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!

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!

Recently, we were asked to create a logo for the very cool open source Flash video player, FlowPlayer. We actually use FlowPlayer in our animation portfolio, so we were glad to work on this and honored that the program’s developer, Anssi Piirainen would want us to create one. We were essentially given free reign and had a blast coming up with ideas. Seeing as how we had such a good time, we figured we’d share some of the process on what went into creating the logo.

To start, we took some of the direction we’d gotten and started brainstorming. The idea was to emphasize the idea of liquid as it relates to the program’s name and the idea of involving a fish was suggested. Based on that and some of the illustration work we did for our Firefox Flicks entry last year, the three of us came up with the notion of using a fish coming out of jack-in-the-box. Being the resident illustrator in the group, Warren did all of the pencil and inking work on the fish and the jack-in-the-box. With the logo completed, we played with a handful of color combinations, ultimately landing on Roberto’s blue/green combination.

While Warren and Roberto got the main part of the logo worked out, I played with an idea for something to be used while loading video in the player and for use when the player is set in fullscreen mode. Keeping with the idea of ‘flow’, we settled on the painted enso symbol used in Japanese Zen paintings. This graphic was sent along with the finalized fish for approval from FlowPlayer’s developer.

We were quite pleased to hear that he enjoyed it, so we set to finalizing the logo and incorporating the text. To do this, we traced the fish in Inkscape to get an easily resized vector graphic. The enso graphic was already created in Inkscape, so that portion was ready to go. After a bit of color tweaking, we were able to incorporate the enso symbol with the text to tie the enso and fish graphics together (point of note, the first and most obvious choice for the enso’s location was as the ‘o’ in FlowPlayer, but it didn’t connect the word well and it didn’t match the font weight very well). That took a fair amount of tweaking and back-and-forth critique amongst the three of us, but ultimately we landed on something we could all agree upon.

Good thing for us: Anssi likes it as much as we do. We actually have one more step to do in order to really finish it, and the good news (for me) is that this will involve a little bit of animation. Stay tuned and we’ll post an in-depth description of that process as well. In the meantime, go check out FlowPlayer. It’s an excellent addition to any website that needs to play Flash video and it’s open source, distributed under the Apache License. We’ve found great use for it and certainly recommend it for anyone wanting to use it in their own website.

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.

Wheeeeee!