Worms music video by Sil Van Der Woerd January 18, 2008
Posted by mwj as 3d, art. 3 comments.
Nodes and Web 3.0 October 21, 2007
Posted by mwj as 3d, art, crowd sourcing, virtual worlds, web3.0. 2 comments.Last week at the Masters of Digital Media we were paid a visit by the creators of Houdini, a high end 3d animation suite. I haven’t used much in the way of 3d tools (like Maya, 3D Studio Max or Blender), but I am getting more interested in the subject. This is mostly because I believe that Web 3.0 will consist of traversable 3d space, like the Metaverse from Snow Crash.
Houdini is the most expensive 3d animation software out there, but the big selling point is that it allows users to solve visual problems in a procedural way. This sort of proceduralism works like so: first, you take a standard primitive object, like a basic pyramid or a sphere. Then you select an effect, say the colour red, and apply it to the sphere. After this, perhaps you take a certain bumpy texture and apply it, or a certain set of commands that morph the sphere into a different shape.
Each of these effects are called nodes, and the beauty of them is that they can be re-applied to a different shape to generate a different object. Or we can follow the advice of one of the crew from Houdini, and think of proceduralism as cooking. If we think of this style of creation as making a soup, the object that you apply everything to is like the stock or base, and each node you add is a different ingredient.
GooTube’s got company December 22, 2006
Posted by mwj as art, business, media, politics, technology. 2 comments.
Something new in the blagosphere? Lulu.tv and Lulu.com are offering free, on-demand video and book publishing, and the author keeps 80% of the profits. For any print publishing, this is based off of the number of sales (which, I assume, are made one at a time - how much quality they sacrifice for cheap one-off printing costs I don’t know). For the videos, they promise 80% of the ad revenue generated by video views goes to the person who uploaded it. I don’t know what sort of algorithm they’ve got rigged up for that one, but with a little bit cleaner and tighter presentation on their .tv site, I think they could give the new big kid on the block a run for their video advertising dollars.
warcraft, death and fictive kinship groups December 12, 2006
Posted by mwj as art, death, games, religion, technology, world of warcraft. 2 comments.
Assuming that what Stan says is true, there is a place for bonding in World of Warcraft (WoW). A very real place, since the average amount of time spent in the game by each of its >7 million subscribers is around 2 hours a day.
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Bring it home, boys, bring it home October 25, 2006
Posted by mwj as art, design, journalism, media, news, twu, writing. 1 comment so far. 
Eidolons October 18, 2006
Posted by mwj as art, poetry, religion. add a comment.Re-examine all that you have been told… dismiss that which insults your soul.
–Walt Whitman