THE DARK MOD is a free, first-person stealth game inspired by the Thief series by Looking Glass Studios. It recreates the essence of the original Thief games on a more modern engine. This project is both a game and a mission-creation platform, The Dark Mod allows players and mappers alike to enjoy missions in a gothic steampunk universe.
Founded in 1997, FlightGear is developed by a worldwide group of volunteers, brought together by a shared ambition to create the most realistic flight simulator possible that is free to use, modify and distribute. FlightGear is used all over the world by desktop flight simulator enthusiasts, for University research and education, for a variety of aerospace engineering and visualization work in industry, and even for interactive exhibits in museums.
FlightGear features more than 400 aircraft, a worldwide seamless scenery database, a multi-player environment, detailed sky modelling, a flexible and open aircraft modelling system, varied networking options, multiple display support, a powerful scripting language, and an open architecture. Best of all, being open-source, the simulator is owned by the community and everyone is encouraged to contribute.
Have heard that with the right equipment playing the FlightGear simulator could be used as pilot hours towards a pilots license. The features available in this open source project are amazing, not to mention just the scenerey would fill more then 3 DVDs. Check out the feature list at http://www.flightgear.org/about/features/
Speed Dreams is an Open Source motorsport simulation (sim) and it is freely available. Speed-Dreams is brought to you by an international team of developers and artists, who aim to bring the very best of Open Source racing to your PC.
Speed-Dreams simulates a wide range of cars from high-tech Open Wheelers and Super Cars, to 1930's 'monsters'. It includes Grand Prix tracks located around the world, as well as Ovals and Road courses. Am personally a really big fan of rally racing games and am glad to see rally cars and tracks in this game.
Speed-Dreams is available for Windows and Linux, and available for free download from http://www.speed-dreams.org
Speed Dreams is a fork of the famous open racing car simulator Torcs, aiming to implement exciting new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents to make a more enjoyable game for the player, as well as constantly improving visual and physics realism.
In other words, Speed Dreams is the place:
where developers can try their ideas and have every chance to get them released to the end-users (democracy is the main principle ruling the dev team),
where end-users can enjoy the completion of these ideas and give their opinion about it, and/or make new suggestions.
So, if you find your or some people's Torcs patch proposals don't integrate the official release as quickly as you would have loved, you have reached the right place!
Anyone can join the development team, contributions to Speed Dreams may take place in many domains:
The core code itself, and its numerous subjects : user interface, physics engine, 3D graphics engine, race management, input device related code, file formats, ... to enhance, optimize, make more up-to-date, fix bugs, port to another platform ...
the robot(s) code (AI racing)
the cars design or tuning
the tracks design
the documentation
Current features of Speed-Dreams as of 2.0 beta:
38 tracks
16 tracks with full scenery and terrain
28 cars
Animated drivers with some cars
10 camera modes
Close to realistic physics
Experimental full 3D physics engine (user selectable)
As an Open Source and enthusiast, couldn't be more pleased to introduce the RepRap 3d printer. The RepRap is an Open Source hardware project under a larger initiative called the Open Source Ecology project aka Global Village Construction Set. Being an open source project the RepRap can be built by following a set of free blueprints from www.RepRap.org, and anyone can submit improvements to the blueprints or build process. One of the key features to the RepRap is that it can print itself aside from a couple processing chips, so you'll print out some for your friends, who hopefully will print ones for their friends and so on.
It works by heating and extruding a thin plastic wire that is purchased as large spools - PLA Clear 1kg spool 3mm. The material that is printed can actually be made from a plant material that would set the way for using broken items as compost. The two common materials used for printing are ABS and PLA. Both are easily purchased but the one I'd recommend is the PLA as it is the material that is made from plant starches and is biodegradable. While the PLA can be home grown the purchased spools are going be stronger.
The fact that PLA can be biodegraded, and re used to grow more PLA makes it much more attractive for me. One of the main problems with traditional plastics is the fact that they do not biodegrade easily.
The third world, and manufacturing centers like Taiwan and China are covered in plastic garbage that does not decompose and does not go away, and can not be recycled into quality goods. If switching to PLA will reduce that even a little bit, I think it would be a huge advantage.
ABS is the stuff legos are made out of and PLA is made from corn.
TED Talks - We Can Recycle Plastic ( if you just have to print with ABS this should make you feel better)
Aside from just printing plastic parts the RepRap can print out metals that allow it to print circuit boards, but not processor chips, there are other types of adapters that are in the works though.
This is the man that started the RepRap, Adrian Bowyer
Watch the RepRap print a simple part and listen to the info about the RepRap.
