dsavi

The preview of Röyksopp's new album, Senior. In particular, Adventures in Barbieland. On repeat. It's 57 seconds long. http://www.youtuberepeat.com/watch/?v=uXQv7TGJnqI

One of my monitors is an LG and works excellently, in fact it's the better one of the two. But I still say Asus, given the specs.

That would actually make a very short and simple tutorial. I'll make it if you promise to do it yourself and post the results.

My schedule will be awesomely random, because my schedule can change whenever the teachers feel like it. This means that I might have 8-4 one day, and the day off the next. Keeps me on my toes.

Did that second sig for you quick. Tried to make it match the one you did as much as possible (Minus the jpegification) [img=http://img808.imageshack.us/img808/8424/franzrequest.jpg]

I've never even tried surfing but I have a relative in San Diego that surfs, we went to Moonlight beach a few times and it was amazing. The waves also seemed right for surfing.

You already have the case and dvd drive, the $400-500 is on top of that. Should have made that more clear. Also, I believe Nadril and Ultimania made it quite clear that it's possible to build a decent gaming rig for under $500 (It could have been $400 actually).

Space weather watching is getting trendy lol.

You have this case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119115 , and this DVD drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136144&Tpk=gh22np20 . You have $400-500 to spend, and you must get Windows 7 (Not home basic). This is for my uncle, who went to me for advice on what to get. I'm pretty sure he doesn't game (:razz:), but I'd like you to max out the specs anyway. My dad's family is pretty technical, another of my uncles worked with one of those punch card programmed computers in the '70s and at one point knew assembler, and my dad is an engineer and programmer, so even if he's just under sixty I'm sure he can figure it out. Build away :-)

Hmm. I was hoping that would actually tell me something. But it didn't. :razz:

It's not? .....The film nut inside of me just died a little. I thought it was some sort of a sitcom until my friend told me what it is about.

adfadsf

It's your browser. I don't see any green.

Yeah I don't like the updates and changes they've made, also there are some basic things that Echofon does that are really stupid (Like making it impossible to use other windows while Echofon is open).

Wait, did you find a replacement for echofon? I would be interested to hear what it is.

In that search thing, type in terminal, when it opens type in ps -A. (I may be making up commands here) Copy and paste the results into a post.

Like I said I'm not actually happy until someone does one of these tutorials. Is there some tutorial that someone would actually be interested in doing that I could write? Here's some I have in mind: Modeling basics (Enough so that you could go do a more advanced tutorial) Very basic animation (Basically how to add keyframes, and a bit of graph editing, again enough so that you could do something more advanced) Compositing basics, like depth of field, motion blur, glow, color correction etc. Rendering and lighting basics

Ah, in that case, one thing you can do is strengthen your legs so you can jump higher. Keep doing it on the trampoline until you can do it in your sleep so you can get some rotation down. Then keep doing it on the trampoline, but don't bounce. Stand still on the trampoline, and then do a front flip. The tension on the trampoline will give you some extra bounce than you would on the ground, but not so much as you would actually bouncing, so it's a good transition. Once you can do that, try standing on the bar of the trampoline and try front flipping. BE CAREFUL. I suggest jumping forward while doing this to prevent an accident on the bar. If you're not 100% confident, then DON'T DO IT. Once you're comfortable with these, then work on the ground. I'd recommend getting a spotter while you do it. The strengthening of your legs will allow you to jump high (high enough to get a full rotation), and the rotation practice on the trampoline will allow you to rotate faster. I've done it a few times on the ground, I can do it "in my sleep" too. Also, I've gotten rid of most of my confidence issues. Here's the problem; My trampoline has a net (Which has saved my neck more than a few times), making it impossible to do a flip into the trampoline. Wait a minute, that doesn't add up. I can take part of it down. Thanks for the advice people. :-) Much appreciated.

Programmer: Okay maybe not. I do program though. The closest I get to "Your scene sucks" is "Prehistoric Emo", although I'd never wear half of that stuff. I have thick-rimmed black plastic glasses (See image), pretty short hair, I play the flute, bike a lot, do computer graphics and listen to modern classical. That probably leaves me at nerd. [spoiler=My glasses]

Can you land it? Or do you not rotate fully around? I can land it (In a crouch) but it hurts. You mean doing a PK roll afterwards? Yes, if you're going from a trampoline to the ground, the roll will be beneficial in the long run, as it takes some pressure off your joints from the impact. Yes, if you're going from a trampoline to the ground, the roll will be beneficial in the long run, as it takes some pressure off your joints from the impact. I didn't mean that literally (Should have phrased it better), I mean I know how to do a good in-place (i.e. from a level jump) front flip on a trampoline, and I'm trying to learn to do it on the ground properly. E: Sorry something went wrong with the quotes.

