Category: Art

Art projects and discussions using various tools, including both 2D and 3D tools.

Thanos Didn’t Do the Math

Thanos Infinity Gauntlet.jpg

I keep tripping across this flawed thinking in the Marvel Universe. And with the new movie coming out recently, maybe it’s time to remind us of the flaws. I’m not rushing out to the movie. I’ll see it when it comes to Netflix. But, as far as I can tell, Thanos is an idiot with no math or astronomy skills. Here are some of the reasons I say this:

If you HALVE the population of any critter in a constrained environment – and apparently Thanos’ “snap” halved the population of all critters in the universe, according to this account – then it doesn’t really take that long for the population to recover. Most populations follow a Leaning “S” curve, this is because growth slows as resources are depleted. So, if the population is suddenly reduced by half, it will make a sudden jump in growth rate to compensate and if the resources available are the same, it will recover to the same level. So snapping only has a short term effect. And I’m not even talking about the Avengers returning from the Phantom Zone or wherever they went. But then what?

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DesignSpark – Easy to Use CAD

DSM Shelves with Dimensionsxx.png

DesignSpark Mechanical is an Easy to Use CAD tool. I’ve done a few hours research over the past few days to figure out a quick to use FREE CAD tool that can be used to draw wood working projects and dimension them to produce drawings for building home projects.

As you may know from my site, I’m a long time user of 3D Art software including 3DSMax and Carrara. But these are expensive. Even Carrara costs more than $250.

I’ve looked at FreeCAD, Blender and a host of others. But the idea is to find something free that’s as easy to get going as possible and allows you to produce drawings with dimensions. There is no doubt that FreeCAD, and Blender can do this, but FreeCAD is quirky – at least for me – and Blender has a very high initial learning curve and no dimension tool built in. There may be plug-ins for that, but that is more learning curve.

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TurPunkenClaus – For the Lazy Holiday Decorator

I like to decorate for the Holidays, but I’m a lazy decorator. I’d like to have a single yard ornament to put up before Halloween and remove after new years. I’ve designed the perfect thing. You might call it one of several things and you might make it in various ways.

TurPunkenClaus

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Hypercosm Fails in Firefox 3.X

Update: Fixed in a new release of the Exporter. A working version of the scene is here.

Fails in Firefox 3.0.12 and 3.5.2. Website reported as a failed site.

Using Max 2009 on Vista x86, SP1, I created and exported a simple scene with a knot, 3 lights and a camera.

Here is the scene on this website.

The model does not play in Firefox 3.0.13, either from the file system or from this website.

It does play in MS IE 8 both from the file system or from the website.

The samples on the hypercosm website play in both MSIE 8 and Firefox 3.

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SL Prims Version 28

Checkout the new release.

It’s posted in the forum here.

Two fixes:

  • Fix size of sphere and check size of rest of the shapes between max and SL. All seem ok.
  • Enhance exporter for better error handling and saving multiple files to control maximum size of the output file. The file size is limited to about 64 primitives so that the 64K notecard limit is not exceeded. Files are labeled _1, _2 etc.

wwv

Second Life Max Primitive UI

I’ve begun work on a maxscript to build Second Life primitives in max. This is based on a Blender Script written in python.

Progress so far is that the UI is pretty much done. Here are some pictures and if you’d like to download the script and try it, you are welcome to. At this point, it does not create any mesh, but the UI functions. Comments are welcome.
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