Loklo Media 3D Animation Blog

I figured out how to grow curves, and essentially how to achieve a handwriting effect in Blender 2.54 using the build modifier.

Watch the video to learn the very simple technique. (watch in 720p HD for best quality – it was recorded at close to that resolution).

If you found this tutorial useful, consider donating so I can make more!

So, I guess I should let my blog readers know that Loklo Media has now officially upgraded to Autodesk’s 3DS Max Design 2011.  I use this daily, as well as Blender (right now more in Max than in Blender though).  It was a hefty upgrade, as most Autodesk Software is, but I expect a fairly quick return on the investment.  The inclusion of Quicksilver renderer, which I haven’t really delved into yet, as well as Composite (formerly Toxik) made this more appealing to me.  I still use the old material editor, as I haven’t taken the time to learn the efficiencies of the new Slate editor.

(For anyone who knows Max, knows that you can customize the splash.bmp startup screen.  the image above is a screenshot… too lazy to go into that retarded Local Settings folder..\..\..\..)

I’ve also started teaching myself the basics of Composite, which is similar to Blender’s built-in Compositor.  I don’t have much compositing experience at all, and thought that this knowledge could make for some interesting projects and open some more doors.

Anyway, just thought I’d let you know.  Of course you can get your own free trial (or buy), if you don’t already have it by clicking the banner below.  The trial is a hefty download, though – don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Building your own workstation is a very fun and good thing to do. It can be challenging if you’re on a budget, especially if you’re just starting out and don’t have any existing cash flow, or an idea of earnings to offset the cost of a machine.

Here are my 11 recommendations: Read the rest of this entry →

Ever had a new website where you wanted to get a lot of traffic to it in a very short amount of time, without needing to wait for search engine spiders, building up backlinks, etc, and waiting, and checking stats, and waiting, and checking, etc etc

I’ve found a tool which will allow you to send an email to thousands of people within the topic/market of your website.  Maybe your promoting a new sale or service, or you need to spread the word about a new product, or a warning?  Imagine sending your link to thousands, tens of thousands, or even email several hundred thousand people – typically for less than 100.  Have you ever run PPC (pay per click) ads (like Google Adwords)?  Then you know how much it would cost to have even 10000 clicks.

This tool, which is a special directory of different e-zine publishers, will give you that access.  You can search for whatever topic or market you are interested in promoting, search for publishers with what are called “Solo” ads – these are where you can create your own email, and it will be sent ‘solo’ – without being a part of another email.  That email ‘solo’ ad then gets delivered to their entire subscriber list.  Some maybe only have 20-30,000 subscribers, and I’ve seen some with 800,000 or more!  Wow!  Even if only 1% (8000) click on your link, that’s pretty good traffic!

What I would do?  Sign up for membership to this directory (around $200), set up your site – WITH social bookmarking features built-in.  Make it easy for people to share what they found with their friends.  Do some basic SEO to get a couple backlinks, then create your email ad to send to the list.  (Oh, you’ll want to make sure you can track either your link, or actual traffic to your page.  I use google analytics).

That’s it!  Rinse and repeat a couple more times on some different sites, or offer it as a service to your clients (to recoup the 200 + ad fee – which should easily be done with the first email), then keep reaping that traffic.  And remember… it’s fairly targeted, as you pick a list which is relevant to your site!  It can’t get any better than that.

So – Check out the Directory, and start getting some traffic.  I am, and will report back shortly with some graphs and stats.

So I started playing with IE9 beta today. I wasn’t really a fan of the preview tools (platform previews) that MS provided previously – so now that there is a beta, I’ll use it and abuse it. (In fact, It’s already crashed twice on me.. more on that in the pics)

First some background – My main workstation is currently Vista Home Premium x64 with 6gb Ram, FirePro v4800 1GB GPU, Intel q9550 quad core overclocked at 8×400=3.2GHz. Internet Explorer 9 will not work on Windows XP. Period. (except through a vista/7 VM of course).

I couldn’t even get it to work on my Vista machine – it wouldn’t install. Or at least that’s what I assumed. After leaving it for several hours (I don’t really know how long, as I wasn’t there), when I came back it told me to install an update (which it provided a link to the relevant KB) (Why it couldn’t do it automatically like Windows Update is able to is beyond me). So – if you try to install the Beta, and it seems to hang during the “downloading required updates” portion – that’s likely why.

So I installed the update. Then started the IE9 installation procedure again – at which time it seemed to hang again during the “Installing” (downloading more IE9 files) step, then after leaving it for several minutes (maybe 1/2 hour?) (My network usage according to the task manager was at 0 – it wasn’t downloading – I don’t know what it was doing). Then it installed and told me to restart. (You know, all Microsoft branded products should know how to install itself without affecting kernel-level features forcing a reboot… – that’s sooo 1990′s).

So I rebooted. And opened IE9. Voila. Oh – I should also say that I have Aero Transparency turned off, and I’m running with a dual monitor (2×21″) setup from the firepro.

Top Impressions and Things I like with IE9:

• Ctrl-L works to put the cursor in the address bar to type in URLs finally – without that little “Open Location” window.
• Address bar and search conglomerated (like in Chrome)
• Clean tabs
• colored tabs somehow representing associated tabs (like if you open a new link in a new tab, it’ll have the same color) – same as in IE8
• Middle Mouse Wheel click to close a tab – without actually opening the tab
• Ability to easily resize/move the border between the URL bar and the tab bar
• Ability to swap sides of the Stop/Refresh buttons
• HTML5 support
• CSS3 support
• IE9 developer tools (seem about the same as IE8)
• Popular sites (like Safari and Chrome)
• Reopen Last Session ability
• It’s Fast!
• More safety/security/screening/phishing type ‘intelligence’ built-in.
• a sort of RSS feed reader
• BONUS – Hardware Acceleration – and it’s Fast.

Images Best viewed on a 21″ or bigger screen with browser in full screen (1680×1050 or bigger resolution).

There we go.  A list of things that I actually like about IE9.  Hopefully Enterprise users (IT departments) will drop XP in favor of Windows 7 so that they can use IE9.  As a Web Developer… it would be oh so nice.  The local university has made the switch.

They’ve capped hardware accelerated pages to 60fps.  Why?  Well, first off, our eyes operate at around 24fps (hence the reason film is at 24fps and almost flickers) – but of course our brain can perceive more.  So why stop at 60?  Look at your power bill.  Electricity (in north america) is 60hz.  What’s a hz? Hertz. Frequency.  The reciprocal of time.  60hz=1/60s.  Almost all LCD screens (the defacto standard for computer screens these days) operate at 60hz refresh rate – because it’s easier to design the circuit.  So if our video card is putting out more than 60fps, and our screens are only operating at 60hz, then it’s wasted GPU cycles.  60 is smooth enough for me!

Almost all of the tests I did (from IE9′s page) capped at 60 with my Firepro – I’ll let you look through the screenshots to see which ones didn’t.

Ahh yes, screenshots.  Nothing really fun to see, but people are visual, and like pretty pictures.  So – take a peek at these.

I look forward to having IE9 more and more stable and soon the default on a lot of computers (I also love Chrome, Safari and Firefox) – but I dislike hacking my websites I design to work with older IE versions.

oh – about the crash – I’m not sure what or why it happened, but when playing one of the feature videos, it crashed – twice in the same spot.  Another tab crashed while in the background, idle.  But – like with chrome, each tab gets it’s own process handler, and can crash and recover much more cleanly than before.

When you have LOTS of tabs open, they just keep squishing in there – no sidescrolling, or grouping feature that I can see.  I really like FireFox 4′s tab canvas thing. (tab candy).