Code

Code

A very very small OpenGL engine.

I wrote this thing ages ago for a commercial project for the now-defunct subsidiary of Sony, Sony Development.  We were trying to make a giant pinball machine where you tilted the entire machine to play.  To test the physical controller hardware as they worked the kinks out of the design, they needed a little 3D engine to hook up to them so they could see what it would do.  So in about a week, I wrote one.

It’s a little odd as engines go in that it loads Lightwave 6.x (or greater) scene and model files and renders them, and then lets you fly a camera around and look at them. It lights the scene according to whatever lights you put in the scene, but all lights are translated as point lights. I never got spotlights or area lights working. It does respect global ambience settings in the scene, though, as well as maintain the hierarchical relationship between all the scene elements (i.e., parenting of scene elements is preserved at runtime.
It eventually ended up being listed in the news section on the now defunct Flay.com, one of the world’s more important Lightwave 3D web sites, and OpenGL.Org also had my listing. I even found a web site in Japan that linked to the original page.  Too bad I can’t read Japanese! The engine has been downloaded tens of thousands of  times since I posted it after SIGGRAPH 2001.

The engine does do texture maps, but only UV textures, and there are a few ways to apply the textures in Lightwave that don’t actually work. The best approach seems to be to convert whatever conventional texture mapping you might have on your models into UV maps using the “Make UVs” tool in the “Map” toolset in modeler. Since the loader doesn’t handle DMAP chunks, models using cylindrical or spherical mapping need to have the vertices split at the seam, or you’ll get mapping errors.

The source code will compile under either Windows, using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.x or greater, or under Linux using GCC. Yup, it’s cross-platform code!

Download the source code, binaries and sample data here. It’s pretty tiny by modern standards – only 3 megs, even though it includes all the model files and textures and whatnot that you get with it. It’s a fairly modest example of a 3D engine. Once I got the object and scene loaders working, the rest of the engine was done in about five days. It does give some good example code for reading objects in native Lightwave LWO2 format, though. By the way, in the ‘credit where credit is due’ department, I started with the example ‘C’ loader code written by Yoshiaki Tazaki at D-Storm.

Once you’ve gotten it to compile (it shouldn’t be difficult if you know how to use the compiler at all), run it by giving a parameter of either a model file or a scene file. If you give it a scene file as a parameter, it’ll assume all the assets are right there in the same directory with you, even if the scene file says otherwise. If you give it a model file as a parameter, it’ll just load the model file and let you spin it around and look at it from different angles. If you can’t compile the project or don’t want to bother, binary executables are included for both Linux and Windows.

A comment: this project was set up to compile from KDevelop in versions prior to 2.x. If your version is more recent than that, you’re going to have a few problems getting to compile as a project using KDevelop. I’ll may revisit this and make a newer version with new project files (thought I can’t promise when.)

Interestingly, the Linux version runs significantly faster than the Windows version does, even though it’s exactly the same code. I think Linux just works better from the standpoint of interfacing the OpenGL API with the hardware. I know I could do a lot more about optimizing the rendering pipeline, though. Right now the only thing I do is sort the polygons by material; this cuts down on having to use the GL material commands for every single darned polygon, and it sped things up a lot. It’s still not a really quick engine as engines go, but it’s quicker than it first was. I never even  implemented tri-strips, and that would have sped it up at least double.

I’ve absolutely got to offer a caveat here as well: I wrote this engine as an exercise, and I stopped before I finished it. There are leftovers and leavings of various ideas in it that I never implemented. The object and scene loading classes themselves are fairly clean, however, and I did my best to keep that functionality as encapsulated as possible so they could be reused by somebody else if needed.

Could I write the same code now?  No. If you don’t use linear algebra for 3D for a few years, you forget how.  Could I learn to write the same code now?  Absolutely.  I did it before.  I can do it again.

Update: It Runs on a Raspberry Pi

My Raspberry Pi 4 running OpenGL code I wrote over 20 years ago and ported to the Pi in August of 2016. The fastest of these windows is running 120 frames per second, and the CPU is barely warm to the touch.