Having an awesome 3d printer wouldn't be quite as awesome if there wasn't a library of free files to download and print at anytime. There is the RepRap Object Library which is a good place to start for beginners. It has objects available to download and print, but also contains learning resources and links to get going creating your own objects to print. Another place to get free files to download and print with the RepRap is Thingiverse, which is a great site.
Where the RepRap project scores over large scale manufacturing is the ability to promote quick innovation and "Distributed Thinking". An example of that is on the website Thingiverse any item uploaded, can be altered by another user and re-uploaded, and Thingiverse shows this. The website let's users say that their object was derived from so and so, and will also display that it has 13 variations of it's own and so on.
Can we afford some actual makeup artists, who will turn our actors into
some jaw dropping visual effects characters who are covered with gore, blood, bolts,
cables, jelly or whatever is required?
Or can we do that all digitally?
The basic idea for digtal makeup is easy, as long as you do not think
about it too long. Just have a digital double, track the head, body,
limbs or whatever, apply the textures, props or clothes to that digital
version of your actor and composite it over the actual footage of your
actor. Here’s an example from Sebastian König:
As seen in the example Sebastian used object markers for tracking various points on his face, but doing it this way can lead to problems with tracking when a character makes turns a certain way, or has hair in there face, or even a fast movement could mess up the tracking. There will soon be another method added for tracking that will address this issue. We don’t have a kind of tracking called planar tracking yet, but our awesome
libmv developer Keir Mierle has something in the pipeline called “affine
tracking”, which might help in this case. So with some luck we can do
digital makeup without object-tracking.
The release of Blender 2.61 is a pretty big milestone with some really impressive new features that will likely draw in a torrent of new users. The feature that long time blender users are most appreciative for would have to be the new Cycles render engine. The feature that will most likely draw new users would have to be the motion tracking, which let's users put 3d objects in movies.
Cycles Render Engine
Before Blender 2.61 when rendering a 3d scene that was indoors or most scenes for that matter, the render lacked certain light elements that left the scene looking blan and not real. With the Cycles render engine the lighting is handled completely differently and it shows as the renders are allot more realistic. Another feature of cycles is that it features OpenCL and will use graphics cards for rendering where possible.
In this tutorial from Andrew Price of Blender Guru you will discover:
The difference between the internal renderer and Cycles
Some of the cool features of Cycles
How to create your very first Cycles render
Using lights, materials, textures and bump mapping
How he made the donut scene
Motion Tracking
Blender as a video editor is a pretty powerful tool, and with the new motion tracking features things just got serious. Mixing people into 3d scenes had been doable for a long while now, but with motion tracking we can now put 3d objects into movies.
A small 10 second example
A quick run through of setting up motion tracking. In this video the ground has already been mapped and the object is getting mapped.
The other new features for blender 2.61 include ocean simulation, dynamic paint, camera sensor size and presets, 3D mouse color wheel editing, and more translations to other languages. New Addons in this release are an Adobe After Effects exporter, an Acclaim and C3D motion capture importers. Not to mention the 108 bug fixes and improved methods for new developers to make addons.
Openshot is a free and Open Source video editor. It is really easy to use and has lots of great features that are also easily used. Such as the 3d title animations, they are really simple to setup, just fill out a little wizard and hit render. To create the 3d title animations Openshot uses scripts that are controlled by the easy to use wizard and aimed at an installed copy of Blender.
Screenshot of the 3d title animation wizard
Dream. Create. Share.
Video editing on Linux has never been easier or more fun. If you create an awesome video with OpenShot, please share it with us. And remember to tag your videos with the word "openshot" on YouTube so others can discover them.
Here is a little video I put together with Openshot
The open source community is always providing an amazing array of useful software. It also has great set of tools to work with. I'll introduce you to a combination of a couple tools that I'm using for 3d game development.
jMonkeyEngine (jME) is a game engine made especially for modern 3D development, as it uses shader technology extensively. jMonkeyEngine is written purely in Java and uses LWJGL as its default renderer.OpenGL 2 through OpenGL 4 is fully supported.
jMonkeyEngine is a community-centric open source project released under the new BSD license. It is used by several commercial game studios and educational institutions. The default jMonkeyEngine 3 download comes readily integrated with an advanced SDK that makes it more like a studio.
By itself, jMonkeyEngine is a collection of libraries, making it a low-level game development tool. Coupled with an IDE like the official jMonkeyEngine 3 SDK it becomes a higher level game development environment with multiple graphical components.
