Category: Cool sights

As so often happens, I find something of interest to me and share it with all three of my readers, even though I know it will be of interest to zero of them. Such is the life of a self-centered geek with an online voice.

Since I’ve been trying to learn new stuff (that’s an industry standard term – it means stuff) on the computer lately, I’ve worked a bit with the open-source 3D modeling tool Blender in my spare time the past few weeks. My artistic skills are roughly equal to my social skills, which means I’m pretty sucky at creating artistic content. Still, I’m having fun learning, even if it is something I’ll never use beyond fun-time play. While tooling around online finding more Blender guides and tutorials, I found this old but still relevant guide to render settings for generating final Blender scenes.

Blender’s built-in rendering options offer many different possibilities for size, effects, and quality. Different settings may drastically affect rendering times. The goal for this analysis is to discover the most efficient methods for achieving the desired image quality with the minimum rendering time. When rendering for animations it is extremely important to achieve the best results is the shortest time possible, since one second of animation represents 30 rendered images.

The author goes on to cover half a dozen different renders and show the visual output as well as the necessary run times to generate a frame. Now the tutorial is from 2004, which means current hardware improvements and probable software improvements have made these times far higher than what they would be if the tests were run on modern hardware. But the relative time is the important point, and the difference between the simplest render setting that gives good results to one of the best render settings that consumes loads of time for improved results is clear. If you have thought about playing around with modeling, I highly recommend Blender, the Blender noob to pro tutorials, the Essential Blender book, the Blender model repository, and any guides you can find (like the one I’ve highlighted here) that can help with render settings and content creation.

[tags]Blender, Tutorial, Tutorials, Render settings, 3D modeling, Open source[/tags]

Hard to explain. Just check out the site and do a search.

Here’s what I get when I go a Toogle search for “Parthenon”:

Continue reading “Toogle – nifty image tom-foolery”

Utterly useless for me, what with having no pool and all, but how cool are these floating jellyfish lights?

All show and no sting, these battery-operated Floating Jellyfish Pool Lights unleash a kaleidoscope of color as they float in the water. For larger pools, unleash a flotilla to create a crowd-pleasing effect.

• Crafted of durable PVC
• Realistic, fiber-optic tentacles emit a vibrant glow
• Top changes colors throughout the light show
• Controlled by a simple auto-off switch

Uses four AA batteries (included).

And while you are there looking at lights I don’t need, check out the underwater light show projector they have. Should be cool for pool owners. (via boingboing)

[tags]Jellyfish pool lights[/tags]