MD5 Fellow

Because of my duties in this period I leaved aside the blog, and I was going to forget to post here about the MD5 Fellow project.



It is a 3D model of a character, created expressly as a test model for MD5 Reader 2 project.

At the current state, this is the first release of MD5 Fellow (v 0.1). The model is provided as *.blend file format (the Blender 3D internal file format) is complete with a skeleton (Armature) that permits to animat it easily enough.

MD5 Fellow does not have any textures or materials yet, but adding them is in our future plans.
About skeleton and weights, it is already usable but it needs some fine tuning.

MD5 Fellow is released under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 license: you can use the model and modify it for any open source project, if you attribute the author (me) and share any modifications under the terms of the same license or a compatible one. For more informations and guidelines about attributing the author try to visit the Creative Commons site.
If you would like to use MD5 Fellow for commercial use, please contact me to find a agreement.

MD5 Fellow is a really important project for me because it is the result of a long research to get the best possible mesh. It still needs to be fine tuned but I think it is a satisfy result. In the past I already started to study the argument (Notes on 3D human modeling), but I abbandoned it for a long period.
MD5 Fellow concludes this research path and is a placeholder of the basis on wich I approach characters modeling.

Cariatide strikes back

If you remember the first pencil draft i made, the Cariatide (I have still not found a English translation for this italian word), now you could be interested in this evolution. It is still a WIP, but it is going to be what I imagine when I drew the pencil.

I am not an expert of Digital Painting, and this is my first notable result of some months spent playing with The Gimp airbrush settings, to be used with my USB Wacom Graphire 4, and trying some techniques using layers and masks (alpha channels).
At the end, I found this tutorial: Draw An Eye In Gimp, where the author gives a magic setup for airbrush used with tablets.

« Airbrush (shortcut a) -- This tool is used to create all shades in and around the eye. Note that you don't need to change the colour in the palette to create grey -- just let the opacity of the airbrush work for you. See the basic and Advanced airbrushing tutorials on more info on this. Set the opacity of the airbrush to 20% (!), the rate to 80% and the pressure to 10%.

For tablet users: Set all sensitivities except colour. Use an opacity of 80% instead, remember to use a light hand to apply the strokes. »

This are the two settings I used.

Unfortunatelly my The Gimp is configured with an italian localizzation.

Though, apart from the general opacity (opacità), rate (ammontare) and pressure (pressione), that are setted as explained in the tutorial, I used this two different configurations for the sensitivity activation check boxes. All activated, except for the color check box, or all disabled, except for the opacity check box.

The first one gives a brush that is better for details of the paint. The second one, instead, gives a brush better for large areas or soft filled areas.

The other settings you can modify are brush size and hardness. To set these two values, I configured four shortcuts from the preference panel of The Gimp. This way I am able to dimically change them, without loose time opening the brush tab and grab the slide bars, working a lot more comfortable and increasing working speed.

Not all the merit for this result is deserved by the tutorial above. I spent a lot of time to find a good approach to a more rational Digital Painting technique. And the result is a method that mix the settings above, with the use of a different layer for each color of the image. Each of these layers have a mask and I paint directly on the mask using white or black color.
Moreover my preferred way to work is to have a fully opaque mask and use black to make the layer trasparent where I want highlights or midtones. This whay you can use easly blending modes, if you need, and layer opacity.

To recreate a marble skin for the girl I used a texture created following this tutorial: Alastair's tutorial - Marble.

Some usefull Gentoo command line instructions

With this command is possible to list all the installed packages of a certain category, that are up to date or that need to be updated.

eix -A media-video | grep -E "\[[IU]\]"

For the example category, I choosed, I got this output.

[I] media-video/dvdauthor
[I] media-video/ffmpeg
[I] media-video/lives
[I] media-video/mjpegtools
[I] media-video/mkvtoolnix
[I] media-video/mpeg2vidcodec
[I] media-video/mplayer
[I] media-video/nvidia-settings
[I] media-video/totem
[I] media-video/vcdimager
[I] media-video/xanim
[I] media-video/xine-ui

This is a variant of the previous command, that lists the packages with the description.

eix -A media-video | grep -iE -A 4 "\[[IU]\]" | awk '{ if ($1 == "[U]" || $1 == "[I]") { print $0 } else { if ($1 == "Description:") { print substr( $0, index( $0, ":" ) + 1 ) } } }'

And this is the output I got.