For a lark, I decided to try compiling this on a Raspberry Pi, and to my great surprise, apart from a small tweak to one of the headers, it worked! Thinking on it, the Raspberry Pi is actually much more powerful than the big bruiser of a desktop machine I developed it on in the first place, yet the computer is no bigger than a pack of cards and draws only about 15w of power. The lightbulb in your refrigerator, if you still have one that isn’t LED based, probably draws more.

 

— Gene Turnbow

Paper Cylons

Paper Cylons

This is just too cool not to comment on.  Yes, I’m geeking out here – this is an article on Make.com on how to create old-style Cylon armor as papercraft.

And here’s the link to the article itself on Make Magazine’s web site.

The reason this caught my attention is that one of my first jobs when I first started doing FX was building the Cylon suits for the Universal Studios Tour in a small shop in North Hollywood in 1979.  I spent three months making parts out of fiberglass and prepping them to be vacuum metalized and made into costume parts.   The interesting thing here is that the costumes we made looked a lot better than the real thing did that they used for the show.  For the show, they used vacuum-formed plastic, and they used simple reflective mylar tape to make it all look chromed.  We tried that for the stage suits, but it looked really dreadful because you could see all the tape seams that the cameras hid so well when they shot them for the TV show – so we were saddled with this laborious, painstaking process that would stand up under close scrutiny from three feet away.  We had to fill every tiny pinhole, or when it was vacuum metalized, you’d see it.  They had to be perfect.

— Gene Turnbow

PS1 deficient animals show complex gene expression changes in the brainAt E12.5, the PS1 deficient embryos, when compared to control littermates, showed 35 upregulated and 35 dowregulated gene transcripts (Table 1, A1 Among the group of annotated genes with decreased expression, we identified several transcripts that were http://www.cheapnfljerseyssu.com previously observed in independently generated PS1 KO animals, thus reproducing previously published observations.20,25 For example, at E12.5 we observed a decrease in protein tyrosine phosphatase Z (Ptprz; phosphacan; DSD1 proteoglycan), Notch1 and Hes5.20,23,25 At this Retro Joradns Shoes Fake Oakleys age, genes with changed expression included members of the Notch (Notch1, Sfrp2) signaling pathway and many transcription factors (Lhx1, Uncx4.1, Sfrp2, Sall3, Pou3f4, Tbr1, Foxg1, Zfp312, Zac1, Eomes, Lhx8, Neurog2, Nfyb, Neurod6). Furthermore, genes contributing to normal neural/glial differentiation were also affected (Notch1, Tbr1, Eomes, Neurog2, Neurod6). Changes in the expression of transcription factors in early born neurons are likely to be related to a premature exit of progenitor cells from the cell division cycle.25 Finally, several extracellular matrix related gene products were also downregulated (Tnc, Chl1, Ptprz, Ptprd), while cytoskeletal genes showed both expression increases (Actb) and decreases (Mapt, Nfl, Nfm, Ina, Sncg). In contrast, decreased expression was reported for genes belonging to the same functional groups as observed in the E12.5 comparisons (transcription factors: Zfp36I2, Zhx1, Zfhx1a; Notch signaling: Notch1, En2, Dlx1, Hes5; lipid metabolism: Acas2, Pde1b, Scd1, Asml3a, Dhcr7; extracellular matrix: Ncam1, Chl1, Tnc, Ptprz, Ptprd). Interestingly, our analysis also found a reduction in PAF acetylhydrolase (phospholipase A2 transcript (a gene that has been associated with lissencephaly), possibly explaining the characteristic brain morphology that PS1 deficient embryos develop.27The Broncos have among the most loyal fans in the NFL, having sold out every home, non strike regular season game since 1970. The team has a waiting list for season tickets of 32,000 people and a 96% renewal rate on season tickets, despite going 4 12 in 2010 and posting 8 8 records the two previous years. The team continues to have problems selling its pricey club seats http://www.cheapjerseyssalestore.com though. Last year it cut club seat inventory by more than 700 wholesale jerseys seats and slashed prices 21%. The deal is worth more than $150 million over 25 years.Remember the SARS outbreak? That originated in China. The CDC and the World Health Organization put the clamps down on international travel the second it was found to have spread to North America. Flights were grounded, travel between borders was locked tight and only 43 people on the entire continent died.

