Software

I asked the Puppy Linux Discussion Forum, can I use a tar.bz2 app with my 4.3.1 puppy?

By The Illustrator  |  2009/12/06 11:45 Posted in 3D, Blender, Review, Software, problems  |  Comments (0)

Super cool 3D app. Can i get it to run under Linux?

I’m having a lot of fun experimenting with my new 3D sculpting and rendering suite, Blender 2.5, under Windows XP and I wanted it on my Linux machine too. But of course Linux has a reputation of being for nerds, and very difficult indeed to use, and installation of new apps is one of the things that is creating that impression. So how did I get on with the installation?

Let’s compare what you have to do to get this 3D app working in Linux with the simple and intuitive Windows procedure. In Windows all I had to do is download the Windows version, unpack it (even this can be daunting for inexperienced users, but unpacking a file seems simple to me now) and click the pretty icon with exe written underneath. Blender starts, no problem. But Linux. oh my goodness…

Take a look at this page of hints and tips about what might, and what might not be needed to kick the app into life. And this isn’t the most complex set of instructions I have found as I have been trying to install, oh no, not by a long chalk.

When people run into problems they start mentioning strange things like a scons package. To me that sounds like something that should be enjoyed with cream and jam. They also, with the best of intentions, offer lines and lines of gibberish that can be typed into something called a terminal, which looks like a c prompt and is just as cold and unresponsive. All mine ever says to me when I type the suggested clumps of It's a monster with one eye.computer geekery is “No such command or file.” Then it says “#”, and that’s it.

For those who enjoy laughing at the misfortunes of the less initiated here is a forum where I have been explaining the idiot things I have been doing, and begging for hints and tips.

Puppy Linux Discussion Forum :: View topic – can I use a tar.bz2 app with my 4.3.1 puppy?

Over the last few days of Googling around I have read thousands of similar stories of woe from billions (perhaps that last number was exaggerated) of other perplexed Linux users who can’t get stuff to install, compile, call it what you will. It might be a good idea for developers to offer already unpacked and compiled versions for idiots, sure they would be a couple of megabytes bigger, but they would be easier to use.

Having said all this I do have the old version of Blender, Blender 2.4, running on my Linux machine because a friendly forum lurker posted a pet – an easy to install version for my “distro” (Puppy Linux) – and a page of step-by-step instructions on installation. So with Blender’s great reputation for backwards compatibility I should still be able to swap files between the two machines and do useful work on both. And when 2.5 stabilizes I’m pretty sure that another kind-hearted forum spirit will take pity on us mere mortals and provide a Puppy Linux specific, easy to install Blender 2.5 pet package, with instructions.

It’ll probably be a while though…

I’m an early adopter, I just downloaded blender 2.5 alpha

By The Illustrator  |  2009/12/04 21:04 Posted in 3D, Blender, Review, Software  |  Comments (4)

Now that's a good looking interface! 

Wow, it’s great to be an early adopter of a state-of-the-art 3D editing suite like Blender. I feel like I’m at the cutting edge, blazing a trail etc. Of course all I’m really doing is poking about with something I don’t completely understand and reporting back some first impressions.

First Impression 1. It’s as easy as pie to install, just do like it says on the download page…

unpack the compressed file to the location of your choice.  

Provided the Blender binary is in the original extracted directory, Blender will run straight out of the box. No system libraries or system preferences are altered.

blender.org – Get 2.5 alpha.

First Impression 2. It looks good. The looks of the interface have always been a little functional and basic with Blender (some go as far as to say it isn’t intuitive), and an awful lot of people have listed this as their number one turn off when it comes to getting to grips with this complex and powerful 3D application.

But it actually starts with a 3D scene now! All the old tutorials always used to start explaining what you were looking at when you opened Blender – it was actually a 3D cube seen from above, but it looked more like a sheet of graph paper with a dark bit in the middle. Now that isn’t necessary, it’s obvious at first glance that this app is about 3D.

First Impression 3. The first thing I tried to do was select a face of the default mesh I was presented with at start up. As an experienced user I knew to hit the tab key and click with the wrong button on the face. I’m pretty sure that this idiosyncratic way of working is, as ever, going to be the biggest hurdle for new users. I couldn’t immediately see any new simpler-to-figure-out (i.e. intuitive) way of doing this. But I don’t want to sound too negative. This counterintuitive way of working is rally quick to learn, way less than a day, and most Blender users come to understand why it has to be this way and even like it.

First Impression 4. Next I deleted the face. Now here there has been a huge improvement in the interface. The tool I needed was right there on the screen, and it was very intuitive to use.

I’ve had the this great 3D editing, animation, rendering, you name it it does it suite on my hard drive for only a few minutes and it has already convinced me that great strides have been taken compared to the earlier versions.