[I] media-video/dvdauthor

         Tools for generating DVD files to be played on standalone DVD players

[I] media-video/ffmpeg

         Complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. Includes libavcodec. SVN revision 9330

[I] media-video/lives

         Linux Video Editing System

[I] media-video/mjpegtools[I] media-video/mkvtoolnix

         Tools to create, alter, and inspect Matroska files

[I] media-video/mpeg2vidcodec

         MPEG Library

[I] media-video/mplayer

         Media Player for Linux

[I] media-video/nvidia-settings

         NVIDIA Linux X11 Settings Utility

[I] media-video/totem

         Media player for GNOME

[I] media-video/vcdimager

         GNU VCDimager

[I] media-video/xanim

         program for playing a wide variety of animation, audio and video formats

[I] media-video/xine-ui

         Xine movie player

And if you find any package in the category that needs to update, you can update all of them in a single command.

emerge -p `eix -A media-video | grep -iE "\[U\]" | awk '{ if ( $1 == "[U]" ) { print $2 } }'`

Control the output and, if it is correct, run the command once more without `-p' option to actually complete it.

Avril

There is a long time that I do not update any drawings.

This one (hope that it is not offensive) was made as a test for a comic book story, where the eroine should look like Avril Lavigne.

I done many tests but I still not sure if it is a good result. Though I do not like Avril.

MD5 Reader 2 CVS

MD5 Reader 2 CVS source code is up. For informations on how to download it go here. If anyone is interested to contribute future development, subscribe to sourceforge.net and follow instructions on how to request to be added as developer to an existing project.

MD5 Reader 2 is the continuation of a dead project, originally created by ChaosDeathFish, that makes the 3D engine for Java, jME, able to load MD5 3D animated models.

This loader supports mesh, materials, weighted skeletons and animation. These features was not nativelly supported under jME; at least until one of the latest CVS code implemented a new skeletal system for jME.

Though MD5 Reader 2, can provide a valid alternative to native jME skeletal system or can be used a an intermediate file format converter, that gives to modelers the chance to model, rigging and animate their models, for example, with Blender and export them with der_ton's blender2md5 exporter.

The Mars face

One of the last ideas I was working to, is the realization of a face for the open source game Mars land of no mercy, in which I am involved as member of the team. The face should be a monument inspired by the well known Mars face. The complete post is here.

The first step consist to draw a sketch of the face using the original image of the Cydonia Mensae that contain the feature commonly known as the "face", taken by the Viking 1.
I tryed to imagine how a hypothetical face should look like if the face on the photo would have been a real face.

And here is the "work in progress" result.

Mars Land of no Mercy game is Copyright © 2006 by Mars Land of No Mercy authors.

The return of the...

I have been busy for some time the past month. I encountered many problems with computers.
Technology have not been on my side in the last period.

Mother Board and Processor of my girlfriend's computer got burned in the half of agust and we have been waiting for a week for the new components we ordered.
Usally the seller needs no more that 3 days to deliver the components but, in the middle of agust, a week is reasonable ;-) .

In the meanwhile I was installing Slackware Linux in a new computer that I bought to have a more performant desktop. I need to work with graphics and the currently released applications asking more and more "need for speed". Slackware is a really lightweight system, but not KDE or GNOME :-D.
Also the installation of Slackware anyway gave me many problems so I had 2 problems for 10-15 days: a burned computer and one working but without any system :-D .

Anyway somehow things have gone well at the end.

Currently my drawing effort is really poor. I am really immersed in some coding work.

I fixed some applications from different projects.
First of all I fixed the World Forge blender2cal_2.py exporter to work with Blender 2.42 and fliping correctly coordinate system to match Soya 3D and jME orientation matrix. Currently the latest news of this attempt are here.
Secondly I fixed the ChaosDeathFish's MD5Reader for jME to work with the latest jME CVS. MD5Reader is an importer to load MD5 3D models format (DOOM 3 and Quake 4) into jME. This effort have been possible thanks to the help of mcbeth, who fixed the model boundings update and send to me the lates MD5Reader sources, currently not any more available online. Of course a great help to make this fix possible have been suggestions from the author.

Currently I am in trouble with many aspects of Linux, so I have been not able to release this fixes yet. But I hope to resolve them in few days and putting up a page somewere with these usefull (I hope) pieces of code.