GLFW, fast subsurface scattering, and SoC March 18, 2007

I’ve said before I’m crazy. Now I’m feeling worse… like something indescribably nuts. Here’s the lay low:

I planned originally on doing a recode/stabilization of verse for blender 2.44 and yet now I’ve seen that it’s more than likely out of my league. My plans now are to mess with sss since my computer graphics class requires me to anyways, and come up with a novel approach to solving the re-emittance of light through scattering under a surface and hopefully apply it within the constraints of a summer to blender. I think if I even get half-way done, it’d be more than awesome, so I’m gun-ho for attacking the challenge.

GLFW was recently suggested to me as a solution to threading problems I’ve had with GLUT (since GLUT and GL normally have a lot of funky behaviors normally enough, let alone with threads). I mostly want to throw out some threads and not worry about who does what, as long as only one is allowed to render and the others play fair with physics calculations. You simply can’t do that with GLUT. It wants only a specific context per thread (GL, as a matter of fact, requires that… not specifically GLUT… but GLUT doesn’t handle the problem). It looks like GLFW is developed by someone who wants just about the same stuff out of a computer as I do. Nimble… open… who cares as long as it works and it’s stable?

Yeah… I’m not a class AAA picture perfect programmer… but I’m going to get some junk done. I hope you’ll enjoy the updates as I continue to work on blender and ray-tracing and give you some reviews and tuts on using GLFW. At least, I hope I’ll manage to do that for you people. We’ll see.

So much to say… April 13, 2006

So much has happened. How I love people… how I’ve got more of my mental tricks down… dude… life is starting to rule! I mean, check this stuff out!

Deep Paint January 20, 2006

The free version of deep paint is just great (google “deep paint 2.0″). I swear, lots of stuff in that beast of a program. And free, I can hardly believe. Well, here’s an image that has a bunch of stuff in it (besides a fellow who clearly ate too much cookie dough last night):

Test sketchy and all November 18, 2005

Okay… let’s see if this sketch disappears

Sketchin’ like nutz November 16, 2005

Well, I admit… I was paintchatting instead of hitting up my new sketch project. I’ll just post some sketches in my older linup along with a sample from paint chat and call it a night. No point staying up too late when I have diff eq. classes tomorrow morn. Give me a sec to dig something up *rummages*

More gimp sketches November 14, 2005

I love gimp to death. Why? Because all I do is press F11 (perhaps you don’t have it configured that way… I dunno) and it goes to a wonderful full screen mode. That, and it has pressure sensitivity, but nothing too macho. Just a simple paint program, quick and simple. And I hate how photoshop and painter both have these huge screen real estate issues. If I want to put a photo next to a drawing for comparison, I have to import or paste or something. In gimp, I set the window right next to what I want to try to transfer… I dunno… it’s the way I work. And it’s terribly easy to make three different views of a thing you’re drawing, so you can see up close, the overall effect, and what the mask will do to the drawing. All at once. It probably doesn’t hold for anyone else. So, that said, here’s a huge load of other tablet sketches I made. I swear, I’m almost ready to buy tablets for my friends just so they too can sketch freely. Oh, and on the side: I think painter elements will be enough for me for now, but I admit I may buy painter IX. Why? There seem to be features that warrant respect. I like many of them. It’s very bloated, but then it has good stuff mixxed in.

I should make a small note here. While I mention copying from photos, unless stated otherwise, all this stuff came straight out of my head. Rarely do photos warrant a sketch… I mean, there’s already a pic, right? Some, however, inspire a lot more. Oh, and I take back what I said about the screen real estate. Looking at mac and linux, that’s clearly a windows issue.

A gimping we will go… November 13, 2005

Well then. I had another good sit down with Gimp. Scrawled a lot weird stuff… a lot. Made a creature that I’m not sure I should post, but above all, I liked one sketch especially. This, I titled “Still trying to breathe”

Paint Chat review November 13, 2005

Well then… forgive me if I’m wrong about this, but paint chat is only populated by a predominantly anime sketching crowd full of otakus and fan artists.

I want to be perfectly clear: I have nothing against that.

But I also want clear… I’m not exactly interested too much in that. I’ll admit that I do stuff like that, but I was hoping for a few paint chat sessions where people just outright did cartooning and sketching of every sort. I mean, there isn’t just anime to sketch, ya’ll. There is more in this world. It’s fun, I won’t deny it, but I just lost interest and usually ended up sketching my own thing in a little corner. What I’m going to try to do, though, is see if there are any places that just create events… like drawing insects or only hands and feet or planets… where you have a subject on paint chat.

I have to admit that paint chat is like any other chat client, therefore… there’s nothing really organized going on all too often unless you make a lot of friends and meet people who are interested. You just goof off, for the most part. While that’s fine and dandy, I was wanting a little bit more of a challenging atmosphere and more interactive and interesting.

You can do that, of course, but it takes a good deal of effort and really… so far I haven’t found any good way to find out when people are going to be on and are going to set up a paint chat session that’s difficult and teaches you some new sketchwork to use on your own and practice.

All in all, paint chat is plain crack. There’s nothing interesting in how you snort it… you just get addicted and keep going. I know I will. But that said, I won’t ever really put effort in to it because it won’t give me anything back. It’s chit chat. Titter tatter. Banter. Those have both good and bad connotations.

I’ll update this as appropriate and I’ll listen to any comments (assuming I don’t get fifty bajillion). Have fun, ya’ll

~Dude

OH! And another thing… if you want to know where to find paint chat, that’s half of the problem. Finding it. I have trouble still, but try 3dluvr and bellpipi in your google search. Just directly going to those sites doesn’t normally help in finding it, oddly enough. * shrug *

Paint Chat attack November 13, 2005

Well… yesterday I didn’t post anything. Why?

Paintchat

Now, I’ll make up for it today by releasing two of my works, but heck… paintchat is pretty plain addictive. The people are nice, fun, and creative. Of course… that was my first try at it. I’ll see if today it’s just as much fun. Expect for me to give a full out review of paintchat if I get more in to it, as well as deviant art, since I think now that I know I can get friends there, there’s no reason for me to not try getting in to the community. They’re such pleasant folks.

Give me a bit to dig up and reformat some sketches of mine. I’ll give out a decent sketch (for being late) and a gritty one… just because I have quite a few of them.

Ah! I got it! I’ll show you some chaoscope renders I’ll be working on sometime soon. I love that program.

Gimp and Blender… a beautiful pair November 11, 2005

Okie dokie. This’n is a biggun.

I animated a fluid simulation using blender (yes, blender now has fluid support, and GIMP easily makes gifs… especially when you install the GAP package)

Well, it might be wise to note that GAP 2.0 works on windows… GAP 2.2 doesn’t. No worries, as there aren’t too many amazing changes, and you’ll rarely need to use it. What I’d suggest you do is make sure you get GIMP 2.2 or later if you’re using windows, as it DOES have a lot of additions and niceties. If that is a word. Anyways, comment if you want me to post some links or some more info.

Finally, here’s a longer gif. It is smaller, but even then, it’s still rather big.