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Ray Bradbury, From the Heart

Ray Bradbury, From the Heart

Ray Bradbury, one of the world’s most notable secular humanists and one of the greatest writers of all time, came to speak at the Simi Valley Senior Center last Sunday, and I took my wife and son to see him.  It was a fundraiser for the city library – Mr. Bradbury’s a huge supporter of civic libraries.  It was a small gathering, but I figured I probably wouldn’t get very many more chances to meet him.  He’s rather elderly now, eighty-nine years old and he’s had a stroke that makes him wheelchair bound and makes communicating very difficult for him.  He’s still writing, though, having just published We’ll Always Have Paris, a collection of his short stories – and working on a new book as well, despite the stroke.

I can think of few people who have influenced me in my life as much as Ray Bradbury.  I’ve been reading his work since I was about fourteen years old, when The Martian Chronicles was assigned reading in school.  I’ve met him on three occasions, each time about fifteen years apart.  And each time, I came away with something new, something remarkable, that kept me going for the next fifteen years.  This most recent time was no exception.

 

We gave him a standing ovation as the attendant wheeled his chair up onto the stage, another attendant pouring him a glass of red wine, which I have come to know is something of a tradition when he comes to speak anywhere now – or if not, then I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my implying that it is.

He gave the same speech he gave the last time I saw him speak, fifteen years ago.   A lungful of air was only good for three or four words, and he was weary with the effort of speaking at all.  But he pressed on, sometimes quiet, sometimes passionate, and the audience broke out into laughter or applause at various points.  He closed his eyes, and tilted his head back and concentrated on his own words.  He was clearly reciting his speech by heart – or was it his heart that was reciting his speech for him?


As this icon of two centuries spoke, telling us of his early days as a writer and how each of his major works came about, he kept coming back to one unifying thread:  love.  It was the power of love itself that kept him going through the entire lecture, and you could see that as he spoke, the reason he was able to do it was that the love of his craft propelled every word from his lips.  As he spoke, he became stronger, not weaker, and the importance of every word rang true, both for him, and for us. He loves what he does, and he does what he loves, and this was itself the important message he wanted to bring to us.

“Do what you love, and love what you do.  Nothing else matters. Love, you see, is everything.”

“If you want to paint, or direct, or act, or write, do it. Don’t just think about it, DO IT. If you do what you love and you love what you do, you won’t fail. Gather your courage and jump off the cliff!  You can build your wings on the way down.”

We gave him another standing ovation as he left the stage.

It was a watershed moment for me.  I’d just been given permission to believe in myself without reservation.  I’d always wanted

to believe in myself that way, but you know how it is – you think to yourself, “I’m just me!  Who am I to believe that everything will come out all right just because I think so?”

But right before he went up to speak, I’d drawn a sketch of Ray in pencil on the back of a program.  I modestly showed it to him and told him I hoped it was okay that I’d done it.  He took the paper from me, and marked it “A+”, autographed it and handed it back.

“A-Plus!”  he said.  “A-Plus!”, he said again, as he shook my hand.

I guess now I have the permission I needed.

Thank you, Ray.  For all of it.

— Gene Turnbow

GENE TURNBOW GENE TURNBOW GENE TURNBOW GENE TURNBOW

 

 

You Can Do Anything

You Can Do Anything

The next time you think to yourself, “I can’t do this, they won’t let me do that” – think about the boy who harnessed the wind.

There’s no such thing as luck, really – it’s just a matter of being in the right place with the right stuff, often enough or long enough for the right time to happen by.

Where are you, and what have you done today?

My whole life has been one of exceptions.  Every career I’ve ever chosen has been one that’s nearly impossible to get into.  For each one, I just went ahead and did it, and looked up the how of things later, and it’s been a great life so far.  If you do what you love, and you love what you do, as it turns out, the money takes care of itself for the most part.  If you’re really passionate about something, you’ll get good enough at whatever it is to convince people to pay you to do it.