More first impressions to come, I’m excited to get to grips with this new revamp of a classic elder statesman of CGI and I’ll probably be having fun and making discoveries long into the night.

First post from within OpenOffice, about spaceships and Ralph McQuarrie

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/30 20:14 Posted in Gimp, Illustration, Software  |  Comments (0)

OK test time, I’ve just added the blog client for OpenOffice to the version I’m using on my Linux machine, and naturally I’m very curious about whether it’s going to work or not.

I’ve also been doing some more work on the 3D spaceship I started much earlier.

I have added detail to the inside of the mesh and am considering what kind of strange space aliens to populate it with. I’ve been trying out ideas using my graphics tablet in Gimp, just hashing lines in over the render of the spaceship interior.

I’ve also been looking at Ralph Mcquarrie images as inspiration. As you can see from the image it is very early days for this conceptual drawing and it should develop a lot over soon.

I’m very interested about how, and if this is going to work, but I’m rooting for this because I like OpenOffice very much – despite the dodgey spell checker – and it’ll be cool to use it for blogging.

OK, here goes, apparently I just export the document to Webblog. There is even a new button in the icon bar which looks a bit like a feather. OK, I’m about to push the button…

Change Inkscape’s interface language the easy way thanks to Rarst.net, and a very nice Photoshop brush for graphics tablets.

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/22 17:22 Posted in Editorial, Illustration, Review, Software  |  Comments (2)

Is it a monster?

Photoshop can make some very nice natural looking and intuitive marks with a graphics tablet – I’m using the “Bamboo Pen”, which is the cheapest available in my parts. It does require some tinkering and I was having a hard time of it, when a commenter on the post containing my first graphics tablet image suggested this cool Photoshop brush presets file.

Which lines were created with the mouse? Can you tell?

You can clearly see which side of this page was doodled with a mouse and which with a graphics tablet and the “stumpy pencil” presets.

 

 

 

And here is how to add the file to Photoshop, curtsey of swampy …

Actually, .tpl files can be loaded from any location on your hard drive, but they must be loaded using either the Preset Manager or from the Preset drop down selection menu in Photoshop.

in her post at TPL brush loading problem – RetouchPRO.

space suit penguinOver the last couple of days I’ve also downloaded both Gimp and Inkscape, to try out the various options and capabilities of my new Bamboo Pen tablet. The picture above was created entirely in Gimp with just the graphics tablet as input over the course of just a couple of hours, and also the space penguin to the left, who’s going to be going in the spaceship bar I’m designing in 3D in Blender. Inkscape on the other hand is proving a little less intuitive for an old Photoshop user like me.

And I was also a little upset to discover that Inkscape autodetected my machines language and used it for it’s interface. My lappy is setup with German as the default – it’s Austrian you see – and while I do speak German I prefer English for complex software like this.

Luckily I found a really elegant and, more importantly, simple solution at Rarst.net. To cut a long story short, create a text file called inkscape.cmd which contains just two lines of text.

set lang=en

start inkscape.exe

 

put the file in the Inkscape folder, and double click that – instead of inkscape.exe – to start the app. Worked a treat for me – full details at…

Change interface language in auto-detecting GTK apps | Rarst.net

I can now get to grips with this interesting looking app without having to do any mental translation.

Spaceships, some of my pictures are on page one of the Google image search for Spaceship pictures

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/21 20:32 Posted in 3D, Blender, Illustration, Review, Software, Spaceships, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

I was looking for some spaceships as sources of inspiration for my latest 3D spaceship and imagine my surprise when i did a Google search with the words Spaceships and pictures. Two of my images where there on page one.

I’m always a little mistrustful of typing anything into an online textbox. I have often typed 200 word works of genius containing my thoughts on science fiction, spaceships, robots and other indispensable themes so many times, then hit post, only to be told that the page could not be loaded. And of course when you hit back arrow to get to the previous page – it’s empty. NOOOOOOO…

So now I absolutely have to have a blog client on my machine. I’m offline right now and I just saved these first four lines, that’s how paranoid my dodgy computers and other IT technology has made me.

As this is a test post I’m going to keep it short just to see what happens, although I will try to hit the 250 word minimum I once read about in an article on SEO, you might have noticed that an awful lot of my posts are exactly 250 words long.

I have been using the version of Blender that’s now running on this Puppy Linux machine, after heroic efforts to get it to talk to my x windows and graphics card – and my latest spaceship is going well. Unfortunately when I tried to insert a copy of the latest renders of the spaceship interior, and exterior with a nice planet in the background Deepest Sender just asked me for the image location without giving me a browse button to find the file on my local machine.

Oh dear I hope that isn’t’ going to be a deal breaker.

