Speaking of websites, to go with the book, I’ve prepared a companion website with a whole heap of content – including images, GIMP files, and at least one python script – that you can use while going through the book. In the coming weeks, I’ll also be producing some video tutorials to accompany the book as well. You find all of that stuff on the companion site at www.gimpbible.com. Also, if you happen to stumble across an error in the book, send me a message and I’ll update an errata page for that chapter so everyone can stay up-to-date.

That’s about it… I’m pretty excited. This is my second book and it’s almost twice as long as my first. It was an intense project and I’m eager to find out what other folks think about it. Oh… also, I have to put out some big thanks on this book. Rob Shimonski, my co-author for GIMP Bible, did an incredible amount of work in a short period of time. I’m also honored that Melody Smith and Chris Hoyer provided me with a veritable library of photographs to use in my example figures throughout the book. Although you can see some of it on gimpbible.com, you really should check out their websites for examples of their excellent work. I also need to thank David Revoy, Tina Keller, and Rennett Stowe for the images of theirs that I also used in the book. Happy reading. Feedback welcome!

And I’m not done. I’ll probably be migrating my gallery from Gallery2 (using the WPG2 plug-in for WordPress) to the NextGen gallery, since it integrates more cleanly. Of course, that’ll take quite a bit more time, so I’ll be backburnering that for a while still.

Wheeee!

• Wednesday, 17 June, 7-9 PM: I will be giving a talk on Blender at DCLUG, the Washington, D.C. Linux User Group. If you were able to make it out to my NOVALUG talk last month, it’s going to be pretty similar to that. To find out more about where the LUG meeting is being held, check out the DCLUG website. It should be fun times all around. I’m driving up from Richmond, so you should be there too!
• Friday, 19 June, 6-8 PM: This one still turns my brain inside out. I actually have a book signing (really? yeah… weird, ain’t it?) for my book, Blender For Dummies. It’s going to be at the Barnes and Noble located at Chesterfield Towne Center mall, south of Richmond, VA. Come on out and say hello, hang out, point and laugh at me… maybe even buy a book. Really, is there any other way to spend a Friday evening?

So yeah, there you have it. I have a talk on Wednesday and a book signing (really?) on Friday. If you’re not lame, you’ll show up to at least one of these.

And now… we’re back! The entire team from last year has agreed to return and we’ve even got a few more added to the mix. The event will take place on the weekend of July 17th. It’s going to be ridiculous and crazy and coffee-filled and awesome. I can’t wait.

I have a good reason for not posting more often. I’ve been writing a book. Specifically, I finished writing Blender For Dummies about a month ago. Woohoo! Now, for those of you who don’t know, Blender is a free and open source program for creating 3D animations and it’s what I use on a daily basis for the work I do. It’s totally sweet and definitely worth playing with.

The book is scheduled to ship in late January and is available for pre-0rder on Amazon now. Weird… I’m an author. That’s just crazy

Of course, the funny thing is that because I tried to keep the content of that article restricted to only information that’s relevant to the Blender community, I didn’t include cool little tidbits like the fact that my hotel had a Krispy Kreme inside it! And not just some dinky kiosk; they had the fresh donut conveyor and the infamous hot light! You better believe I had donuts every day.

But this show is probably the largest conference I’ve been to, to date. There were lots of interesting people to meet… and I was only to meet a few. Some notable people include the directors of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who, Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino of Blue Sky Studios (as I mention in the article), as well as Andy Milonakis and Harry Shearer who have shows on MyDamnChannel.com (BTW, if you haven’t seen the You Suck at Photoshop series yet… you should). I got to meet quite a few independent producers and production people, including Johann Dawes and Terrick (please forgive me, I never got his last name… or the proper spelling for his first name), both from Jamaica. The former is the Executive Director of Hype! TV, a Jamaican music and entertainment station and the latter is a “swiss army knife” of production, focusing primarily on music videos. Hell, even Chuck D made an appearance.

Oh… and does anyone have a couple thousand dollars to spare? I made the mistake of visiting Wacom’s booth and now I want a Cintiq… badly.

