I know that it might be tempting, when crossing a state where you do not have a concealed carry permit, to just figure, "Its a hassle to unload and store it in a way that conforms to the Firearms Owners Protection Act. What are the chances that the police will search my car?" At least in Maryland -- shockingly high. Truth & Commonsensereports on a Florida man who was driving through Maryland. From the January 12, 2014 Tampa Tribune:
He did not have a gun with him, and it was a good thing. One of the automated license plate readers in Maryland grabbed his Florida plate, matched it up with Floridas concealed weapon permit files, and then the excitement started:
Finally the patrol cars emergency lights come on, and its almost a relief. Whatever was going on, theyd be able to get it over with now. The officer — from the Transportation Authority Police, as it turns out, Marylands version of the New York-New Jersey Port Authority — strolls up, does the license and registration bit, and returns to his car.
According to Kally and John (but not MTAP, which, pending investigation, could not comment), what happened next went like this:
Ten minutes later hes back, and he wants John out of the Expedition. Retreating to the space between the SUV and the unmarked car, the officer orders John to hook his thumbs behind his back and spread his feet. “You own a gun,” the officer says. “Where is it?”
“At home in my safe,” John answers.
“Dont move,” says the officer.
Now hes at the passengers window. “Your husband owns a gun,” he says. “Where is it?”
First Kally says, “I dont know.” Retelling it later she says, “And thats all I should have said.” Instead, attempting to be helpful, she added, “Maybe in the glove [box]. Maybe in the console. Im scared of it. I dont want to have anything to do with it. I might shoot right through my foot.”
The officer came back to John. “Youre a liar. Youre lying to me. Your family says you have it. Where is the gun? Tell me where it is and we can resolve this right now.”
And yes, the police state of Maryland thoroughly searched the car, separated John and his wife for 90 minutes of interrogation -- and then wrote them a speeding ticket. (They say that they werent speeding, because they were being following by a police car, and knew it.) Maryland, being a liberal controlled state, is fascist. I cant imagine ever driving through it. And I sure would not do it with a gun on me. I do not think I would even do so if the gun were possessed in accordance with the Firearms Owners Protection Act. It sounds like Maryland police might just load the gun so that they would have a reason to arrest you and confiscate the gun.
It sure will be nice when Maryland joins the United States, and the Bill of Rights starts to mean something to them besides gay marriage.
Dear blogger friends today is share an awesome tips How to Add/Display Your Picture in Search Results Beside Each Blog Post Link.(Very Shortly) Like as:
Process to Add Picture Beside Google Search Engine: 01.Go to the blogger dashboard 02.Click on layout and add new gadget "About Me"
04.Click on profile next go to about page 05.After that go to Links and Add your Blog Name & URL here.(Contributor to)
06.Save it. 07.Your process is fully finished just wait 4-5 days after that you see your Google Plus profile picture or image beside blog in Google search engine.
Members of Islamist group, Boko Haram, have been believed to be behind brutal attack on a village in north east Nigeria that saw the slaughtering of scores of civilians
Suspected Boko Haram Islamists killed more than 100 people in an attack on a village in Nigeria, a local senator said on Sunday.
The attackers stormed the village in Nigeria’s restive northeastern Borno state on Saturday, slaughtering scores of civilians and sending many others fleeing.
“A hundred and six people, including an old woman, have been killed by the attackers, suspected to be Boko Haram gunmen,” Senator Ali Ndume said.
“Sixty of the dead have been buried while the rest are awaiting burial,” he added, saying the attacks in the area were becoming “deadlier and more frequent by the day.”
The raid took place on Saturday in the mostly Christian village of Izghe in Borno, which has been under emergency rule since May last year in a bid to stop an Islamist rebellion that has claimed thousands of lives since 2009.
Weird as it may sound, Ive never really been into Facebook until just recently and Ive just realized what Ive been missing all this time.:) While going through some of my friends albums - I saw tons of pictures that brought back fun memories and I just had to have copies! Copying a single photo in FB is easy - just right click on the image and youre done. But copying an album with 200 pictures could become quite a task without the right apps.
Fortunately, there are numerous ways to grab entire albums on Facebook. There are websites that can do it for you online like Picknzip and Facebook2zip.
