Creating a 3D movie using Blender

Over Simpson's May term (a full class taught in three weeks), seven students created a 3D computer generated movie. The movie was created with software called Blender. Most of them had little, if any, experience with Blender.

The results were great. I'd love to see what could be done if they had longer than three weeks. This video talks about how it was made:



And this is the video itself:

Fish husbandry

Earlier this year I bought a porcupine puffer fish for my home fish tank. I got the fish from the local Petco rather than Adam's Aquatics. Petco is much cheaper, although their selection is poor.

Well, the Petco fish had "Ich", or something similar. I should have put the fish in a quarantine tank before putting it in my main tank, because soon all my fish got it. My Regal Tang really got hit.

I set up a 55 gal tank in the basement, and moved all the fish to it. Then I added copper sulfate, available as some kind of snail killing product in the fish store. That cleared the ich up in a couple weeks. Unfortunately the Regal Tang continued to fair poorly.

After five and a half weeks, I moved all the fish back to the main tank, in hopes to get the Regal Tang feeling better. Unfortunately I lost that fish, and the ich came back. I should have waited longer to break the parasite's cycle.

Now "Dory" rests in peace, buried in our garden. She has her own sign, courtesy of my daughter. The other fish are back in the quarantine tank, and the ich appears to be clearing up. This time I'll probably wait eight weeks.

The fish tank I maintain at Simpson has had serious problems with red slime. That tank doesn't have a protein skimmer, which is one of the best defenses against it. I finally tried Chemi-Clean. I don't know what is in it, but it did manage to clear up most of the red slime after a couple treatments. I didn't lose any fish or snails either, which is good.

Later this summer, I should be upgrading that tank to one with an in-tank overflow, and a protein skimmer in the sump.

Blender and cloth simulations

I've found Blender 2.46 RC4 to be a bit buggy when dealing with cloth. Here's one of the more obvious looking ones:

Jello Cubes From Heaven 2.0

Multi-colored Jello Cubes:

Jello Cubes From Heaven

Short movie created with Blender 2.46 RC 4:



I have a 640x480 resolution version of the video at 198 MB. The ray tracing looks pretty good with it. But it is too big to post.

Creating 3D Movies

Have you enjoyed watching movies such as Ice Age, The Incredibles, or Toy Story? Want to know how you can do it too, for free? By using Blender - the free 3D modeling program! Attend the premier showing of "Recursion" and learn more about how a student-lead May Term class created their own 3D animation with Blender in just 3 weeks. Come on over and watch this movie, eat some pizza, and learn about what you may be able to do in the years to come.

Following the presentation Alejandro Saenz will also be showing off the project he has been working on this May Term. Alejandro has been busy creating a web-based game utilizing Adobe Flash.

CIS-290 Presents "Recursion" by:
-Patrick Carlson
-Steve Pilling
-Tim Fairfield
-Clinton Bradfield
-Heather Elliot
-Carl Davidson
-Wes Kocher

Alejandro Presents "A Flash Game."

Date:	Thursday, May 15, 2008
Time:	8:00pm - 9:00pm
Location:	Jordan Lecture Hall - Carver
City/Town:	Indianola, IA

Web development

I enjoyed "The Mother of all Interfaces" posting at The Daily WTF. With a lot of fancy high-paid architects, a simple application can be made horribly complex, slow, and unreliable.

In my day, we created a fully user-customizable portal with full session fail-over, that processed user requests in less than 10 ms. All this while running on a Pentium Pro. (We also had to walk to work, uphill, both ways.)

I dislike many web frameworks for the multitude of unnecessary abstractions and layers they add to a system. KISS.