Blender 2.8 is out! I'm sorry I missed the Blender user group for the first time in years. Monday was super overlapped with Blender, Unreal Engine and the Electronic Theater all scheduled at the same times. But, I could tell there is a ton of excitement around Blender. It's been great to see the pro...
Blog
Notes on ongoing projects — builds, experiments, and things I'm learning.
In order for VR to take off there really needs to be a low barrier to entry, both on the side of the creator and the viewer. A-Frame is a great framework to create VR interactions, and the web is the preferred standard. There are too many walled gardens from Oculus, Steam and others already. Let's...
3D modeling is a very time consuming task. It is a mix of artistry and a ton of grunt labor. Certainly with today's technology there should be a way to scan a scene and generate usable 3D geometry. I say usable because we have all scene Guardians of the Galaxy and the point cloud capture. I have a L...
I have been doing a number of projects related to RGB LED control. The LED strips are fairly inexpensive and great for all sorts of lighting needs. Previously I used an Arduino to directly control the lights, but I'm looking for something a little more standalone.
I purchased a TC420 LED Controll...
I made some updates to my lab setup this weekend. I've been meaning to get my VPN working to connect my iphone photos to my own FreeNAS. Of course that started a bunch of wheels in motion as often happens.
- Install Ubiqiti VPN gateway
- Update FreeNAS to 11 because GUI (but also VMs)
- Get Nextcloud co...
Today's VR headsets need a pretty cutting edge graphics card. The Occulus hardware specs continue to evolve, but basically you need a high end gaming card like a GTX1080Ti for decent playback. This is problematic for a mobile solution as many laptops don't have this level of graphics. There are a...
There was so much good tech at this year's SIGGRAPH in Vancouver. The first thing project I wanted to talk about is AliceVision. My background as a photographer makes me very interested in bringing real world objects into the virtual world as accurately and quickly as possible. I imagine a day whe...
OK so what is this ground breaking technology that is more than one hundred years old? It's known as the Pepper's Ghost illusion or Pepper's Pyramid. This idea was first laid out by John Henry Pepper in 1862 and recently got some attention when it was used to resurrect Tupac Shakur from the grave. Y...
A simple task for today, make an animating text logo where the letters individually rotate. There's not a way to control this in Blender so I had been using Fusion which makes it real easy. Then I stumbled upon Animation Nodes! This is one of those Blender plugins that opens up a completely new ar...
I was brainstorming on a project that requires an eye catching way to demonstrate machine statistics. I wanted to jot some notes on my thinking method during this phase of a design. Basically, I want to open up any and all possibilities unhampered by what's possible. I ask, "What's the coolest thing...
Updated my FreeNAS server.
[root@freenas] /mnt/data2# sysctl hw.machine hw.ncpu hw.model
hw.machine: amd64
hw.ncpu: 8
hw.model: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz
[root@freenas] /mnt/data2# sysctl hw.physmem
hw.physmem: 34213445632
Run some basic iozone tests to see what we can ge...
I received a batch of connectors from chargeconverter.com. There are 30 pins on the Herobus, it would be great if I didn't have to connect all of them because they are tiny! The BacPac extender cables worked for everything except what I believe is sync. I was able to control the grouped cameras, I w...