Here is a Demo reel of jME from early 2011
Using Blender3d you can save models with textures, animations, particles and more as a blend file then open them in the jME3 SDK and drop them into your game. On top of all that jME3 will compile to an android install package, if you point it to the android sdk.
Another piece of free and open source software in jME3 is the Nifty GUI. Below is a video demonstration of some of Nifty GUI's features. More on jME3 to come soon.
Blender has so many features it is more like a studio of software it's just amazing what it can do. Being Open Source and free there is a huge community of users helping noobs! Such as Andrew Price's website www.blenderguru.com where there are many in depth tutorials on using blender, plus a file that you can open in Blender and compare yours with his. There is also place to download free models such as www.blendswap.com and with creative commons licenses they can be reused and built upon.
Blender has a physics engine and tools in place to create games without knowing any programming, which is awesome but for programmers to simple. That's where jMonkey Platform comes in.
Check out the links, get the software and have fun creat!
Today was pleased to find on Vimeo an overview and manual for the newly released Blender 2.5 Norman Rig. With this being my 1st experience with a rig, am blown away by how easy it is to pose and animate him. These two videos should be enough to get started playing with and customizing the rig.
Norman is a Maya puppet built unofficially for theAcademy of Art UniversityPixar classes. Since those classes disbanded, they decided he should finally be set loose. Anyone is allowed to freely use the rig for non-commercial purposes, and to edit him and pass him along to your heart's content (which is why we now see it on Blender).
To get a feel with what can be done with a rig, below is a video demonstrating what students have put together with Norman.
A long time user of Blender and writer at BlenderArtist has put together a web page with animations created with Blender by the community over the years. Watching them should inspire everyone to keep creating awesome videos cause Blender just keeps improving and has a feature set that is to long to list. My favorite video of the bunch is directed by Junichi Yamamoto and is called Memory.
Link to 27 inspirational and jaw dropping Blender videos @ BlenderGuru.com
Blender is an amazing program that started as a commercial program but was donated to the Open Source Community. They knew if they open sourced the developement (made it free) and sold the manual everyone would benefit. Not to say someone has to pay to learn to use blender, on the contrary, there is tons of great free learning material. Personally enjoy the tutorials from Andrew Price the BlenderGuru. The image was made with help from Andrew, followed the intro to compositing, to get the effect on the text, he makes good tutorials that were easy to follow. Definitely returning to his site for all blender related questions.
Currently under a major overhaul the application has tons of new features, and has even made it's way into Hollywood. Have read that it was used in the production of one of the Lord of the Rings films, and don't doubt it.
Here is production from the Blender Foundation.
"Sintel" is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film.
This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world.
Blender is easy to install, has a relatively small installation size, and runs on several popular computing platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows, along with FreeBSD, IRIX, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris. Unofficial ports are also available for AmigaOS 4, BeOS, MorphOS , Pocket PC and SkyOS. Though it is often distributed without documentation or extensive example scenes, the software contains features that are characteristic of high-end modeling software. Among its capabilities are:
Basic non-linear video/audio editing and compositing capabilities.
Keyframed animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal), hook, curve and lattice-based deformations, shape keys (morphing), non-linear animation, constraints, vertex weighting, soft body dynamics including mesh collision detection, LBM fluid dynamics, Bullet rigid body dynamics, particle-based hair, and a particle system with collision detection.
Modifiers to apply non-destructive effects.
Python scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game logic, importing and exporting from other formats such as OBJ, FBX, DXF, COLLADA, task automation and custom tools.
Game Blender, a sub-project, offers interactivity features such as collision detection, dynamics engine, and programmable logic. It also allows the creation of stand-alone, real-time applications ranging from architectural visualization to video game construction.
A fully-integrated node-based compositor within the rendering pipeline
Speed Dreams is an Open Source motorsport simulation (sim) and it is freely available. Speed-Dreams is brought to you by an international team of developers and artists, who aim to bring the very best of Open Source racing to your PC.
Speed-Dreams simulates a wide range of cars from high-tech Open Wheelers and Super Cars, to 1930's 'monsters'. It includes Grand Prix tracks located around the world, as well as Ovals and Road courses. Am personally a really big fan of rally racing games and am glad to see rally cars and tracks in this game.
The other new features for blender 2.61 include ocean simulation, dynamic paint, camera sensor size and presets, 3D mouse color wheel editing, and more translations to other languages. New Addons in this release are an Adobe After Effects exporter, an Acclaim and C3D motion capture importers. Not to mention the 108 bug fixes and improved methods for new developers to make addons.