Did you get it in that format? If not, then go back and save it as PNG.

In this tutorial I'll go through basic smoke simulation in Blender 2.5. You can achieve some very nice looking results with just the right knowledge. You'll also learn how to put the first tutorial into practice. If you haven't read it yet, go read it: How to Understand the Blender User Interface First some demos, however. I want you to know what kind of smoke we're talking about. Yeah, that kind of smoke. This tutorial won't produce results that awesome (It would be maybe almost twice as long) but it will certainly get you started. What you'll need: Blender 2.53 Beta (http://blender.org) A beverage of your choice (Depending on your weather I would either recommend lemonade or tea) Possibly a sandwich too Open up Blender, there should be a cube in the center (But not as big as in the below picture). The cube is selected by default, if it isn't then right click on it. We're going to scale it to five times its current size. Press S, (Scale) then Numpad 5 (Multiplies the size by five). Hit Enter to confirm. What we are doing right now is creating the smoke domain. The smoke domain is the area that the smoke can "live" in. This restriction cuts down processing time significantly. (Otherwise Blender would have to calculate smoke physics in an infinite area, which could result in infinite processing time needed I'm not sure). Next, in the properties window, click on the physics tab. Under a heading that says Smoke click on the Add button. Then click on Domain. Next we'll add an object to emit smoke. Press SHIFT+A (Add), select Mesh->Icosphere. The problem is that now it's in the middle of the domain and we want it to be on the bottom, so that the smoke has room to rise. Press G (Move) Z (Z axis) and move your mouse down. Click or press Enter to confirm. Oops, I moved it too far (Okay so it wasn't a mistake, and it's not visible in the above picture BTW), so we need to make sure it's in the domain by switching to a side view. Press Numpad 1 (Front view), and then Numpad 5 (Which changes the view to orthographic). Orthographic is the opposite of perspective, so lines to not converge on the horizon. Now make sure that the sphere is in the domain. If it's in the square, it's inside and it's okay. If it isn't, press G and then Z again and move your mouse so that it moves up into the bottom of the domain (Leave some room below it too). Click or Enter to confirm. I like working in perspective mode, so press Numpad 5 to go back to perspective mode. The Physics tab should still be open. Again, press Add under Smoke, but this time press Flow. This means that smoke will flow out of this object. Now it's time to change some particle settings. Go to the Particle tab, and change End to 20 and Lifetime to 5. Now I'll explain what that means. Particles are just points in space, that can be used to simulate a number of things (In this case smoke emission). They can also be used to simulate liquids and Newtonian particles (Speed = 9.81m/s² etc.). Each particle, starting from when it is emitted from the "Emittor", has a lifetime. This means it will disappear after a certain amount of frames. The "Start" and "End" values dictate when the emission will start and end. The amount is the amount of particles. So since there are 1000 particles emitted over a 20-frame period (Less than one second at 24fps), 50 particles are emitted from the object every frame. Got that? Good. :razz: It's not critical that you understand that. Now scroll down in the particles tab to the "Velocity" header. I forgot to highlight it, but change "Normals" to 0 and "Z" to "1". Whoops, I forgot something else too. Go back to the Physics tab. Check "Inital Velocity". This means that the smoke will have momentum when it is emitted from the emitter object. Time to test it out! My computer is three years old (Although it was pretty decent at the time) but this is still quite resource intensive. So don't be worried if it lags. Press ALT+A, and watch the smoke rise. (Pressing ALT+A again will pause it) YEAH. Pretty metal. :razz: But it sucked. That's not as awesome as it can be. (Your smoke probably looks different than mine) Let's add something for it to collide into. SHIFT+A (Add, again) Mesh->Cube. Now to make the result more unpredictable, let's move it over a bit and make it into a cuboid. First click on the red arrow and drag it in the direction of your choice. Now let's go into the top view with Numpad 7 and resize it on the X axis by pressing S and then X, and then moving your mouse around. Click when you're done. Scale it on the Y axis a bit too. Can you guess the keyboard shortcut for that? :razz: With that done, let's go back into the front view by pressing Numpad 1. Make it a bit thinner by scaling it on the Z axis. Now in the smoke panel, press Add under Smoke and click Collision. Now press ALT+A again. It should be even slower, but