Inkscape. Vectorize for free and without too much pain

A great friend and coworker drew my south park caricature. It was a hand drawing so I scanned and get a dirty grey-scale image, not to nice. So to get something cleaner I realized that I will need to vectorize the image. To do so I was looking for some freeware and I found Inkscape. This open-source software is surprisingly great and the vectorizing tool is awesome for someone like me that was facing this problem for the first time. So in the following lines, I will briefly document how to vectorize a bitmap using Inkscape and the help of The Gimp.

Modelling (II). Playing with subdivision surfaces.

The main idea behind modelling using subdivision surfaces is to create simple geometry that after applying a smoothing algorithm like Catmull-Clark or Loop it finally gets its smoothed and final shape. This way you model the low resolution mesh and you get the higher resolution meshes applying different levels of this smoothing modifiers.

The main problem is that this smoothing algorithms will smooth at all cost and you sometime want to keep several edges chamfered but hard. One way to do this is creating bound edges around the edges you want to be hard.

3dsmax Modelling (I). Using Image references

One interesting technique to model real things, is to use pictures of this real things as a reference and place them in our modelling software so we can do the blocking of the model based on that visual information. Here I will describe step by step how to do it using 3dsmax. Thanks to Ramón for all the help.

Mundos Digitales 2008 (I). Beowulf y la pirámide del valor.

Tuve la suerte de poder asistir a la edición de este año de MundosDigitales, festival de la industria del 3D que se celebra anualmente en La Coruña y que reune a personas de la mayoría de los estudios de animación nacionales y parte de Europa. Es un encuentro muy agradable donde asistir a conferencias sobre este mundillo y hacer amigos del sector.

Para no olvidarme de las conferencias que considero que más me han gustado, voy a llevar a cabo unos cuantos post en que describiré varias ponencias de Mundos Digitales 08 de forma desenfadada y con bastantes aportaciones personales (quién avisa no es traidor),

[Post in spanish because I feel more comfortable using my native language and I don´t have too much time to translate this in english. Content just for spaniards sorry.]

EL CAMBIANTE MUNDO DEL PIPELINE EN EL CINE
Sebastian "Beowulf carnosico" Sylwan

MrPotato Indiana Jones

Incredible, people from Playskool knows what I need, they have already released the new MrPotato Indiana Jones, with integrated sound in the hat. So I can get rid of the useless Indiana Jones soundtrack emitter and replace it with my voice synthetizer :D. Now I only need some spare time.

I agree it´s not very friendly, it´s a kind of ugly, but it´s a MrPotato c´mon and if you press on the hat you will get some music, isn´t it cute?. During this summer holidays I need to be working on that defenitely. MrPotato v.3 is about to come. Muhahahaha

Arduino Contest 2008

The company that is currently distributing Arduino in Spain, Libelium, organized 2 months ago an Arduino Contest. And I force myself to compete with something. I decided to improve my first MrPotato Robot adding voice, led eyes a thermometer, and of course using the new MrPotato Maximus Prime. It took a great effort, I finished the hardware stage, but I couldn't end the software one. Anyway, I sent it to the contest, competing in the Art Hack section.

4 Windows must-have Tools

Developing SysAdmin task on Windows Operating System seems to be a kind of hard, not anymore if you are properly equiped. Here I recommend a set of cool tools to make your Windows usage&control experience easy peasy.

• Windirstat


• Autoruns


• Procmon


• ProcExplorer

CmdHere. Console directory navigaton... Forget it

Some coworker told me that there was a way to navigate your filesystem using the windows explorer and opening a windows console from there. And today I found some time to search the solucion. CmdHere.

If you are using Windows Vista, the CmdHere is a builting feature. The only thing you need to do from your windows explorer is to Shift+Right Click at the directory and choose from the context menu option open command prompt here. For more details, MaximumPcguides

Groupie, groupie!!

Let's give this blog a little bit of color. Here I want to share with you my Conchita's Signed CD. A friend of mine, (Mrs. Andrew), has contacts in the VIP world, and gathered this for me. I'm pretty excited, I'm not sure how much time it will last. Anyway here I add a brush of eccentricity to this blog.

FusionCharts. Cool flash charts with a free distribution

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.boundingbox.es/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/fcf_mscolumn2dlinedy.swf" height="300" width="600" fvars=" dataURL= http://www.boundingbox.es/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/temperature_080321.xml ; chartWidth = 600 ; chartHeight = 300"/]
fcf_mscolumn2dlinedy.swf
temperature_080321.xml

I have to admit that I wasn´t very proud of my matplotlib code to represent the temperature values I was gathering with Arduino. It was pretty complex, and too slow. Meanwhile I´ve been facing several issues that requires data representation and searching for alternatives I came across a nice solution, flash charts. I found two projects, one open source, Open Flash Charts, and another commercial, but with a free distribution, FusionCharts

libgmail. Python binding for Google's Gmail service

I´ve spent some time thinking how to backup the data I´m currently storing in my linux server. First of all, I faced the problem of coding the script to backup and then configuring the cron services to execute it daily. When all was working I had to decide where to put those backup files, because leaving them in the server hard disk wasn´t a solution. So I bought an USB hard disk and from time to time I move the backup files there. I was more or less happy with the solution. But some months ago I talk to a friend and co-worker who was starting to use a gmail account as a backup storage. I thought that was a great idea so I started to find a python library that helps me to send all my backups to my auxiliary gmail account, and I found it, libgmail .

OOOLIB. Python module to create procedural spreadsheets

At the beginning of this year I decided to take control of my expenses. To do so, I wanted to automate this annoying task as much as possible, to be aware of my expenses without spending too much time. I started gathering data from my bank using the Norma43 format, then adding this info to a database and so on. After all this, I needed to create reports, and I thought that OpenOffice spreadsheets could be a great place to store them.

To create your procedural spreadsheets you can use csv(coma separated value) files, but you loose the ability to set format configurations like font color, column width and so on. With the ooolib, you can use Python to to create procedural OpenOffice spreadsheets easily and without pain. It doesn´t support all the format options you have in Calc, but the main ones. Definitely enough for me.

Tune your iTouch

The iTouch as it is after you buy it doesn´t worth the money it cost, but after some work tunning it, this nice device begins to blossom. But keep something in mind, without wifi connection to internet your iTouch won´t evolve.