have some test images but they really show some kick ass stuff.



You can click on the slide show above to see the Flickr page.

Enjoy!

Moving leaves Illusion

moving leaves Illusion
Originally uploaded by elephantatech
Check out my latest work in Harmony web app (http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/) focus on the leaves and look at the in a circular motion around and away from the black spot and you will think the leaves are moving or flowing out of the black spot. This is also marked with creative common license click on the picture to see the flickr page for details

Handmade art

Check out some of my older work on my new set
mostly sketches I had made before




..

Flame application created in processing programing language

Here is another Flickr set I have created for an application called flame programmed in processing language. The web link is http://www.escapemotions.com/experiments/flame/#top check it out you will like it. he has some other stuck that are cool as well. please digg it if you like it

Flicker page link is here for the gallery below http://www.flickr.com/photos/elephantatech/sets/72157623771892554/with/4463053647/



Edited: Forgot to inform you this work is creative common licensed so you can download it and use it as you wish for personal use. if you post it on the web please let me know were I would like know where my work is being displayed


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.

Edited: Just Updated flame set with new pictures all with Creative Common License so you can download and use it as you wish for personal use.

HTML5 Application Harmony

People are now hearing about this HTML5. It said to be the next big thing on the web that will wow the people. well I have been wowed by a simple application Harmony at found at http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/. It is build purely on JavaScript and HTML5 so it work with Firefox and chrome fine. When you first go to the page it it has a blank white page with menu or control box on the top.

Screenshot 1

As you see the screen shot above not very impressive or wow like. Now try using it and you will be see something amazing things the brush does.  As I started using I was wondering what I can do with this so I ended creating some graphics. I could see this with a few more features becoming a huge thing. For example layers, blending, eraser tool, options to save file in more formats and obviously a lot more brushes or pens.

Since the code it under the MIT license which by the way is another open source license developed by MIT you can look at the license here if interested in it at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php. now how to get the source code click on about and there is a link for source code right there. Download it and you will be able to to use it like a desktop app if you wanted to or develop more options for it. I would like to think that this will develop to something awesome and powerful.

Flickr Slideshow for Harmony Collection