Tumbling Dave

Some guy makes himself a big paper head (via @everybody)

Tools used:

3ds Max 2009
Mudbox 2010
Photoshop CS3
Pepakura

Any tutorials out there?

http://testroete.com/index.php?location=head

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Ronald Regan doodles

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Evolution of Monkey Island characters -- the ascent of Guybrush, Elaine, and Le Chuck

With a new Monkey Island game on the way, let's see how advances in computer graphics and storage lead the characters to evolve. The early ones use great economy of design so that we can read a lot of ourselves and our own prejudices into each character. In sequels, the characters conform more to the artist's vision and less our own.

Guybrush

The Guybrush character has to be two things at once. He's a character in the story -- and a fairly stupid one. Also, he's you. As a character he should look stupid. But as a representation of the player, you have to project on to him. So you mustn't look down on him too much. The early versions use their lack of detail to make this work. In the later images he looks too stupid and it becomes harder to identify with him.

Elaine

In the early shots she looks like a fiesty and adventurous piratess. Is there anything more fanciable? First with hands on hips, then striding decisively into the future. Wow. In the later episodes she too becomes more realistic and annoying. By the end, she looks like a nag. (Errrrrr... not that all realistic women are annoying.) I recollect that her character went in that direction too. Let's hope she's more of an active character in the new adventures.

LeChuck

The second image is by far my favorite. The green pixelated skin does a great job of representing decomposing, rotten flesh. You can almost smell him. As the character develops he becomes less of an unpleasant adversary and arch enemy, and more of an elemental force of nature. His menace and malicious nature has translated into simple, raw power.

Where are they now?

The good news is that early pics and videos of Tales of Monkey island have a less dimwitted Guybrush, a fiestier Elaine, and a green, rotting Le Chuck. Just what I wanted.

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Want to write an XNA book? Here are some XNA topics I'm exploring...

If you or somebody you know is an XNA games builder with a penchant for writing, please put them in touch with me.

I'm exploring specific, focused topics for serious developers. Here are some topics I have on my mind:

• 3D Lighting - an Introduction to HLSL using XNA
• 2D Platforming and Physics in XNA
• Immersive RPG dialogue and interactions using XNA Game Studio
• Advanced Particle Systems in XNA
• XNA Game Studio and C#: Managed Games for the C/C++ Programmer

Is this kind of thing up your alley? Contact me! By email (davidb@packtpub.com), Twitter (@DRB), or the forms in my Posterous profile. And if you're looking for different XNA topics, the comments are open...

I've always wanted to do games development books. :D

PS What would really excite me are example based books that show how to build particular kinds of games -- especially adventures.

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Tweequalizer: I #WANT a graphic equalizer for Twitter (@mahemoff would this do the job?)

All the Twitter clients just show your whole stream in various different ways. I want a way to filter tweets while still giving a sense of randomness... and a graphic equalizer interface is the way to do it.

As you adjust the knobs, the Tweequalizer application hides the tweets that aren't a good fit for your needs.

If you just want Tweets from your close contacts, adjust the sliders so you are looking at people who follow few and are followed by few people. There could also be a slider for "people who reply to you".

If you want the goss on trending topics, ramp up the "trending" slider. If you don't, sling it down.

Want to see the latest from Twitter celebrities? Ramp the "lots of followers" and "RT'd a lot" up.

You could also have a VOLUME control -- turn the volume low and the filter is applied strongly. Turn it up and most tweets are displayed, even if they don't fit the filters you've set up.

Why hasn't anybody built this? It would be a REAL innovation in Twitter clients, especially for heavy users.

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Packt Towers Hygiene in Jeopardy: A whole shelf of fancy toiletries but not a single bottle of hand wash

... and that's not because they're out of stock either. Our local Tesco sells several brands of shampoo, bubble bath, eye liner remover, nail varnish remover, hair sculpting products, deodorants, antiperspirants, shaving gels, shaving creams, spot creams, moisturizing creams, haemorrhoid creams, and antiviral wipes -- but not a single bottle of ordinary, stick it next to the sink hand wash.

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Getting thoughtful with my ukulele

The beard has gone now but the ukulele hasn't.
 
My wife is 50% happier. ;-)

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Where is "FireOffice -- the Firefox of OpenOffice.org"? The secret to succeeding with Open Source on the desktop...

In January 2004 there wasn't much hope for Mozilla browsers. Mozilla had a 5.5% share -- 1.5% more than it had in January 2003. The future looked bleak. But by the end of the year, Mozilla had tripled its numbers and had a share of 16.5%. A great leap forward that changed the game for browsers and gave IE some serious competition for the first time.

As you know, this extra 10% of users were not using Mozilla -- they were using Firefox, a brand new pared down browser based on Mozilla's code.