Ive tried using Picknzip but just cant seem to make it work. Ive used it in Mozilla, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome but it just kept on hanging up on me. Ive even tried to leave the website and PC working for an hour thinking that the site did not hang but was just working in the background - unfortunately, I was wrong :)
Facebook2zip works fine - what it does is create a zip file containing the album youre downloading. It is fast and you get the album in just a couple of minutes. I just noticed that the image quality is reduced/lesser than whats on Facebook. Ive searched their website for a way to make the image quality the same as whats on Facebook but found none so I gave up and moved on to checking out desktop applications that could download albums.,
I came across several programs but most of them are either outdated (cant seem to detect FB albums/profiles) or too difficult to use. One program that I particularly liked is Fotobounce. It is a freeware app so you dont need to pay anything and it does the job perfectly. The application has other features but I only use it to download FB albums (Ill try to figure out its other features soon) Heres a quick step by step guide on how to use it to download FB albums:
1. Log-in your FB account through the application.
2. Click on "Friends" to load your friends list.
3. After selecting the friend who has the album you want to download, click the album tab, select the album, and click download.
4. A window will pop up showing the download progress.
5. After its done - the album will be saved in your pictures folder! Its that easy! :)
Hope this helps! :)
Yes! You Can download your friends albums easily! :)
NOTE: This method works as of November 15, 2012 - Ill update everyone in case it gets outdated too or if I have problems using it in the future :)
Bing is the second most popular search tool on the internet after Google. So is important to raise your search results in a single page to save you time. By default, you may have from 5 to 7 results on each page and the page you are looking for might be far away.
Here is a simple video showing you how to increase the number or results in Bing.com
(Sorry, on the video, my regional setting for MSDN is in French)
Been wanting to purchase that shiny new iPhone 5s or maybe sport your favorite team color by getting one of the colorful iPhone 5c? Just a little more wait and you'll be able to get your hands on a subsidized unit! Very soon! Read more »
One lazy Saturday morning, the kind of Saturday where you just want to relax, eat and unwind, we were invited to try out one of the most famous snack places for Xaverians/ Icans and now, for Judenites too! (..and soon, the entire Metro Manila maybe?) Located in Barangay Little Baguio in San Juan City (Gen De Jesus corner Gen Lim Street), a candy colored place will welcome you into their cozy restaurant -- Pao Pao Xiao Chi. Read more »
Alright, today I wanted to talk and discuss a little bit about Curve in Blender.
Recently I have been using Grease Pencil and converting the Grease Pencil into Curve object. This workflow is very useful and many times we would like to turn Curve into some kind of Solid Pipe or Tube looking object for rendering. If you read my previous blog post, you have probably seen few different ways I would do that, whether: 1. I use Bevel and other curve (Circle) to sort of Loft the shape. 2. I use Extrude and Solidify Modifier.
Apparently, Curve in Blender has something more to it! It actually has hidden built in Tube/Pipe like maker. I just found out about it today. Let me just show you with an example.
Ok, as you all may already know, we could create controlled Curve either by: a. Drawing with Grease Pencil and turning it into Curve b. Drawing the Curve using Poly (extruding points) and then convert it into Curve. (I will probably make video tutorial to just demo this.)
Anyhow, try drawing a Curve yourself, so you have something like this on the scene, a curve:
We got curve. Now we like to turn this into tube like object, and this is todays finding that kind of surprising. Take a look at Curve property on the Curve data panel on the side:
Focus on tab Shape and Geometry.
With Shape Fill checked for both Front and Back, increase the value of Geometry Bevel Depth to higher number than zero. You get something like this that resembles slides:
That is interesting. But here is another more interesting thing. Uncheck the Shape Fill for both Front and Back, you get something like this:
Its like a very low poly tube now (remember it is still Curve object). But very ugly with those random twisting happening. I have no idea why. But if you notice there is this 2D and 3D tab option, you can actually switch from 2D to 3D, and this will amazingly fix the twisting problems:
Cool solid 3D tube.
NOTE: At this stage, do not select 2D option or it will turn it into flat curve to the ground plane.
It does not stop here, because there is actually something interesting with this Curve. If you hit TAB and go to Edit Mode. Select a point or some points, and then press Alt+S (this is actually Shrink/Fatten option, UPDATE: at some point they suddenly called this Scale Feather), and do something like scaling, you could actually control the parameter of how this Curve turns into pipe! Instead of having all same size of pipe, you could have different size at any point, thinner or fatter. Something like below:
And you could also increase the resolution of this resulting Tube/Pipe by increasing Bevel Resolution. Try all the different options parameter under Curve Data and see what else you could find.
Now, like previous blog article, at this stage you could now add Build Modifier and see things grow. Very interesting and useful.
