ricardocabellov5.5

And you may be saying... oh no! another guy talking about iPhone... no, not really.

I don't see why should I want it... iPhone is technically cool, but, that's it, it won't make my life easier, at least not mine.

But, on the keynote there was another gadget released which was much more useful, and will make my life easier. There is something I really hate and that is wires all over my flat and having to connect wires to the TV (in my case projector) to watch movies or listen music on the big speakers.



However... AppleTV is iTunes (aka pain in the ass) dependant, which is a bit of a problem. I wonder how hard would be doing a custom app for avoiding this ;)

Must be that famous global warming because even the finnish people are complaining about this.

This christmas we went a couple of days to Spain (1 week in Valencia / 1 week in Barcelona more or less) and the first thing I realised was that the weather was really good. Even too good. Only the first days it was a bit cold, the others were even 18C during the day. Is this suposed to be normal? I remember some years ago having really cold christmas but Valencia and Barcelona were like on summer. A lot of people will like this but I would prefer having some cold weather once a year.

Anyways, the break is over, 2007 is starting and there is a lot of things to do. Keep working on xplsv.tv (which by the way, do you remember 2005 report? 2006 was the same ;)) After a long break without doing anything for xplsv.com vj-side I will be back giving some help to the crew content-wise. Also there is kind-of-personal new project that I'm not able to talk about yet, and some others that I even have NDA :S

So, busy busy year! I'll keep everyone informed! By now, have a nice and productive 2007 you all!

PS: Don't try to go inside a plane with a Bonsai, they won't let you go inside with it :( The present was very good tho! Hope someone takes care of it now :S

Longest post title in the blog for sure!

So, well.. this is a non-finished work (i'm looking to do something else with this) but I guess I got something interesting to show alredy...

Using Carlos' Panorama as base I've created my own one but also with my own scene and textures.



(It takes a while to load (600kb, 6 x 1024x124 textures there).

In a way, this is just a trick to have a scene of 186.122 polys, 20 lights, raytrace reflection and fog in realtime ;) Well, it's not, but you get it looks like. In a lot of games and demos they use this trick to simulate complex 3Dscenes when in fact they are rendering 6 textures to a cube and having the camera inside it.

So, if you were wondering about how to do this with your 3D scene, here it's a nice and simple how-to.

As some of you know already (and probably hate), I've used the Greeble to create the object (based on a tube). Then a couple of lights to the scene, created a material for the tunnel using raytrace for the Reflection and then adding the fog to the camera.

I'm not going to detail on all this, I would asume you know how to create 3dmodels and texture them... the point of the article if about how to get the 6 textures you need for doing the cube map of your scene.

So, after doing all this I end up with an scene like this:



At this point, what you have to do is create a box on the middle of the scene:



And then, create a new material. We only need to put a Reflect/Refract map on the Reflection slot for this new material.



Going inside the Reflect/Refract parameters we wil find everything that we need there. As you can see, 3D Studio MAX has a batch texture renderer in this section (kind of hidden). If you check the opfion "From file", then you will be able to specify where you want to save the textures and the prefix name (I've used frame01 as a prefix name). Then the last thing you need to do is after clicking on "Pick Object and Render Maps"... well, select the box, and it will generate all the maps for you.



And that's as simple as it's. This will generate these 6 images:
frame01_BK.png, frame01_DN.png, frame01_FR.png, frame01_LF.png, frame01_RT.png, frame01_UP.png (which are the Back, Down, Front, Left, Right, Up textures).

Now if you want to see how it looks, here you have the Source Code!
(this is just a small modification of Carlos original source code, so say thanks to him! :D Also, these sources doesn't include the PV3D AS3 classes)

You can also check out the .max file.

Enjoy! Doing 360 panoramic views with Flash hasn't ever been that easy! :)

PS: As a side note, one of the things I thought that wasn't doable with PV3D is in fact doable! Amazing!

A couple of (spanish) friends already asked me the same question, so I guess this information may be interesting.

Some of you probably already know that some months ago I left the "rat's race" and started my own business. By now I didn't do too much but I hope to go quite far with all this.

So, to be honest, it's really easy and cheap. I think in Spain you have to pay something like 300€ each month, in UK It's £2.10 (Class 2, National Insurance Contributions) a month. This depends of how much do you earn, but for the basic stuff that's what you will have to pay. Also if your income is higher than £61,000 a year then you should also charge VAT.

The only thing you have to do is call to the HM Revenue & Customs Self-Employed Help Line, from there you just have to let them know that you want to register as a self-employed, I think you need to have a National Insurance Number ready (as they will ask you for this), and also, you need to know the name you want to use (in my case Mr.doob ;) The process may take something like 10minutes, no more!

