If you haven’t see how it works, give that LEAP website a look. Control of your PC with just your fingertips and gestures in the air – People following the Leap have been waiting patiently for news of when we can get our hands on, or “on” the device. It came this morning.

I followed along in a tutorial diligently to create my first kind of complex rig. Solid enough model, great concept to try, good tutorial. Tried things on my own and found that duplicating shape keys in Blender 2.65 uses a different system all together.

Even after upgrading to the latest version, one project of mine was not behaving correctly in one of three views. No matter what I selected, the view was locked to center on the 3D Cursor in Blender. Fixing it’s a breeze, breaking it without knowing, however, that was harder.

It’s much easier to edit someone else’s work than it is to create the original. That said, as I dig deeper into detailing a 3D model of the “fourth” Enterprise Star Ship, the B, I would have gotten nowhere fast without first having Martin Shaw’s mesh. The proportions are sound and all the large chunks are represented. Straightening out normals and modeling details for closer camera work than the original model allows has been my goal.

Over 2,000 years ago, something happened. Something bigger than global, bigger than Earth. Whatever it was caused fourteen known calendars at the time to re-adjust their count of days in a year. It seems to have happened in 701 BC and everyone is making religion out of it. What’s the science?

He’s funny! Poster child for social networks in the naughts laughs last and loudest putting down snarky Tweeter then claiming if he changed his picture from the Tom avatar we all know, the Internet would break. The put down that shows our friend, Tom, is doing just fine. And a fine article surrounding it.

In the midst of organizing for the holidays, or end of the world, whichever, I keep encountering a few nice things I know nothing about. One such example is a lamp my parents prized. With Google knowing everything there is to know about things, I thought I’d give the Google Image Search a whirl. It requires you snap and shot and upload an image for the great Google machine to analyze. The results were not entirely unhelpful. I did laugh. But I know less now than I knew before.

The video from YouTube, titled “Chick Bank robber” is a numbing example of stooooopid – 19 year old chick robs a Nebraska bank. Posts the video, flaunts the cash, etc and gets arrested the next day. The CNN reporter has to use a mirror to read hand written messages in the video which are all backwards – one guess why? It stumps CNN producers, the reporter and whomever else helped make the segment but it’s too easy, the webcam was set to invert or mirror the video so the darling bank robber could see herself positioned correctly. Also, “Shiny” comes up. The CNN reporter suspects that the bank robber might be referring to the glossy finish of a Cadillac she stole; I haven’t seen the video, but I wonder if it’s a reference to ‘shiny’ as vernacular, like ‘cool,’ or ‘bad,’ popularized in Firefly by Joss Wheadon. Anyhow, there you have it, The Flower State’s growing’em low.

CNN video

After hearing that WETA and the boys used ZBrush for The Two Towers and Return of the King and contributed to the second ZBrush release with their advice, I thought, “Shit yeah! I’m getting that!” After Photoshop 6 many years ago, ZBrush was the second software I ever shelled out good money for. Its interface stared at me and ZSpheres floated around and I was utterly stumped. Totally fucking bewildered is more like it. With Release 4, I got all excited again – Pixologic was offering FREE upgrades if you could prove you were ever a customer. I could. I downloaded it to Windows 7 and again, its interface stared at me and ZSpheres floated around and I was utterly stumped. Now I was pissed.

Then, something happened. I visited Pixologic’s website ready to give this another go – Sculptris, a free download and “unlimited” software was available to “cut your teeth on” giving you the modeling tools without all those ZShits messing you up. It’s taken a while, but I have some good advice if you’re just starting out…

Does your new Textpattern installation invite and show comments three times? Just out of the box, the new Textpattern 4.5.2 is a gleaming machine of new HTML and CSS – if you’ve not designed your own CMS but used the default, messing with the Admin side of things can get that Comment Display to stutter. Here’s how to stop it…