One more thing that I found: If you are using this Curve dynamically as Force: Curve Guide for Particles, the way you have adjusted each point (to be fatter or thinner), will also affect how Particles would behave when following and traveling along this Curve. This is in fact an option that you could turn on and off, called Radius, inside Path Animation tab for each Curve. This has to be turned on if you like Particles to follow the Curve Guide force. The programmer/developer of Blender must have though about this. Not sure if they are actually documented. Maybe they do, but with Blender, often you accidentally found things like this by looking at other people video tutorials on the web.
So... there are apparently a lot about Curve that maybe we have not touched yet. Most 3D artist these days work with Poly anyway, but it is good to know something like this, can be very beneficial when modeling or certain effects.
I must do a video tutorial to show all this to make it clear. In the meantime, feel free to try it yourself :)
UPDATE 2011.11.30: In Blender 2.6x and up, Curve object has been updated so you could now easily turn curve into a solid pipe, by just selecting one of the dropdown options:
ABOUT 3D TYPE I was reading some books in the library the other day and stumbled upon this 2011 publication titled "The 3D Type": http://3d-type.com/
That book is really worth reading and I absolutely recommend it. It is full of great 3D typography examples that you may have or have not imagined, for examples:
Alphabet made by juxtapositions of book on the shelf
Alphabet made by balloon.
Alphabet made by hair.
Alphabet made by arrangement of cup on a gate
Alphabet made by ink.
Alphabet projected on 3D environment
Alphabet of found stones that are shaped like one
Alphabet created by clever arrangement of sandwich
Alphabet created by melted cheese
And so on...
ABOUT 3D TYPOGRAPHY So, what is really 3D TYPOGRAPHY? In my own words, 3D typography is an arrangement and composition of text/alphabet in 3D space that we considered aesthetically beautiful, when properly designed can give extra impact to the message.
The typeface (the type of font) that is chosen can also influence the final look of typography design. True for 2D typography, even more in 3D typography, thus we have 3D TYPE topic.
Combine both 3D TYPE and 3D TYPOGRAPHY, then you have this huge design topic to explore. This is where you think FONT as character.
What would that topic has anything to do with Blender? Blender is actually a perfect tool for conceptualizing 3D TYPE design and TYPOGRAPHY arrangement in 3D.
Blender Text Object is pretty good starter. There is a limitation in term of control if you want to the details such as kerning, etc. It is not so important if your text is for TITLE/HEADING. You will not be doing novel inside Blender anyway. Surely, it could be interesting to think how to setup 3D TYPOGRAPHY for motion graphics animation, like how After Effects or MoGraph. Save that for later.
Alternative to Blender Text Object, we can always use NodeBox2 to prepare the Text Shape as Curves to pass on to Blender. This is perfectly recommended. NodeBox2 allows curve resampling and some easy 2D procedural curves.
3D TYPE(FACE) + 3D TYPOGRAPHY Like great examples shown on that book (shown at a glance on the video above), you can actually re-create most of them in CG.
Okey, purist artists might prefer to have a hands on 3D TYPE such as those made of grass or balloon, etc, that is all fine and dandy. Surely there are a lot more unexplored 3D TYPE concepts that are only possible to be done in CG, or at least create proof of concept, and maybe do 3D print. --- 3D print will get cheaper, so take notice! Home 3D printer is in my wishlist.
I remember some years ago, one of my college major projects was also to create 3D TYPE, Alphabet Set that is totally creative, made by juxtaposition of real everyday objects and to serve a purpose (for example: if the alphabet design is for furniture company, then you maybe design the alphabet using furniture). My design was this alphabet set created from liquid. Back then, we dont have Blender :) I created all the works using Photoshop. I kind of fake the liquid using halftone effect. This liquid text can be made a lot better if I were to do it again today.
THE BASIC STUFF So, lets think further about 3D type and typography together. 3D type in term of the design of the type (it should still readable as alphabet) and typography in term of the composition you will be creating.
Often time maybe we may just think: start with a Text object, choose a beautiful font, then extrude it and put it in 3D space, such as below:
Boring 3D type with perspective camera.
How about like this, set the camera to Ortographic and re-render with just ambient occlusion. Notice how "ortographic camera" can be quite neat. Try rendering your scene this way.
Very design-ish, but still boring.
These are very basic and will serve its purpose, sometimes you dont need any more than this. You could play around with the Bevel Object to create additional details. Similar to what you see at old signage design nicely carved edge and framed.