Wheeeeee!

We’ll start this with a YouTube video featuring musical tesla coils playing a tune from Super Mario Brothers. There are no speakers used in it; it’s literally a laptop PC that’s outputting a MIDI channel to each coil, which, in turn, play the respective notes back… with bursts of electricity that have noise levels around 110 dB! (direct link here, if the embedded video doesn’t load)

Following that, here’s a set of very intricately carved pencils. I cannot read any of the text on the site (curse my non-multilingual background!), but I think “awesome” is a universally understood concept. I want to try doing this.

Now for this one… I first saw this on Slashdot a few days ago and then, just yesterday, BoingBoingTV did a story on it. It’s a new nerdy competitive sport: Speedcabling! That’s right, IT geeks compete at untangling Ethernet cables that have been knotted and placed in a dryer for 30 seconds. The prize? Why, it’s a $50 gift certificate to a local Italian restaurant (spaghetti, anyone?). Check the Slashdot and BoingBoing links for photos and video.

And you guys know that the Writer’s Guild has ended their strike, right? Well, apparently not everyone is pleased with the tentative agreement that’s been made. Harlan Ellison, in particular, minced no words in giving his opinion on the matter (link is to a repost on Warren Ellis’ blog). A choice quote:

You are their bitches. They outslugged you, outthought you, outmaneuvered you; and in the end you ripped off your pants, painted yer asses blue, and said yes sir, may I have another.

And I’ll leave you with this little bit of the oncoming future (yeah, the article was posted a month ago, but some folks still haven’t heard about this). The University of Washington has developed biologically safe contact lenses which incorporate integrated circuits and lights. They don’t currently have anything wired to them or powering them, but this is a huge step forward toward the possibility of having a heads-up display directly in our vision… or enhanced vision. Think about it like a removable bionic eye and marvel at the fact that we do indeed live in the future!


Alright… back to work I go!

This is an important step in improving the quality of Blender training as well as providing more of a professional presence for Blender in the computer graphics and animation industries. It’s exciting times, I tell you.

We took quite a bit of time to finalize the evaluation criteria for certification applicants. Since there are no real training centers and our review board is international, it was a particularly interesting challenge. The entire process has to be managed over the Internet, so it’s somewhat difficult to issue in-person tests or interviews as you might be familiar with in other certification programs. As the Blender education community grows, we may be able to do that in the future, but in the meantime, we had to find other ways to validate an applicant’s qualifications. Hopefully what we’ve landed on will work well. On the anniversary of this launch, we’ll evaluate how things have gone and try to make any necessary changes. I really hope that the program proves to be a success.

As a bonus, all of the members of the certification review board are officially recognized as Certified Blender trainers. Woohoo! I’m Certifiable!

I brought a camera with me, but I’m particularly horrible at remembering to actually use it.  Hopefully today I’ll recall that I have it and make it a point to snap one or two really quick shots.

Wheeee!

Recently, we (Hand Turkey, that is) finished creating a logo for the developer of FlowPlayer. FlowPlayer really is quite sweet. It’s a Flash video player that you can embed in your website to play FLV files (and high quality h.264 files once Adobe releases a new version of their Flash player). And the best thing about it? It’s open source. I actually talked about it a little bit before on sheep-dot. At any rate, this is going to be a bit redundant on sheep-dot, but if you’re curious about the process we went through to create this logo, we’ve made a nice detailed post.

Go check it out… and check out FlowPlayer!

Okay, so it’s a short review, but it certainly makes me feel good to see it in an international magazine like 3D World.

32GB on an SD card – Toshiba announced late last month that they are able to produce a high capacity SD card that will hold 32GB (that’s right, thirty-two GIGAbytes) of data. Granted the cards are slated to cost £350 (roughly $709, according to my handy internet current exchange website), so they’re by no means cheap. But, they plan on releasing it as soon as January of next year, so hopefully it will get cheaper as the year goes on.

