f-log

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
is perhaps the most important link you will click on today, oh and you WILL click on it!

New video on YouTube
Rendered my football in 720p and as glass ;)
Looks great full screen.

Back in 2007 I released a JavaScript game that showed a UFO on the Microsoft Virtual earth.
About six months later it stopped working, I assumed it was due to the VE version being updated and that it would be a pain to debug and fix.
As I am doing a lot of mapping stuff I decided to have a quick look again and it was a really easy fix, just change the CSS z-index.
There was also a bug for Linux users that for security reasons the key presses never repeated. That meant you had to keep pressing rather than just hold the key as with windows users.
That was a relatively quick fix, just record when the key-down occurs, repeat the action every 30th of a second and wait for key-up.
For your amusement here is UFO adventure v2 revisited

Been fighting visual studio 2010 and expression blend 4 today.
I beat vs2010 but blend4 beat me :(

The high resolution football images are available
http://robdavis.deviantart.com/gallery/

Nintendo sent me an email, the body was fine but the subject readHello <mail merge>, you currently have <mail merge> Stars

Back in 2009 I wanted to create a mathematically perfect 3D football with blender
I created a script that selected vertices before subdividing in the hope that then extruding and scaling those would create the hexagons.
Did you ever notice that footballs are not just hexagons ?
Still it did create this nice android wallpaper


Fast forward to last month and I was heavily involved with The world Cup Map a silverlight azure bing maps HD video experience that is currently linked too from the bbc world cup home page.
Being a large silverlight application it needed its own loading screen, we opted for a bouncing football. If we had had time I would have created and all dancing XAML ball, but due to time constraints we went with a stock image.

I wondered how easy it would be to blender up a nice football and went in search of flat image maps on google ..
After a fair amount of searching I found a grand total of ... One

Slight problem was it was 128x128 pixels, not very detailed.

Inkscape to the rescue. I set the image as the background and over a few nights created a full vector based impression of the ball map, being very careful to retain the gaps between cells.
I then had lots of back-and-forth from inkscape - gimp - blender making sure all the edges were in the correct place, this took a substantial amount of time.
Finally I had a perfectly mapped football in blender but, I wanted more, more detail to be precise.

First attempt was bump mapping which fakes 3D, the results were not good, so I looked at the displacement modifier.
This creates real 3D topology in your mesh based on differences in the pixels in your Texture.

In Gimp I used the gradient fill (shaped) too convert all the hard lines into soft grey scale ones and applied a blur.
The displacement modifier needs a lot of blur or you get striking differences in height.
It got a bit messy here, but using gimp and the UV editor I managed to get the map to sit correctly and give the correct appearance.
From there I just added a quick random bump map to give the leathery appearance.

Download the 2.4mb blend file from blendswap it contains the high-res color map and displacement map.

Watch on YouTube

Production images are on flickr

Image maps were 2.5kx2.5k and the high-res image on flickr is 5000x5000 1024x1024 - where can I host the real high-res images ?

UPDATE:

High resolution images are now hosted at DeviantArt