Mr X
First Post on New Site
This is the first post on this new site. Our old web site (circa 2007) was a home brew affair running on an old Pentium 166 that I bought for $1.00 around 2001. That machine was so old the BIOS wouldn’t let it boot from the CD-ROM drive. I wanted to load Linux on it […]
First Render with Terragen 2
Terragen is a scenery generator, created with the goal of generating photo realistic landscape images and animations. The original Terragen was/is available as a free download from Planetside. Terragen 2 was released as a technology preview with a beta release scheduled for Feb 2008. I played around a little with Terragen and made some test […]
Spacecraft Communications
Do you remember what the Astronauts sounded like during the Apollo program? What? Not old enough to have seen it or too old to remember? Well then, have a listen to this. I thought I would try to duplicate that classic sound. Its all about the Quindar tones. I added some pink noise, white noise […]
Buddy Bear Has Left the Building
On November 13, 2007 that old Buddy bear moved on down the road. He was about 11 years old. Earlier this year he had to have some round parts removed due to a tumor. The biopsy was inconclusive but it was a clue for us that he might not be around much longer. On Tuesday […]
“Universal” Globe
Here is the opening from Heather’s leadership video. Its a ripoff of the Universal Globe. Paragon is the name of Heather’s gymnastics team. Used Blender to make this. The Globe is a sphere with the “blue marble” earth map as a texture. Extruded text to make the “Paragon” letters (one letter at a time). Made […]
Enon Hall Restoration
I tripped over this really interesting web site about a family from Richmond who bought and is restoring thier ancestral home in the Northern Neck of Virginia. Check it out at Enon Hall Journal .
European Vacation
We just returned from a 3 week vacation in Europe. We went to a wedding in Switzerland, stayed at an Agri-tourismo in Italy, and went on an 11 day Meditarranean cruise aboard the SS Disney Magic. It was a great time and will probably go down in history as the greatest vacation ever.
3D Model of a MiG-15
Used Blender and Adobe Illustrator to make this model. Grabbed some blue prints from a Russian web site (including contour sections). Used Illustrator to trace the contours and the top and side views. Imported the resulting 2D drawings into Blender as a background image. Set up three views in Blender (top, front, side) and aligned […]
Asteroid Test
Here is a test sequence showing an asteroid floating thru space towards earth. It hits the Earth’s atmosphere and glows red before turning into a fireball. I used concentric spheres to model the Earth and its atmosphere. The Earth turned out ok, but the atmosphere isn’t quite right. The asteroid’s trajectory is too shallow so […]
Learned to Use LaTex
I finally got around to learning how to use the LaTex type setting program that has been around the Unix/Linux community for years. I tried using LEd and it worked just fine, but I decided to use Eclipse instead since Eclipse is available on both Windows and Linux…