Universal “Racetrack Memory” – Speaking of massive data storage… This is probably 5 years off or so, but a researcher at IBM named Stuart Parkin (the same Stuart Parkin responsible for huge leaps in storage capacity not too long ago) is developing a technology referred to as “racetrack memory” which may increase data storage capacities another 10 to 100 times. And it currently reads and writes in just 1 nanosecond! The best part is that it could be used to replace both traditional hard drives as well as flash drives. It’s too early to guarantee that it will work for mass fabrication, but the prospect is very promising.

Mind-reading Wheelchair – Now this is just cool. Granted, it’s not really mind reading, per se. This wheelchair has electrodes that stick to the surface of your skin near your throat. When you think of saying a word, it reads the nerve signals going to your larynx and translates that into movement. Eventually, this might even be able to have use in synthesizing speech for some people!

Blender Stuff

The main reason I was at SIGGRAPH (aside from seeing cool stuff, learning new things, and meeting more people interested in computer graphics) was primarily Blender-related. I was presenting a 15-minute QuickTake on Red Hat High for the Educators Program. After showing the excellent student work from the 3D animation track and talking about where the program is headed, I got some very good feedback from teachers interested in finding out more. It was great to see legitimate interest from the educational community in growing this program.

But that wasn’t the only Blender thing going on. At the Blender Artist Showcase BoF, I showed off some of Hand Turkey’s work (via a sadly slow network connection) as well as the Blender SIGGRAPH Demo Reel. Also on hand to show work were Bassam Kurdali, Lee Salvemini, Roland Hess, and Erwin Coumins. Erwin’s presentation was particularly interesting as he talked about improving Blender’s rigid body physics engine with better ragdoll support and tighter integration with the other physical simulation systems in Blender.

At the earlier Blender Foundation BoF, Ton Roosendaal talked about Blender’s development and future, including things like the upcoming event system refactor, the Peach and Apricot projects, and the Blender Institute. We also had a Blender pod set up in the Khronos booth on the exhibition floor. At any point during the day, you could see a variety of Blender folks giving demos. I had to make it a point to shake Nils Thuerey’s hand, because without his work programming Blender’s fluid simulator, I couldn’t have made the tutorial DVD on it. He was at SIGGRAPH sharing his continuing research on fluid simulation, some of which was on display in the Animation Festival.

Emerging Technologies

The really cool thing that I always enjoy about SIGGRAPH, though, is the Emerging Technologies section, and it would be remiss of me not to talk about all the sweet new tech I saw. A couple highlights include Grimage (a device that instantaneously models and textures any object placed in its interaction space in real-time), Gravity Grabber (a haptic device that allows users to feel virtual weight in their hands), and the very cool Transparent Cockpit (a novel way of eliminating blind spots in cars).

However, the most interesting (and frightening) exhibit in Emerging Technologies had to be the Saccade-Based Display. This thing works like those novelty clocks that swing a wand of LEDs to show the time floating in mid-air, except in this case your head moves instead of the wand and the display is in full color and six feet tall. The image only shows while your head turns. It legitimately had me questioning my sanity for nearly ten minutes before I discovered what was going on.

Electronic Theater

Each year, I come away from SIGGRAPH with something I can only describe as “inspired depression,” and this is due in large part to the work shown in the Electronic Theater. This year was no exception. The show was a bit heavy on special effects demos and commercial work. However, there were some great standouts in the animated shorts including Pixar’s Lifted, Blur’s A Gentleman’s Duel, Blue Sky’s No Time for Nuts, Platige’s Ark, and The Mill’s Raymond. Truly inspiring stuff.

Next Year

So what’s in store for SIGGRAPH 2008? I predict big things for Blender. For one, the Peach project animation should be released by then. And Blender will most certainly have a bevy of new developments to show off. Perhaps some other cool things could happen, too: another Open Source Pavilion? a Blender course? a Hand Turkey presence in FJORG!? an animated short by Hand Turkey Studios? Only time will tell. One thing is certain, though: I’m going to be there to soak it in… and you should be, too.