Mattiesworld

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Blender experiment of the day (night?): Extrusion & glass material

For the first time in history, there’s an “open source pavilion” on one of the biggest CG exhibitions. You can follow daily video coverage on BlenderNation! Quite entertaining for a fanboy like me.

Recently, I wanted to make a simple animation to put on a webpage. I have a background image and a rendered 3D animation which should be on top of that.

When it comes to lossless image compression, PNG is my all-time favorite. It has layer support, full transparency, lossless non-patented compression, open format, … So the PNG-derived MNG would be a logical choice for animation, right? Wrong! Almost none of the current browsers support it out of the box! Mozilla supported it for some time, but gave up due to bloated implementation. Konqueror is the only one supporting MNG! Can you believe that? Maybe you can, if you see the popularity of Flash. But what if you just want a simple animation? Is the loading of a full flash player justified for a simple animation? And why prefer a closed proprietary format if there are open ones? So I went on a quest for better formats. (more…)

From time to time, Google just keeps surprising me. The innovative projects just keep coming. This time it’s Google’s Sketchup that got my attention. It’s another one of those products they bought in and modified it to integrate with some other google technology.
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