Firefox gave up trying to beat the incumbent Internet Explorer on features, standards compliance, or power. Instead, it did a few key things in a clearly better, easier way. You could pitch Firefox to anybody in a few seconds:

• It was faster and more stable
• It had tabs
• It had built in search

... it was quick to install and it worked well alongside IE -- so there was not much risk if you didn't like it. You'd "download it and give it a try". I remember there were even Firefox plugins that would use the IE display engine on sites that didn't play nice with Firefox.

OpenOffice.org is in a similar position to Mozilla in 2003. OpenOffice.org should be irresistable -- it does nearly everything MS Office can do, in some cases better, and it's free. But the pitch fails because most Windows users already have Office, or would know how to get it if they wanted. OpenOffice.org's own why OpenOffice.org is not especially compelling if you already have MS Office installed -- it just sounds like the same product.

FireOffice -- the FireFox of OpenOffice.org -- would do a few things so obviously differently from MS Office that people wouldn't be able to help but try it out.

Here are the features that I want in FireOffice:

• Loads faster than MS Office -- I don't mind it 90% fewer features, because if I need to break out the big guns I can load MS Office (or the full OpenOffice.org). Just get my document open faster.
• Handles multiple open documents better -- a tabbed interface with the option to have documents, spreadsheets, presentations open in different tabs on the same window.
• 1 or 2 killer interesting, time saving features -- that I haven't thought of
• Lightweight, fun and interesting extensions -- like import photos from Flickr to illustrate presentations, upload my documents to Scribd easily, and so on. Not serious stuff that turned it back into a heavy app, but fun things that made me want to show FireOffice to my friends.

FireOffice wouldn't try to stop me owning MS Office. It would try to get me using it less. It would make my core day to day tasks go by faster and be more fun.

Please somebody, fork OpenOffice.org and build FireOffice -- I am waiting and ready to use a lightweight open source office suite.

What do you think of OpenOffice.org and Firefox? What other Open Source apps could learn from the Firefox example? Tweet or comment me...

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Use Picasa to create vintage color style photos

As far as I can tell, this is the only tutorial that shows you how to create a vintage photo effect in Picasa. I hope you like it...

Let's say you've been on a lovely day out and taken a few photos on your digital camera, but when you get them home you realize they are all a bit boring. There's nothing exactly wrong with them -- they are just flat and dull. If you upload these to Facebook nobody will think you are cool. If this happens to you as often as it happens to me, read on....

This tutorial will show you how to make photos taken on your digital camera or camera phone look like they were short using a point and shoot film camera. The effect might not fool an expert -- but it will make your snaps stand out from the crowd on Facebook, and give them a funky, retro, colorful feel.

By the way, Picasa is a free tool from Google that helps you import, organize, and look after all your photos. It's extremely easy to use. You can download it for free from http://picasa.google.co.uk/.

It takes only 5 steps, each step only takes a few seconds. It will turn a boring run of the mill photo like this:

Into something like this:

Or this:

If you like the sound of that, read on...

Step 1 -- Basic Fixes

First things first, get the basic photo in good shape. Go to the Basic Fixes tab and do whatever needs to be done -- fix red eye, crop it. Click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button to get your color and balance sorted out. Your photo looks slightly better but still unremarkable.

Step 2 -- Tune the light

Next go to the Tuning tab. Increase the Shadows slider until just before it starts to look silly. This will make your photo more dramatic. Do the same for Highlights -- probably you won't be able to take that one so far. Finally, you guessed it, do the same for Fill Light.

Step 3 -- Saturation

Go to the Effects tab now and pick "Saturation". See if you can ramp it up a bit without the image starting to "break up" -- if you take the Saturation slider too far then strangely colored patches will start to appear. Just take it far enough to give you bright colors.

Step 4 -- Soft Focus

Old cheap cameras couldn't focus as well as even a camera phone digital. Use the Soft Focus effect to give your picture blurry edges. Click Soft Focus and adjust the Size slider so that it's as big as it will go -- you only want the corners and edges of the photo to be blurred. Adjust the Amount slider until you like how it looks.

Step 5 -- Add a lightly colored Tint

Click the Tint effect. Now, adjust the Color Preservation slider so that it is at the maximum -- you only want a subtle tint. Then click on Pick Color.

To get retro, vintage colors, slide the mouse around in between the red and green areas -- and mainly in the quite light area, at the bottom of the picker. (I'm talking about the rainbow rectangle, not the hexagons at the top.) Slide around until you find the color you like for the photo. Click when you've got the right color, then click Apply.

You should now have a retro looking version of your photo that you can proudly upload to Facebook.

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Witty (and slightly rude) branding on this delivery van

Playful marketing a la innocent drinks...

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