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Written by Petri
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This is an animation test with a smith working in his workshop.
Some data:
- The modeling and animation has been done with Blender 2.49b.
- Ardour has
been used for synched audio.
- Human model and Rig by Juan Pablo
Bouza (Blenrig 3 / Zepam the second)
- Materials from Blender open
material repository (numerous authors)
- Ideas for equipment in the
workshop from Finnish historic workshop pictures found with google
"Sepän paja"
- Stonewall UV texture from some free texture site,
beefed up with displacement. Same applies to stove texture.
- Audio
samples from www.freesound.org under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus
1.0 license, with specific attribution to: dobroide, l0calho5t,
NoiseCollector, Benboncan, reinsamba, martian and mich3d
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Written by Petri
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I have been doing little learning exercises with the Blender 3D modeling software. Some of these tests have involved trying out HDRI lighting for 3D scenes. Earlier I have not been that interested specifically in shooting panoramas. However, now with this new angle to it, I was motivated enough to do some research.
Shooting panoramas is now starting to become pretty interesting topic for travel pictures - travel pictures will be more interesting, when some of them are shot as immersive panoramas viewable on computer and on web browsers.The same applies to shooting HDRI images as well.
I recently bought Samyang 8mm F/3.5 Fisheye lens (review1, review2) and here are my very first panorama test pictures. There obviously are some stitching artefacts due to parallax erros etc... Anyhow, I was pretty impressed with what you can do with free software.I do realise now though that taking good panorama pictures will require carrying around both tripod stand and specific panoramic head (e.g. Panosaurus or one of the expensive ones) to remove/reduce parallax errors that show up as problems in the stitching the panorama.
The specifics:
- Nikon D80 + Samyang 8mm F/3.5 Fisheye
- Pictures taken as RAW (NEF) and converted to 16-bit TIFF with
Nikon NX sw (comes with camera)
- Hugin (good tutorials) + Autopano-sift-c with feature identification suited better for fisheye projection enabled. I have to admit that the autopano-sift-c truly finds better matches than normal autopano, so it is worth installing/compiling.
- No post-processing in these test pictures (GIMP/Photoshop). Only automatic panorama
creation in Hugin + some own control points.
- The only commercial software component: Pure starter
toolkit package by ImmerVision for (portable) panorama creation and for viewing. Other alternatives exist.
- Obviously there are stitching errors (panosaurus ordered :-)
Check out my test pictures and see how the Pure Java panorama player works for you.
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Written by Petri
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Hinausautot.fi is a web site project I put together pretty quickly. Main effort went into planning the site structure and the template. Setup was otherwise pretty straightforward, as the site is running Joomla Open Source CMS.
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Written by Petri
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Ylonen.fi is the official homepage of the Ylönen Family Society. I have made basically a couple of design rounds on the site, and currently it is based on Joomla open source CMS system. Earlier version had somewhat more complicated design and more features, but that was simplified to make it correspond the content available.
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Written by Petri
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We bought some land property and shortly after that a "turn-key" house package called Vihtori from Designtalo in the Spring 2007. We have been living in the house since March 2008. If you are interested to see the steps from buying property to finalising the house, please see our house building blog.
Although the house is already ready, maybe the pictures will help you in your project. Unfortunately the comments in the blog are in Finnish only, but then, one picture can tell more than a thousand words.
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Written by Petri
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This is improved version of the Facebook Notifications gadget created by Frank Liauw. His work was based on the original Facebook gadget by Turhan Aydin. The gadget is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic, but some specific functions are from Google examples (under Apache License).
Improved features of the gadget:
- Menu option to allow "offline" use of Facebook, to avoid need for repeated logins.
- Animated status feed of your friends, based on FQL queries, to avoid need to enter friend feed address manually.
- Image of your friend shown next to his or her status
- Clicking on either the image or the status entry of your friend, will launch browser to the person's page in facebook.
- Settings dialog to configure various options.
- Localised for English and Finnish.
The Gadget will, after (automatic) login, try to fetch friend feed information. Note that if you set parameter for how often feed is fetched to too small value, you might not see all entries in the list before new list is fetched and the showing of the entries is restarted from the most recent entry.
I ended up doing this enhanced version after having used somewhat similar widget in the Microsoft Vista sidebar. However, having fed up that my commercial software did not work with 64-bit Vista Ultimate, I upgraded to 32-bit Windows XP. I missed the sidebar in the XP, so moved on to using the Google desktop which provides all the gadgets I need, now.
Let me know what you think of it, and please let me know if you would like to add to this package localization to your favaourite language.
Testing Status:
- Only tested on Windows XP.
Click here to download Latest version. The latest version is 1.0.0.5 (more or less corrected window resizing, and added tooltip for the status feed to show full status in the tooltip in case the status does not fit into the area available).
In case you don't know how Google Desktop works, you may want to familiarise with the getting started guide.
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Written by Petri
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The capitol of USA! This was the second stop on our road
trip on US East coast. The weather continued to be super good with the
heat wave on, and the city bathed in sun.
There are plenty of motels and hotels to choose from while driving
in USA. However, when we arrived to Washington D.C. in the evening, we
found more or less the last hotel with rooms in the city. Every other
place seemed to be way beyond our price range, or booked. Even this
hotel had rates for the last free rooms three times higher than what we
used to pay for a typical room. It was tempting to just pay and stay in
the city, but we made the right choice when we decided to try our luck
and drive 15-20 minutes out of the city to see if any motels show
up.
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