Pete of Penguin Pete’s has recently become something of an Inkscape ace so I asked him to help me with some textures on one of my planned animated shorts. This short is currently titled “Sugar” and I’m working on it at the same time as " Wedge". So here is the first fruits of that collaboration with Pete. I may fix the proportions a little, but here we go:

For a while it seemed as though Debian couldn’t stop the hemorrhage of distros decided to be based on Ubuntu instead of Debian. For months on end people talked about whether Debian was still relevant and whether its long release cycle was to blame. Well, now it seems that perhaps some of those derivative distros were a little quick to jump on the bandwagon! SimplyMepis has decided to be based on Debian again.

The founder said that each time Ubuntu is build from scratch and it was hindering the ability of SimplyMepis to have a sensible upgrade path. I don’t know enough about that side of Linux distros to know how different that is from what most of them do, but apparently Debian does not have that problem.

After 3-4 days of rendering (fluid reflections and tranparency take forever to render), here is the video outcome of the splash shots I’ve been showing here. Enjoy!

Fluid Simulation: Creating a Splash from djotaku and Vimeo.

After literally a week of cleaning and compiling, I FINALLY have a working copy of Blender on my bulletbill box. This is the one I was most excited about because, while it’s a Pentium II, it has 2 processors! So it should be able to do two Blender frames at once when I’m rendering via drqueue! Finally! I’m excited!

So, with water simulations in Blender, the resolution of the water particles can be set. Basically, you are telling the simulation engine how big to consider the particles of water to be. This can have extremely dramatic results. Let’s take the tank of water I rendered yesterday. This time I’m at a more exciting point in the animation, frame 104.

First, here is the animation with a resolution of 50. This takes up about 3 MB on my computer.

Probably for the same reason I LOVED taking these pictures:

(you should view these large to get the full effect)

So here’s one frame from a new mini animation I was working on today. I still have a few tweaks to make, but it took 20 minutes or so to generate this frame.

Politicians continue to take the gay vote for granted. Personally, with the stances that Republicans take on social issues I don’t see how anyone with an alternative lifestyle can vote republican. Well, today, while listening to last week’s “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”, I found out that recently John McCain fired some of his campaign staffers. His complaint? He wanted them to stop dressing him in “gay sweaters” on the campaign trail. Wow….

Will be out either tomorrow or wednesday. Gamestop says tomorrow and Best Buy’s website says Wednesday. I played one last Warlords Game and did pretty well. I think this was my third best score in the expansion pack. So you can download it and play this last turn and add it to your high score if you want something to beat or something to laugh at. Eric XI of the Chinese would be happy!

Check out this link to see some really awesome shots of Charlie Brown - redone in manga style!

Here’s one sample:

Ilusiones from Emmanuel Tenenbaum and Vimeo.