I generated space ships based on the nicknames of all Blender 3D coders.
The code is based on the entoforms scripts… which you can find here: http://www.entoforms.com
You can download the base blend from: http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/vehicles/shipwright-06/
You can download the scripts from: http://code.google.com/p/entoforms/
This page should like to shapewright.com
This is an experimental visualisation of all temperature readings between 1800 and 2009,
It uses the HadCRUT3 subset January 2010 release from: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/climate-monitoring/land-and-atmo…
The music can be downloaded for free from: http://www.ichiigai.net/release/spielgelbild
The animation was generated using Python in Blender 3D (all free software). Each spike stands for a location where temperatures were recorded. The length and colour reflect the temperature.
This morning the stork delivered a brand new little coloured Entoform. It has a couple of siblings in white and “alumide”, but I dare say… wow… colour is great! I’m calling it: Nuntius Certior. It shows me that this is definitely the way forward. More exciting news is on it’s way in the next couple of days, but for now… awesome!
I took all day yesterday refining the look and feel of the renders. Thanks to David Revoy I found a really nice font (Birdman Bold). And he reminded me that my screen is a bit too bright… but then nearly everyone has that.
Also I fixed an issue with colour palette selection. The previous series had only 2 palettes because of a stupid bug… So that’s yet another fix. I changed the closing titles as well… added some logos for the websites I’m getting stuff from.
I spent rather a large chunk of yesterday working on legs… figuring out why they disappeared mostly. But now, I’m happy to report their return. Apparently the legs were not the problem. I’m growing three main bodyparts Head/Body/Tail. The tail was using up so much of the body that there simply was no more surface left for the legs to grow out of.
That was all due to the optimisations I did a few days ago. Tweaking and finding the cause of little issues like this is eating a lot of time… like now… this species is very very red… which is cool, but I don’t quite know why… Let’s go find out!
After getting the renders to visually work the way I wanted… I spent some time making the settings for generating Entoforms a bit more “automatic” using less presets. As you can see the result is more defined legs, but also some missing legs. By the way… yes I didn’t post a ‘species’… I’ve been advancing rather a lot these last days.
I need to now see why a bunch are missing legs… and I want to see if Ican make legs “intersect” less… then bring back bulges/ridges and eyes!
I made some big changes to the way I have been rendering. I really wanted to use the Freestyle renderer to get a more “drawn” look, but it was crashing on some Entoforms. So I hacked a nasty workaround into my scripts, and learned some new tricks. In stead of just generating a creature, and then rendering an image of it… my scripts now do something different.
The result is rather a big performance boost! Because the script that generates the Entoforms does not have to wait for rendering to start growing the next version.
Also… the crashes I was getting have already been fixed by the Freestyle people! So… awesome… speed boost, and no more manual fixing! Thank you T.K. for the fix and paulhart2 for the fresh windows build!
At long last development is really gearing up for big advances. I was unhappy with the colours I was getting for the previous species. I was generating them fully automagically… which is nice, but the results were simply not good enough.
I decided I was missing the human eye… so after a bit of browsing I found Adobe’s Kula website where people can create and share colour palettes. It is a nice system… and… most important, it has RSS feeds with lots of colour palettes. So I wrote a python program that can retrieve them for me.