But as I suddenly suspected according to www.surfthemind.com/index.php/2008/09/17/power-blogging-tools-deepest-sender/ it seems impossible to post images from deepest sender. I’ll Just have to give Scribe Fire (another) try instead.

Scribefire’s image handling is basic to say the least, but at least I can upload them from my computer. There switched to Scribefire, and here’s an image, and a rather fine 3D one, of a spaceship.

As you can see this spaceship still needs a lot of work, both inside and out to make the renders look like they are even approaching a nice completed CGI look.

But the 3D meshes are taking shape and it shouldn’t be too long before they are done. Even including delays caused by me playing with my new Bamboo graphics tablet and trying to change the language in Inkscape to English. There’s always something else to fiddle with…

PuppyLinux: GimpGraphics

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/14 14:52 Posted in Illustration, Other Systems, Review, Software  |  Comments (0)

Hello little GIMP. I recently installed Puppy Linux on a laptop, and now not content with that epic victory of trial and error over open source software, I want to actually install a program onto my newly functioning machine.

OK so I decided to try and install GIMP on the Puppy Linux machine, and I found a version of GIMP that seemed to suit my needs. PuppyLinux: GimpGraphics. Uppermost in my mind was the hope that it wouldn’t turn out to be too hard.

Of course it turned out to be more difficult than I had hoped with page after page leading me to zip files that wouldn’t open. But this GIMP link seemed to be more useful. This page has a few versions to download in the Puppy Linux .pet format, and I chose the smaller version without help file because I always Google for help anyway. And…

It worked, it worked, it worked. But I did have this problem, where I couldn’t find Gimp once it was installed, but the advice here helped me sort it. It was working, but with an ugly default desktop logo. So I found a copy of the GIMP icon file to drop into the box Puppy Linux provides if you click on the old ugly icon.

The screenshot that you can see at the top of this post is also the first thing created on the unlucky virus infected laptop since it was brought back to life with Puppy LINUX.

With luck there will be a lot more to come, especially after I install Open Office. I just have to find a .pet file and everything should go pretty smoothly from there.

I wonder if Puppy Linux has a version of Live Writer and ActiveSync as well.

Gnomad2 for MP3 players for Puppy Linux, for inspiration while I’m thinking up spaceship designs.

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/13 20:28 Posted in 3D, Review, Software, Sound, illustration, spaceship  |  Comments (0)

 What big feet you have little spaceship!

I have a Samsung U4 pebble-looking MP3 player that I’m very fond of. The only problem was the heck-awful software that it demanded me to install on my Windows machine before it would let me add any music.

But now that I have a Puppy Linux machine I thought I might be able It's pretty and it sings!to find something a little more user friendly and a little less inspired by iTunes. And find something I did, Gnomad2 for MP3 players, which loads in about a billionth of the time EmoDio takes. There was one little glitch when Gnomad2 didn’t add a desktop icon, but I just turned the usual Puppy Linux USB stick purple – like my player – and gave it a black screen also like the one my Samsung U4 player has, and I used that as the logo; and I think it looks quite cute on my desktop.

I’ll be looking for some Star Wars music to put on it, and perhaps that “Ground Control” song by David Bowie, oh yes and that 80s music that David Lynch put on the Dune soundtrack. You bet I’ll be listening to that crazy stuff and reading a science fiction novel on my phone – and the spaceship inspiration for my next piece of 3D sci-fi art will come flowing, at least that’s the plan. 

And this week “unbalanced” is the word on Illustration Friday – a cool art challenge site I take part in – and of course my mind turned to spaceships, but a spaceship design that would be somehow unbalanced.

A perfectly balanced spaceship, for now. I opened Blender and loaded up the work in progress mesh of my latest spaceship, The Packard, to see if I could unbalance it in some way. And after looking at it for some time I decided to give it really big landing gear. The landing gear on this spaceship is square pods with a strut coming out the bottom which to anyone at all familiar with British sci-fi are reminiscent of those on the Space 1999 Eagle. But with such a diabolical and unbalanced change how would the spaceship look when it got rendered?

Actually I quite like the oversized landing pods… Hmm… Maybe I’ll keep them.

If you want to suggest some music to listen to for spaceship inspiration just leave me a comment.

Designing Another Spaceship (with mesh and textures) – Orbiting a Planet

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/12 20:59 Posted in 3D, Blender, Forum Thread, Illustration, Review, Software, Spaceships, role-playing game  |  Comments (0)

A rubarb and custard planet, how peculiar!

Now that I have my second copy of Blender installed on my Puppy Linux laptop I’ve actually stopped faffing around with disk partition and installing codecs and started modeling again – not Kate Moss modeling, 3D computer generated art modeling. And it seems I’m not the only one, I recently found this this cool thread started by a stats obsessed 3D spaceship designer. Which includes this post from iliketosayblah

i love the stats…i wish all ships had stats…

… and I couldn’t agree more.

