f-log

So that Blendered Raspberry Pi made it into VR a lot quicker than I thought.

This video shows me mucking about with the scene I created in Unity.


Yes, you can stand on the Raspberry Pi while trying to place all the components.

I do intend on doing a few more improvements but, I cannot see this ever reaching a point where it will be releasable. But, you never know...

The HTC Vive allows you to take screen shots and view them as 3D snapshots. You can also find files on your machine at.
C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Temp
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\366764375\760

Note, the Temp one seems to get wiped when the machine is shutdown. I have no idea if the numbers in the Steam userdata folder are consistent.

In one there is a 2D and a 3D image saved as JPG and in the other the pair are both PNG.

I tried to take a screen shot of each app we have at the moment but, loads ended up washed out and either far too dark or far too light.

Here is the first in a series



That is a screen shot from Budget Cuts Demo a "stealth 'em up". Your character can "fire" a teleportation node that can be used for remote viewing before you commit to a move.

It is one of the best demos available at the moment with such immersion that I ducked out of a doorway I was entering and tried to flatten myself against the wall. Only the wall was virtual, so I physically fell through it. The knives you can see exposed in the inventory above are complete virtual objects and can embed themselves in walls as well as bad robots. They can then be retrieved. One final experience I must relate from playing this through to completion is that when crawling (literally) in a ceiling space do not try and stick your head through a missing ceiling tile. I headbutted the floor in the real world.

If the final game is anything like the demo lots of people will be lining up to buy it!

Time for a quick image that hopefully will make its way on to the HTC Vive.



I got both the models and the images from other sources, but I had to modify both quite heavily for my purposes.

The modelling, material mapping and rendering was all done in Blender over a couple of nights.

That playlist for the HTC Vive is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW5VBqewIBU&list=PLPSfdZNK27E0NgPESr5kNLKKWJcOjvyv8

Includes time-lapse of unpacking (but not setting up), find a real cat in the real world is a hazard to VR users and lots of TiltBrush.

I keep promising HTC Vive stuff. Well here a couple of video from a longer play-list I have just uploaded.

First up we have balloons in a lava tube.

Value Software's "the Lab" has a number of experiences including this "Postcard" called the "Lava tube". You can not walk about but can jump to different viewpoints. In the other "post cards" you usually have a virtual robotic dog who will fetch sticks when thrown. In this one there is no dog but instead a balloon maker. Each balloon is fully interactive and can be hit, bump into the surroundings or other balloons. The balloons even pop if the hit the top of the cave, which is why I spend most of the video trying to get them out of cave. This was recorded using Win+G which seems to be a new thing in Windows 10.

When I first setup the Vive we all wanted ago so we wired up my wife while she was in the wheelchair.


Imagine how this technology could transform lives of people restricted to wheelchairs, hospital beds or even just care homes.

This is the beginning of the end, super resistive bacteria and how to evolve them.

More Blender fun

I created a extruded cube in blender then added a torus and simply set the torus to be the hair object. The final piece of the puzzle was to set the node colour for each hair item to be sourced from a ColorRamp that was powered by an Object Info->Random.








FYI: I did jiggle the Hair settings a bit to get it nice and Random.

For my first image that is larger than usual I have a Blender tip that I found.

When you have a large number of elements in Blender it is not just good practice to name them sensibly but, essential!

I was given some large 3D files to work with(more on that in a later post) and I needed to set each of 490 elements a specific colour. I could find them in the hierarchy easily enough but it was taking for ever doing one at a time.

Luckily the elements where named red_001, red_002, red_003 etc and I found that I could use the Select pattern... in the Select menu. Sadly not a regular expression but "red_*" selected all the elements to be "reddyifed".

Once selected change the material. It only changes the last one selected so then hit CTRL+L and from the menu select Materials.



FYI: I could not help compressing the JPG a bit, so it's only 24kb. In the past I would have aimed for half that.

So in the process of trying to setup FTP for the f-log I wanted to check my hosters setting to see if it wanted me to enable SFTP.

I like 1and1.co.uk but they have dumbed down their control panel to the point of uselessness. Eventually found that SFTP was on by default, so no changes needed there.

When I setup this site I got 500mb as the FTP quota and I have always been very careful to keep all my images and other files as small as possible. But I had not checked the usage amount for many years and I wondered how close I was to the limit and if there was a "buy more" button.

Well, first up I found I had used 486mb (there are a number of sites hanging off that hosting contract as well as this one) but I found the quota was 50gb. That's right I have 49.5gb free!

I think I should start up-loading some more serious detailed shots.

Not entirely sure what I did there. tried force SSL mode, no good and tried forcing the port to 22 also bad. So just set it back to no extra settings but had the connection in the command script rather than part of the invocation.

Seemed to work though ...

HTC Vive is amazing and I *need* to blog about it but, I also need to fix my FTP for the blog.

Do not adjust your set. Please stand by ...

again ...

and again ...

HTC Vive is amazing and I *need* to blog about it but, I also need to fix my FTP for the blog.

Do not adjust your set. Please stand by ...

again...

HTC Vive is amazing and I *need* to blog about it but, I also need to fix my FTP for the blog.

Do not adjust your set. Please stand by ...