Lately, of course, I’ve been planning things out a little bit more, and haven’t been quite so impulsive, and I’ve been working one job now since 2003.  I thought that opportunity was something you had to go out and catch, but I was apparently wrong.  If you pick the right spot to stand in, and just keep doing what you love, the opportunities will come to you.

Don’t stress yourself out over it.  You’re not living for the stress, and you shouldn’t feel badly for not having conquered the world on your first try.  It never happens that way anyway.  But what does happen is that people do find what really makes the world make sense for them, and then after that very little matters.  You don’t have to accept other people’s definition of success and measure yourself by that.  Your success is whatever it is you do that makes you think to yourself, “Yeah.  This is it.  This is where I want to be.”

The hard part, of course, is deciding what that thing is, especially if you’re either gifted, or pan-disciplinary, or both.  To make that decision for yourself, you need to turn off other people’s voices that tell you what you should be doing, and look into your own heart and find the things there that you cherish.  They’ll give you the clues you need.

– Gene Turnbow

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I spent a month at the Priory, but I was more comfortable at Sporting Chance, because there were other athletes there, and I could speak about my injuries. Nobody knew for a long time afterwards, but I felt like I was lying in every interview, so now I’m not embarrassed to talk about it. The initial sharp movement downward in T common stock is a logical consequence of the decision to use T stock to pay for half the $85 billion purchase price of TWX’s 787.5 million fully diluted shares. Let’s assume pricing related to the collar on T shares is not triggered and the transaction goes through within the range. Numerous training programs and self help books take this idea and run with it; promising that building self esteem is the key to overcoming obstacles and failure. Even elementary schools jumped on board and started giving self esteem classes to kids, because as all Americans know, the key to happiness is constant rewards for little to no actual accomplishments.. Mom is driving all the way from North Carolina to pick up the cake. Charm City has been invited to make three massive cakes for a guy’s “Big Fat Greek Birthday.” One of the cakes is an old theater with “It’s a Wonderful Life” adorning the marquee; another cake is a girl sipping a soda at a soda fountain.. We are extraordinarily energized to be leading the company cheap football jerseys at a time when there are so many opportunities ahead. But of course, the company finds itself cheap jerseys wholesale in this position, thanks in very large part to Chase, who we must thank for his many years of exceptional leadership. For women, there are NFL jerseys that are available in stores. They are cut wholesale nfl jerseys to fit the unique figure of a female. 3. Dallas It’s Super Bowl or “See Ya” for Cowboys Coach Wade Phillips. I’m hearing from a lot of my former baseball colleagues, which has been great, hearing from people I don’t even know, giving me positive shout outs. It’s Knockoff Oakleys been great. It implies that the brave 300 had delayed the Persians long wholesale jerseys china enough for help to arrive and finish them off. In reality, Xerxes still managed to invade and ravage Greece, completely sacking Athens after the citizens were forced to abandon the city. Investable Market Consumer Discretionary 25/50 Index and holds a large basket of 386 stocks. Walt Disney, at the fourth spot, has an exposure of 4.8% in the fund. The Stash is a promotion going on that adds $50,000 each month to the longest streak prize if the player reaches a streak of 27 or higher. If no player breaches the 27 streak threshold, the $50,000 rolls over to the next month. N. KotterScientific Reports 6, 31599Rights permissionsOpens in a new window.
You Can Do Anything

Places to Get Stuff

The best content for your production is arguably the content you make yourself. However, sometimes the best content is stuff you just buy and use, because it’s not center stage content or the time and resources required to create the content exceeds the time and resources you have.

Here’s a list of sources for models and 3D resources. There’s also Turbosquid.com, but  there’s a bit of a flap about them penalizing artists who don’t sign exclusivity agreements with them. I’m not sure what to make of it, since I’m not currently active creating CG assets for resale currently (though this may change).

Here are the other sites as mentioned in the blog linked above:

And then there’s this one other site I found, called Animeeple, which trades in BVH files (motion capture file format animations).  This looks interesting, but the free animations they offer are a rather poor enticement to go further, and I don’t know anybody who sells animations through them.  It might be worth a sniff or two.

— Gene Turnbow

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