Archive for the Category "Art"

Image via Wikipedia

The Away3d team are pleased to announce the release of the 2.0.0 update to the Away3d engine!

You can download the update from the trunk in the svn repository:
http://away3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk

or go to the downloads section of away3d.com where a new zip file is available:
http://www.away3d.com/downloads

Highlights of the update (posted on the site together with a new demo):

• Simulated phong shading (with blinn-phong specular highlights)
• Environment-mapped materials
• Normal-mapped materials (an open source first for Flash)
• Z-depth filter for large outdoor scenes
• Fog filter
• Straight-to-bitmap rendering for fast scaled views
• Surface caching for fast rendered lights
• Package refactor for easier learning of basic classes

Yesterday I attended a presentation of Zemanta, a recently launched "blogging apprentice".

Currently only a Firefox plugin ( IE on the way, if anyone cares ), running on Blogger, Typepad and WordPress < 2.5. Its concept is simple: It gets the images from Wikimedia Commons, Flickr and various stock photo providers, and lets you pick them out and place them into your post. They are suggested based on contextual comparison of your text and the image's title, description and articles they were used in originally.

From what i used it, i was satisfied. Looking forward for the WordPress 2.5 update.

Update:
Zemanta now works with WordPress 2.5, and i seem to have played my part in it =D

A new version of Inkscape, the SVG editor is available for Linux. Although a windows version is still in production, lets check out a bunch of new stuff in this version:

Top of the list is a neat perception tool, you can see its results in the top right of this web page's design. The new, and long awaited bucket fill works just like any other bucket tool you might have used in any other program, but its advanced filling options might just give it the edge.

The tweak tool gives you a quick way to morph, shrink/grow attract/repel shaped without worrying about nodes.

The usual horizontal and vertical guidelines have become angled at 0/90 degrees. To change to a different angle, just double-click the guideline you want to change and enter the values.

Skeletal brushes are now possible with the new path on part effect. Anyone for engraving ?

Also, new built in stroke patterns and a interface to OpenClipArt.org.

These come from a couple of hours of boredom.. Inkscape was is use, and GIMP make the work complete. Speaking of Inkscape, version 0.46 (under development) is full of new tools. I suggest you check out the nightly builds.KDE4.0 on OpenSuse10.3 was more then disappointing, i lost the taskbar in the first 10 seconds, none of the widgets would dock (they would move out of reach trough), it was much slower etc.. did a one click install so one cant expect much anyway.
I will try a kubuntu live cd in the next couple of days.