Archives for posts with tag: technical
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iPhone Photography

March 16, 10 //
3

I recently got an iPhone 3GS, the camera that’s built into the phone is a pretty big disappointment for someone who shoots dSLR for the past year.  Super-noisy at base ISO 100, no manual control, shutter lag… it’s a mess.  Granted, big lenses and big cameras are super cool, and they take amazing pictures.  But this post is about living with, and taking advantage of the tiny camera on a camera phone.

Lesson 1: Know the limit of your camera, and try to work around it.
Vancouver sunset
Small cameras are known for their low dynamic range, so to get the most out of this sunset, I took two images at different exposure and merged them together with Pro HDR, right on the phone.  This increased the dynamic range dramatically, making it equal to that of a dSLR.  Then a bit of contrast and saturation boost completed the look.

Lesson 2: Post Processing
i am {not} on a boat
This picture came out very bland at first, but a few tweaks in Lightroom 3made it marginally passable.  There are enough apps in the Apple Appstore to edit your photo into oblivion and back.  Some of my favorite apps are Pro HDR, TiltShiftGen and Best Camera. Of course, for the most control, you’d have to use a desktop-based tool like Lightroom or Aperture.

Lesson 3: Color
Metrotown through iPhone
What the tiny camera lacks in light-gathering ability, it makes up by upping the vibrancy and contrast.  iPhone photos are usually a lot more vibrant and contrasty than what you get out of a high-end dSLR.  Use this to your advantage to capture some eye popping pictures.

Lesson 4: Bokeh
Untitled
You CAN throw the background out of focus even on a tiny sensor like the iPhone camera, but only if you are shooting in macro.  Just be patient with the focus, it can take a while to get the razor sharp image that you wanted.

That’s all for now, I am still discovering the capability of the iPhone camera.  Let me know if you have any tips regarding digital photography.

The perfect laptop!

February 7, 10 //
5

I was window-shopping for laptops today and discovered the amazing Asus UL30 series.  It’s truly an amazing piece of engineering: it’s thin, it’s light, it’s fast, has an insane battery life, and pretty cheap.  Let me break down the specs for you non-geeks:

Core 2 Duo SU7300 Processor:
It has a 1.3Ghz (up to 1.7Ghz with TurboBoost technology), ultra-low-voltage processor manufactured on 45nm technology.  Which really just means the processor can do a LOT of work while barely sipping on your precious battery.  Honestly, it’s unbelievable how fast this processor is while using less than 10W of power.  [Compare with a 13 MacBook Pro: slightly slower, but uses 1/3rd the power)

Nvidia G210M 512MB and Intel 4500 Graphics:
This .93 inch thin laptop has TWO graphics cards.  The Nvidia G210 is probably the fastest graphics card available on a 13 inch laptop.  It's build on 40nm technology, and uses a max of 14W of power, which is still impressive for a graphics card of this caliber.  The Intel is slower, but uses even less power.  You can toggle between the 2 to trade off performance for battery life. [Compare with a 13" MacBook Pro:  The Asus is twice as fast, while using the same amount of juice]

4GB DDR3 RAM:
Also, the laptop can support a max of 8GB of memory, you know… in case you need that much. [Same as Macbooks.]

13inch LED-lit Screen:
LED also means it’s uses less power than regular backlights. [same as Macbooks]

12 hour battery life:
…or so Asus claims, you can probably expect 10 hours of real world usage, and maybe 4-5 hours of gaming/heavy 3D work. [much longer than the MacBook Pros]

Design:
Not quite on par with Apple’s drool inducing one-piece aluminum finish, but it’s one of the nicer laptops I’ve seen (once you get rid of all the stickers).  The design is obviously Macbook inspired.  And it’s really light and thin.

Price:
$800 USD.  I know you can get an even faster 15″ laptop for $900, but the battery life and portability also suffers as you up the screen size.  13″ with this amount of computing power is perfect.  It also comes with all the standard bells and whistles: webcam, bluetooth, 802.11n, and a half terabyte harddrive.

The bottom line:
if you are looking for a portable powerhouse, take a closer look at this laptop.  If you want raw power and don’t care about battery life, skip this.

* I do not own this laptop, nor did I got paid to write this, I was just excited that I finally found a laptop that seems to be everything I am looking for.

Tip: How to sculpt with 4 million polygons on a laptop

January 31, 10 //
6

With these tips, you should able to drastically increase your polygon-count limitation while sculpting.

1. Get Blender 2.5 Alpha, also go for the 64bit version if you have 3GB or more of RAM.  2.5 is simply a lot faster and refined than Blender 2.49.  The tools and interface is also much cleaner and more intuitive.  Also, a lot of work has gone into optimizing the sculpting feature in Blender 2.5.

2. Start with a base mesh, then apply the multires modifier.  Do not use a default cube and rely on the multires modifier to do *all* the sub-division.  It’s always better to start with a base mesh with a few thousand polygons, and use multires with a sub-division level of 2-5.

3. Turn off “Double Sided” in the Object Data panel.  This will significantly speed up the redraw.

4. Delete UV texture data and Vertex Color data *might* help speed things up, but I don’t really know for sure.

5. Turn on VBO in the Preference menu.  This will further speed up drawing speed.  (Thanks Gustav!) Okay apparently it doesn’t according to another commenter, since sculpt mode already uses VBO by default.

SVN log parsing and analysis fun

December 4, 09 //
0

A few of you asked about how I got those statistics for my previous post about Blender SVN.

For the inquiring minds, I got the SVN log with the following command

svn log -r 25000:0 --xml https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/branches >> log.xml
svn log -r 25000:0 --xml https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk >> log.xml

These two SVN operation fetches the SVN logs for both the branches and the trunk of Blender and combine them into one 8 megabyte XML file.  Please do not do this often as I imagine querying all the commit logs must put a heavy strain on the Blender SVN server.

Parsing the XML for the author commit frequency is done with the following python script:

import xml.sax

authorList= {}

# create document handler
class SVNXMLHandler(xml.sax.handler.ContentHandler):
	def __init__(self):
		pass

	def startElement(self, name, attrs):
		self.hasAuthor = 0
		self.hasEntry = 0
		if name == "logentry":
			self.hasEntry = 1
			#print attrs.get('revision', ""),
		elif name == "author":
			self.hasAuthor = 1

	def characters(self, data):
		if self.hasAuthor:
			#print data
			try:
				authorList[data] += 1
			except:
				authorList[data] = 1

	def endElement(self, name):
		if name == "author": self.hasAuthor = 0
		if name == "logentry": self.hasEntry = 0

# load and parse log
f = open('log.xml', 'r')
xml.sax.parseString(f.read(), SVNXMLHandler())

# print to console in comma delimited format
for i in authorList:
	print i,",",authorList[i]

Run the above python script like so:

python logParser.py >> crunched.csv

After a few seconds, a CSV file should be created containing all the data you need, ready to be graphed in Microsoft Office.  Yes I used Excel for the graph…

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