Another couple of weeks, and another ashrants.com video. Once again, the animation is done with Lightwave, the lip sync with Magpie Pro and editing done with Newtek’s SpeedEDIT, which is a subset of the software that comes with the TriCaster hardware. The music is a jam performed by the Asphalt Potato Jam band. Enjoy!
Read MoreWell, there comes a time every 3 years or so that I look at my current rig and decide that I need a change and with me, usually that means, drastic change. The last time this happened I opted to switch from an Apple to a Dell… Which was, to those who know me and my thoughts on Microsoft, shocking…
Read MoreAsk anyone who hasn’t bought a BluRay player yet why not and you’ll likely get the same response: They’re too expensive. And they’re right. With the cheapest player at Best Buy, the Samsung BDP1500, currently weighing in at $262.98, it seems the industry still has a while to go before they hit the $199 mark (the price point that many believe is the turning point for the global infiltration of a new media format). They’ve been popping up here and there, but they’re usually by brands like Vizio or Insignia…
Read MoreCornucopia 3D recently announced an update to the venerable 3D landscape software Vue, which creates everything from stunningly realistic to downright cartoony and cool worlds to plant your stories in. Beyond the commercial software, they also make Vue 7 Pioneer available for free for non-commercial use. The renders are watermarked, but what makes Pioneer interesting is that you don’t have to pay for the full program to get rid of them. Pioneer has a series of modules which you can add to the basic software which can remove the watermarks…
Read MoreA new online gaming service called OnLive was announced this week at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), promising a new way to play video games via digital distribution, but will it undermine the hardware based consoles? Instead of worrying about keeping that tricked out gaming rig up to spec, or having a big old console sitting under your TV, OnLive actually runs the games on their own servers and streams the video to you through a 1Mb browser plug-in for your computer or a “microconsole” hooked up to your monitor/HDTV….
Read MoreAt last month’s annual TED conference, MIT’s Pattie Maes demoed what she called the new 6th Sense, which took the form of a wearable piece of tech that was able to translate your gestures and behaviour into functional and useable data. The uses for such a device are enormous, as you’ll see in the video, but the most fascinating part is that this is not simply theory but practical fact. At a cost of $350 “cobbled together” with “off the shelf parts” at an MIT lab, the device is not…
Read MoreThis is part of an animation side project I’ve been working on. The site is finished, and the first couple of animations are in the can, so I thought I’d post the latest here for (what I hope will be) your enjoyment. The website is ashrants.com For those who are curious, the animation is done in the venerable Lightwave 3D, with an able assist in the lip sync department by a program called Magpie Pro. Magpie makes lip syncing dialogue easy, and can output for just about any 2D or…
Read MoreA trial is convened in Sweden, in which the co-founders of filesharing directory The Pirate Bay face two years in jail and a €100,000 fine for “assisting copyright infringement”. YouTube begins crippling the audio on all of its content, whenever it auto-pattern-matches with any audio pattern claimed by a record company, sparking fears of the ‘End of Mashup Culture‘ and reports of the first massacres of teenage digital dreams. Then, just weeks later, as if to reassure any who might be in doubt as to whether there is room in…
Read MoreReference design image from trustedreviews.com Nvidia’s small form factor (SFF) computing platform has received Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) certification for its drivers. What makes this noteworthy is the new platform is both tiny, as illustrated above, and dirt cheap (starting at about $300 US when shipping) and a not insignificant amount of horsepower under the hood. This looks like a break out platform for the growing netbook/nettop device segment, as it provides significantly more graphics power than the current crop of Intel graphic chips ubiquitous to the low-end market….
Read MoreNewtek, makers of the venerable Lightwave, have announced a radical change to their 3D animation package, in the form of Lightwave CORE. CORE is a complete re-write from the ground up, with a completely open SDK, with 3rd party developers using the same software tools as the programmers themselves. One of the potential advantages is transparent interaction between the various physics solutions, which should obviate the need for workarounds that have been the bane of at least one Lightwaver I know. The first advance build should be out by the…
Read MoreSometimes two or three things come at you in the news in the same week which are such perfect expressions of opposing spirits of the times, that the connection simply begs to be drawn between those points. Take the recent rant on Derfcity, declaring a modern economic End Times for cartoons as a result of the Great Comic Axing at alternative weekly newspaper chain, Village Voice Media… OK. This is it. We’ve reached the apocalyptic final struggle for the future of cartoons. Village Voice Media is the largest group of…
Read MoreVince Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, has announced the introduction of a new service on the Google Blog. The Measurement Lab will give end users and researchers remote access to a number of advanced network diagnostic tools to simplify the task of network analysis. Many of the individual programs are also available as downloads to be installed (so far only on Linux).
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