Here you'll find the number you need to call to and also A LOT of information/check lists and stuff.

Then, you'll have to wait meanwhile they setup everything and in a couple of weeks you'll receive the information you need. At the end of the day what you're after doing all this is for your TAX reference. So in each invoice you send to your clients you need to put your name and this TAX reference.

And that's it. Let's say that in a day of work you can earn at least £240, so having said that, I think paying £2.10 a week is really a good deal. Isn't it?

The only thing you need now is clients! :D

And another interview ;) Looks like xplsv.tv worth it :D Again, sorry for the people than can't read spanish :(

xplsv.tv in motion! interview

SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAAM SPAAAAAAAMM... oups! hehe... too much monty phyton latelly...

I wonder how is it possible that being in 2007 (almost) we (the humanity) didn't find yet a solution for the Spam. It's funny how the internet evolves, how many new technologies appear everyday, how much work the people does on the web side, and how little work the people does for real troubles like the spam. Wouldn't if be funny if whenever you fill a form to register for a bank account in the real world there is a box that says "Anti-Spam: What is the sum of 0 and 3?".

And I'm not really talking about receiving it cos there are some ways for detecting it. The real problem is when somebody decides to use your domain as the sender, something like random_name@yourdomain.com. That will made you receive a lot of MAILER-DAEMON emails saying that your email wasn't delivered, and the worst part is that your domain can end up in blacklist of spammers.

That is really pathetic.

A) The ability of sending an email being able to put any sender that you want, lets say bill@microsoft.com without having to authenticate or something. Is it me, or after a lot of years with internet we should have found a way to handle this?

B) I don't know how blacklist for spammers work, but if they can add a domain in a blacklist, that could be quite unprofessional cos they would be the first ones to know that the owner of the domain didn't have to do anything with the spam that was sent. Instead of adding domains to a database they could spend his time finding a way to improve the system properly.

Solutions?

A) Changing the way of how mail works, maybe having to pay for sending an email. I guess the main problem are the mail servers, would it be possible to change how they work so they only allow emails from certified email addresses?

B) No idea.. by now I will get rid of the catch-all account and will allow only 3 or 4 email addresses. So my server will give a mailer-daemon of a mailer daemon. Silly.

Does anyone know about all this??

Right, that's a funny one. Let's say that you have a folder  structure like this:

Class files / com / mrdoob_as2 / ...
Class files / com / mrdoob_as3 / ...

And then, you have a some new classes you want to copy on that folder, let's say.. that you have

com / other_guy / ...

So, as a Windows user (and probably Linux) what would you do? Probably just copy the com folder, then go to my Class files folder and paste there. So that's what I did. And how wrong I was when I suposed that the popup window was asking me 'Close' or 'Overwrite'. It wasn't asking that, it was saying 'Close' or 'Replace'. It found that there was a folder called 'com' and it was asking if I wanted to replace it with the 'new version'.

Why it can't just copy the files inside? No, it had to delete the folder first and then copy the new files.

What's the end result? I lost all my Classes! Well, atleast all the ones I did after the last backup.

Thanks Apple! :(

I've tried another way of doing it and as I was expecting it runs much more faster now :) So I can see a future full of lights in flash ;)

dynamic flat lighting+textures, 2nd try

o/

A good example of why marketing and the execution of the projects it's very important would be Papervision3D. Sandy has been around for a couple of months already, but they didn't find the good examples to impress the people. Papervision3D didn't really has anything you new. Probably it was faster tho, but everyone was talking about it :) And I can tell you that was because Carlos nice demos of it.

So, because this, and also for the fact of helping a bit the project of another spaniard I added couple of classes (light3D and color) so now it can render with lights (well, only 1 by now).

flat shading example

The bad news that I also implemented it to work with textures (something I didn't seen on the flash-3d scene yet). And the results doesn't look very well :(

flat shading + texture example

This is the very basic approach tho. There are still some things I can test with, but to be honest, I don't have too much hope on this :(

See how everything goes this month, as Papervision3D should be released by the end of it (I guess).

Ok. Too many hours spent on the spanish demoscene trying to improve it as best as it was on my hand since 1995 to STILL having to hear/read comments like these ones. I'm really pissed off now.

Sole: I'm sorry, I won't move a finger for escena.org from now on. I know I said that already some months ago but that's the final decision. I would probably do some more stuff demoscene-related (keep doing stuff with blackpawn mainly), but I won't move a finger for the spanish demoscene ever again. As you can see I'm not welcome there.

Thanks to everyone, and specially to shash for telling me the truth, and speaking for everybody. Thanks, I would have much more free time now.