This beveled 3D TYPE alone, if you like to do further research and exploration can be interesting to study and explore.
BEVEL OBJECT EXAMPLE
Create a Text Object, hit TAB and change the text to your liking, keep it one word for now.
Under Text Object - Object Data panel, input Bevel Object with curve object. NOTE: Be careful here, if your Bevel Object curve is too big, you might get an unwanted result. You basically just need to rescale the curve you use as Bevel Object, and revoke the Bevel Object again. This does not refresh automatically, unfortunately, maybe they can change this in the future version of Blender. Maybe its the way for text object to cook off the object and save memory.
For Bevel Object, an open curve and a close curve profile will give you different result.
Without bevel edge, we get this more modern type (actually more boring, but simple, hence modern) tend to have this simple smoother plastic/metal-ish edge.
You could then continue then by adjusting other parameters such as:
COLOR: (notice that multiple materials on a single live Blender Text Object is possible)
Good thing being Text Object is that things are still easily editable. I try to always keep Text Object as is.
When you are in Text Object edit mode, you can easily assign multiple materials.
If I am correct, Blender Internal Render has little issue rendering Text Object with Ambient Occlussion, the solution is to convert it to normal Poly object and re-render. Alternatively, Blender Cycles render Text Object without any issue.
MATERIAL: (or surface property)
Blender Cycles is cool at creating this raytrace material: Chrome, Glass, but I think Blender Internal Render with Subsurface Scattering is still better at giving plastic/skin natural realistic look, similar to RenderMan.
TEXTURE:
Node based procedural texture in Blender is rarely noticed. Seriously they are fantastic, even better on Cycles because of the realtime preview. Separate tutorial needed to just explore the possibilities of material created with those procedural textures. Take notice of FAC attribute and MIX node, they are important.
SHADER (combination of color, texture, material, displacement) can play important job because it turns 3D TYPE into objects that have physical belivability.
Anything else I have not touched here? I think thats all the basic of what typically we do when doing 3D TYPE. Dont get me wrong, as designers, you can get really creative treating your 3D with just all above basic elements.
But of thats all about what we can do with 3D TYPE, it is still BORING, dont you think? I think so.
GET MORE INSPIRATION For more inspirations and research study, take a look some examples of 3D TYPE on famous movie posters. Some of them are interesting, some are a little bit boring. For these examples, I will borrow some images from Google Images Search, I dont think anyone would mind:
Movie Poster Title Examples
Dressed up movie title like Happy Feet Two is quite cute. Beautifully textured Kungfu Panda 2. Perhaps the Shrek Title also can be inspiration. Usually good 3D TYPE is easily recognizeable, even a single letter can tell you thats from which movie, for example The Matrix.
TAKE 3D TYPE FURTHER How can we take 3D TYPE into the next level? I will take you to explore this in the next article post.
DISTORTED TYPE (Particles, Displace Modifier)
SMOKE TYPE (Particles Fluid)
LIQUID TYPE (Volume Polygonizer)
FURRY TYPE (Hair)
BLOBBY TYPE (Particles)
ABSTRACT TYPE (Particles)
PROCEDURAL TYPE (Particles)
FRACTURED TYPE
ETC
Take a look at this awesome inspiration:
Hopefully this intro article on 3D TYPE can be useful for you, Try to take 3D TYPE further so that each text is totally unique and like a character in your scene!
UPDATE: Check this video for extra 3D typography inspiration:
UPDATE 2013.03.09: Motion Graphic Designer must love to see this: Sagmeister & Walsh Interview Its quite fun to see how those 2 designers worked really hard to create 3D type in real life. There is an art in itself of course. Their idea and execution is very clever.
Our job as 3D artist is probably to observe and think how to recreate the 3D type more efficiently in 3D, or maybe what can we create in 3D that cannot be replicated in real life? https://vimeo.com/58575990
Yu Zhenhuan from China is the world’s hairiest man with hair covering 96 percent of his body. Yu was diagnosed with a rare condition that causes hair to grow in places it normally shouldn’t. He was born in a farmer family and when he was only 2 years old his parents noticed he had hair coming out of his auditory canals. His situation worsened as he grew up and now almost his entire body is covered with long thick hair.
But Yu might have the chance of living a normal life, he is now undertaking a laser treatment to have his hair removed. Basically, every hair on his body will have to be zapped with laser. That can’t be pleasant, but for Yu Zenhuan it’s nowhere as painful as looking in the mirror.
Couple of days ago his girlfriend posted some new photos on a Chinese forum.
