digital home of MacSlow

The first alpha version of blender 2.50 (what will become blender 2.60 once final) is officially out. It is being stress-tested by their user-community and by the artists working on “Sintel” (the newest installment of the OpenMovie-series by the blender foundation).

I’m really looking forward to this new short, even more than I anticipated the last two ones. Because this time around I, or rather the martial-arts team I’m a member of (banGang), is going to help out the creative minds behind “Sintel” with fighting, acrobatics, stunts and reference footage.

I’m leaving for Texas, USA soon. Me being a German living in - guess - Germany, causes the need to apply for the US “Visa Waiver Program” using https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov (thanks again to Otto for reminding me *g*) these days. While clicking through and filling out the forms of the electronic variant of that “green sheet of paper” (the one you used to have to fill out on the plane prior to landing on US soil) I was greeted by this notice…

It’s almost 2010! Have the people, who implemented that web-interface, ever heard of Unicode or do they expect international travelers to not use anything but ASCII to supply their (usually non-english) names, which carry the high probability with them to not use ASCII characters only? For me it’s just the ü in my surname. I wonder what people with funkier names do, when they have to diverge from the correct name-spelling to something this ESTA-system accepts. Once they succeed there, I bet they have a hard time trying to convince the staff at customs, that they are really themselves, because the spelling of their name on the passport doesn’t even remotely match the spelling in the visa-waiver-form.

I once almost wasn’t let aboard a plane in Germany, because the travel-agency booked my flight on “Mueller”, but my passport says “Müller”. Is all that the legacy-fault of Cobol?

… so… I wrote my first particle-system ever. It does not look photorealistic - by far not *g* - but implementing something like that is great fun! You see a cluster of 5000 particles in the screencasts below. Right now I’ve two emitters (a “singularity” one and a rectangle one) with a gravity force-field being applied to the particles. WASD/Quake-like camera-navigation I implemented too, so one can “walk around”. From here numerous things could be added: wind, general turbulence, attraction-/repulsion-forces between particles, collision-detection with obstacles… the visualization could be improved with motion-blur, lighting, shadows etc. Rendering- and simulation-loop are coupled and run at 60 Hz. Screencasts were recorded with 30 Hz.