Blue windows, I gues they're watching TV. This was such an interesting thread to read; it had an argument about physics, it had advice on how to design spaceships, it had a crazy amount of stats, and I learned some new vocabulary. The comments on the meshes that the Blender artist posted included one that complimented the greebles on the surface of the spaceship.

Now apparently, according to Wikipedia,

A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects.

Now I didn’t know that, but you can bet I’ll be using these magnificent words a lot more from now on.

Abstract art or texture tile? You decide. I’m going to call the spaceship in this 3D image “The Packard” after the Packard Bell laptop which I did most of the design work on the mesh and basics on. I also produced the jpeg for the texture on the same plucky old laptop in Gimp, which was a pleasure to work with and seemed to be every bit as powerful as Photoshop, even though it opens in a fraction of the time.

There is a lot more work to come on this spaceship. It needs some smoother hull plates mixed in with the basic structure of this mesh, but not too many, because I want it to retain a low-tech feel. It needs a lot more greebleing in the area connecting the bridge of the spaceship to the main body, that’s still looking to thin and aerodynamic, like an airplane, and that’s not what we want at all in this workhorse of the planetary spaceways. And I might even look for another free science fiction table top role-playing game so that I can produce some simple stats to go with this powerful but workaday spaceship.

Photoshop is making me fat so I’m going to go GIMP.

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/09 11:59 Posted in Illustration, Other Systems, Review, Software  |  Comments (0)

Why are we waiting! Whenever I switch Photoshop on and get that ugly grey screen followed by the splash screen, I know I’m going to be sitting and staring at it for a long time. I sit staring at the credits and I feel I actually know Thomas Knoll and the rest of the development team because I’ve been sitting looking at their names for such a huge chunk of my life.

And I recently noticed that I was using this dead time while Photoshop loaded to go and make myself a sandwich. That’s really no good for the waistline. So I’ve decided to go GIMP if it can do everything I need.

A friend recently gave me a dead laptop and the only way to bring it back to life was with an injection of Linux, after that I installed GIMP and now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t play around with it a bit and see what it can do.

I downloaded a pdf snapshot of the GIMP documentation and turned it into a MobiPocket book for reading at my leisure – on the tram mostly – so I could get an idea of what GIMP can do.

The real proof of the pudding will be in the image editing of course, but from what I have already read it looks encouraging. Gimp can work with layers, vectors and seems to have the functions I’m using right now when I add colour and interest to a pencil sketch or add the finishing touches to a render of my latest 3D spaceship mesh.

I do sometimes also use Photoshop for animation, but the animation files are so huge and unwieldy that I’ve even given that up recently. So animation aside I can’t immediately see a reason not to switch and there is a huge advantage to making the jump to GIMP. It loads in about five seconds instead of fifteen minutes (subjective time, I’m sure it’s shorter than that but it does seem like an absolute age).

WordPress broken again, this time I can’t view comments left on a page.

By The Illustrator  |  2009/11/07 03:20 Posted in Review, Software, problems  |  Comments (0)

The blogger from outer space. I love the comments left on my blog – I’m always complaining about my problems, and nice people comment with advice and help – so it was with dismay that I noticed my comments failed to arrive once clicked, and therefore couldn’t be seen. What was I to do, how was I to get those lovely comments back?

I immediately started Googling, and found WordPress › Support » can’t view comments in a page. So did this work for me?

The simple answer is no it didn’t, and I’m using quite a rare and esoteric theme, I don’t think I’m geeky enough to fix it. So I came up with a plan B. I would keep installing comments plugins till the problem magically fixed itself. The first plugin I found was a way to synchronise comments between Wordpress and Facebook. It seemed like a great idea, but I couldn’t activate it because of a fatal error, and that was before I started messing with the code as suggested by the plugin author.

So on to the next plugin. I found another Facebook comment grabber here. It looked an awful lot simpler. But again I got the parse error, though this author had an explanation posted on the plugin page. Apparently I have to be running PHP 5 for plugins like these to work. What on Earth is PHP 5? This seems like a real geeky thing to have to fix, if it even is fixable, so on to the next plugin.

I found a plugin that replaces the entire Wordpress commenting system with an external one. “That’s what I’m looking for!” I thought. It is run by Disqus and it was a pig to set up, but it did seem to be working. Although it keeps falling over and even told me that there were no servers available to handle my request, it’s got to be better than my current “you can’t even see the comments at all” system – hasn’t it?

The only problem remaining was to stop the comments showing up black on black. Because black on black can be difficult for a human to read. Oh good gracious I have to do it with CSS. Wish me luck… This Disqus CSS guide should help though. I don’t know how this blogger came up with this but they are a genius and I am eternally in their debt.