ricardocabellov5.5

Almost forgot about this one. I feel like maybe I'm repeating myself too much on these interviews...

http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/interview-with-three-js-creator/

And yet another interview... this one is in spanish though.
http://mosaic.uoc.edu/2013/02/27/ricardo-cabello/

Got interviewed on the 3rd episode of the WebGL Podcast.

And here's a talk I did one month later at dotJS.

For this one I only had 20 minutes and I had to be sharp. So rehearsing was required again.



Oh, and no... that's not my laptop. Not really a fan of stickers on laptops :P

Here's a quick talk I did some months ago with Branislav at JSConf EU.



This was the first time I rehearsed a talk. Not sure if that makes things better or worse.

This time around, the now traditional making of blog post is a video instead..

I didn't go much into detail but hopefully there are some interesting bits:



Thanks to Mozilla for sponsoring!

Don't include in your portfolio projects you wouldn't enjoy doing again.

That's something I learnt right when I started mrdoob.com. The aim there was just to share some experimentation and have fun, wasn't meant to be my portfolio but people started contacting me proposing interesting projects. At that point I took down my old (and boring) portfolio here and kept doing experiments over there.

So now it's time to apply that again... At this point I've no interest on doing Flash projects any more, hence I've removed all the Flash projects and experiments (files are still there, just not linked).

One of the things WebGL will bring us is Fragment Shaders. If you're familiar with Pixel Bender you know how Fragment Shaders work.

Although they usually go with Vertex Shaders, you can set it up for doing just 2D effects with it. Iq did exactly this some months ago with Shader Toy — a browser based Fragment Shader editor.

This week I started experimenting with this. First thing I needed to do was a sandbox with the basic WebGL initialisation code. With that done is just a matter of testing values and refreshing the browser. I tried to have a compile button right in the page so I wouldn't even need to refresh the browser but it was over complicating the code...

These are the tests I've done so far:









Next thing on the list is to implement render to texture so I can use the output of the fragment shader as input. That'll allow crazy feedback effects and even crazier drawing tools!

Feel free to use the sandbox code for your own experimentation.

Seems like WebGL is about to land. Chrome 9 beta, Firefox 4 beta 8 and Safari Nighly Build have it enabled by default already. It's just a matter of weeks for the final versions to be released.

I think we're going to face a funny situation... For web developers OpenGL may be a bit intimidating — at least it was for me! For game developers it's piece of cake, but because some features have been disabled some of them feel like a step back in their careers. So it's an area where there won't be so many people for a while.

You may know that, for the last few months, I've been busy developing a library that aims to make this as painless and fun as possible. Hopefully there will be more libraries like this in the near future.

If you're a web developer I would suggest you to start tinkering with all this. I have the feeling things are going to move quite fast as soon as it lands. Won't be long until Mobile Safari — iOS and Android browser — also enables this.

Exciting times! :)

This is something I've spent a fair amount of time on already. Last year I wrote about some of my findings but the truth is that it didn't anywhere.

The main problem is that, for whatever reason, Lagarith is not finding its way into ffmpeg and rumours say Youtube uses ffmpeg for doing the transcoding. So if you tried to upload that 2gbytes video file to Youtube you'd end up getting a "unknown format" error.

Early this month I checked what was the status with all this, and seemed that nothing had changed so I thought about looking for other lossless codecs. This time I tried with Huffyuv. Video file size is bigger but at least ffmpeg supports it.

The idea is to let Youtube host the uncompressed files for me (5gb-20gb each). I don't know if that's what happens or not, but I would think such service must keep the original.

This is how the process looks like:

1. kkapture the demo using Huffyuv for encoding.
Note: I have antialias enabled on my nvidia config as that compresses better than non-antialias stuff.
2. Now you'll get a bunch of .avi files that you need to merge. To do so just use Virtualdub. While you're on it, go ahead and remove the aspect ratio black bars.
3. Upload the file to youtube. This may take a while. It takes about 24 hours per video here.

And that's it. Now it's up to Youtube to keep updating their videos as technology evolves. It's a slow process, but if the theory is right it just needs to be done once.

You can see the ones I've managed to do already in the (just re-opened) demoscene section.