have patience. :-) We need to set up a material for the domain now. Wait, the domain is only a container that should be invisible, why would we set up a material for that? Actually, the domain also acts as the only place that smoke can be rendered. It's like a machine that "Reveals" the smoke when the smoke is inside that area. So go to the Materials tab, and click on Volume. Smoke is a volumetric material, like steam or fog. This means you can see through it, and light is scattered around in it. To put it simply. Change the Density to 0. Why are we changing the density to 0? We will define the density by a 3D texture which has 3D pixels called voxels. (Volumetric + pixels). The density value is given to every voxel before the texture is applied, which means if we leave it at 1, we'll get a cube that just looks filled with smoke. Go to the Textures Panel (Barely visible under that dropdown), and change the texture Type to Voxel data. Scroll down, and under a heading that says "Influence" uncheck "Emission Color" (Here you can only see "Emission C") and check "Density". This makes so that our texture will influence the density and not, you got it, the emission color! Whoops, looks like I've forgotten an image here. Somewhere in the same panel there should be a header "Voxel Data". Under that header there should be something that says "Domain object:". Click on that, and from the dropdown select "Cube". Time to do a first test render! Press F12. Well that sucks. Fortunately I know what's wrong, being all-knowing and wise as I am. First let's just fix the camera. In the front view, (Numpad 1 if you're not already there- See the top left corner of the 3D view) zoom out a bit by scrolling down and press CTRL+ALT+Numpad 0. Now to fix that wispy junk we got in the first render. Go to the materials tab, and change "Density scale" to 20. This basically makes it twenty times as dense. You can render it now if you want, and you'll see the difference. (Those objects won't be black by the end of the tutorial). But it's time to kick it up a notch. This is where the beverage and/or sandwich comes in. With your domain selected (Right click so that it's highlighted orange), go to the physics tab one last time, scroll down, and get out the big guns. First change the domain resolution "divisions" to 64. Check "Smoke high resolution", scroll down, open the panel "Smoke high resolution cache", and select "Bake all dynamics". Do not do this if your computer has less than 2GB of RAM and a 2gHz dual-core processor. Unless, of course, you have prepared a three-course meal and have lots of plans for the evening, including but not limited to theater and possibly a night on the town. When it's done, change the frame in the timeline (The horizontal thing at the bottom) to 1, and press ALT+A. This also might take a while. When it's at a cool looking frame, hit ALT+A again (Be patient) and when it stops lagging like crazy press F12, That's more like it. Two more things. Those other objects (The emitter and the collision object) are black in the render. Select them one at a time, go to the materials tab, scroll down to the Shadow header and check "Receive transparent". Smoke casts a shadow of varying opacity, and Blender turns off the reception of transparent shadows off by default (It's rarely used). The other thing you should do is go into the material tab with the domain selected, and change the step size to 0.05. (Scroll down). Now I'm tired and can't be bothered to show you the (Quite simple) lighting setup I made. Just throw some lights in there with SHIFT+A Lamp->Point. Move 'em around a bit. You can even rotate them a bit. I honestly don't care. When you're done, go to the first tab (The one all the way to the right), and change the output to AVI Jpeg if you want video or PNG if you want just a still image. If you want to render video, press CTRL+F12 after that (Look for the resulting file in C:\tmp or /tmp). Learn Sanskrit or take skydiving lessons or something. If you want a still image just press F12. That is all.

Can you land it? Or do you not rotate fully around? I can land it (In a crouch) but it hurts. You mean doing a PK roll afterwards?

I think the B&W one stood out a lot more.

Not an odd question at all actually. One goal of the Blender 2.5 project was to make so that users did not have to be admins to use Blender. You have to be an admin to install it, of course. But to use it you just download a zipped file that contains an exe that you can run as any user account. It does also create a .blender folder in your home folder where Blender has its default file. Since the user interface information (How you have your windows set up etc.) is stored in the default file format (.blend), there's a .blend file in that folder that Blender loads every time it starts. I should also mention that I'm almost done with the next tutorial (Smoke simulation). Here's a screenshot.