I’ve pulled down my twitter feed plugin for now. As much as I wanted to follow the trend, Twitter never did anything for me. Now that it has started dying, probably as teens start realizing no one gives a shit about their angst, I figure why not just dump the whole thing. Now I can focus my time and energy in beating people to the next social media trend. WOOO, www.24_7BathRoomShot.com Watch as you and your friends do nature’s business and then comment on it: “Oh damn Skylar, that looks like a brown yeti. You need to get a Polaroid of that and then frame it above your cleverly ironic atari 500.”
Some people give their groomsmen hip flasks, some give them cigars. I give mine 7″ 3D color prints of their favorite Team Fortress 2 characters.
The prints you see below are only the 1-inch prototypes. Being so small their limbs aren’t strong enough to withstand shipping as exampled by the pyro’s missing arm.
Prints were made with the Z-Corp 650 3D color printer. And let me say it was a bitch finding a place that did small scale jobs like this. Thankfully I ended up finding the 3D printing lab at the University of Iowa. They definitely put the time and effort in to helping me with my model despite many import issues.
Would that I could call out the first vendor I tried but because they provide my employer with other services I can’t. After the 2nd failed import they simply ignored all subsequent emails. I’m perfectly fine with: “Sorry Jeremy, we can’t make this work.”
On a small side note: If you attempt to print TF2 characters like I did be prepared for some issues. As far as I can tell there is only a single set of TF2 models floating around on the net and for some reason they do not like the ZCorp printing software. We had many texture related issues and in the end I simply had the folks at Iowa paint on a generic head to both models.
In my ongoing hate war with BeautifulPeople.com please allow me to show you exhibit B as to why their site is a steaming pile.
Amusingly I got a few “What is benefiber?” questions from my midwest friends. Benefiber is a fiber supplement that keeps you regular. Their commercials are a bit of an amusing joke because they feature ridiculously attractive women, posing suggestively, while you’re told the benefits of poopin’ on schedule. Thanks Benefiber.
“He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.” - Moby Dick
Amen Ahab, amen. I feel the same way about distributing code. Yes yes I’m a programmer and handing out programs should be the end all be all of my existence. It isn’t. Writing code is fun, writing an installer is not. Why do you all think I hand out links to my code rather than compiled executables? Well that and because you freeloaders get enough help.
Onward to the point:
I’ve always seen the browser as becoming the dominant app on any computer. Google OS takes this concept to heart by being a browser-centric experience rather than PC centric.
In my mind the major component missing from this system is an OpenGL/DirectX wrapper. Browsers, without the aid of plugins and 3rd party apps, did not have native access to the graphics card. Until WebGL. In a nut shell WebGL is a set of standards for accessing OpenGL from within a web browser. *Bezier patch seen from the side. Lighting is not calculate for this example.
What I’ve written is a dinky little app that shows you how to accept a .txt file (formatted like a WaveFront OBJ) and display that object in an in-browser renderer.
Open Firefox 3.7 (“Minefield”). In your address bar type about:config and hit enter. In the filter line search for webgl. There will be a line called ‘webgl.enabled_for_all_sites‘ , set it to true.
Use the browse button or simply drag the proper file over to the browsing area. The file drag and drop was supposed to look like this tutorial but my server doesn’t support the SVG mime-type so all you’ll see is the works ‘Drop Here’
The red square will update with your file.
Rotation/Translation/Zoom controls are coming in the next update.
The code for my page is freely available but I haven’t posted the entire webgl directory to my repository just yet. For now you’ll have to manually grab the page source. Sorry.
WebGL tutorials can be found here. My code is based entirely on his excellent work. Please be aware that since he posted his tutorials there have been some API changes. I’ve used the updates in my code. Be aware of these if you copy his code directly as these changes may halt your browser depending on which version of 3.7 you use.
Lastly, if you need a test file for my example just copy the lines of text below to a test.txt file. (Be aware I use a zero indexed file.)
