Add iOS and Android license to Unity3D for free

In a surprising but understandable move, you can temporarily register for a free (basic) license for Unity3D and add the iOS and Android Basic licenses without cost.

While the Pro version of Unity3D and the additional licenses of the mobile addons are still about $1500 each, the creation of smartphone and tablet apps has finally been more accessible than ever.

For Android apps you need only the additional Java and Android SDK, but it runs on Windows and OSX. Linux is supported for these SDKs but not Unity3D (yet?).

For iOS apps (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch), you need a Mac with OSX and an Intel CPU. While you can prototype a full app and remote control it using your iDevice, you need a non-free iOS developer license, which is $99/year for individual developers.

What's the catch? This offer is only till 8th of April and the basic versions lack some of the features of the pro versions, but they are very complete and can be used commercially!

Choose your license (and currency format)...

Check it out at the Unity3D Store.

So, what do you plan to develop? I'm looking at getting interactive architectural models from ArchiCAD, passing by Cinema4D and into Unity3D to end up on the iPhone or on a web page.

$0.00 on the Unity Store receipt page

Graphisoft Virtual Building Explorer available for students

The Virtual Building Explorer (originally born as the Zermatt plugin) is an add-on to ArchiCAD to export the 3D Building Model into a realtime model to send to others, without requiring ArchiCAD.

You can export the 3D Geometry into a standalone PC or Mac application and include a radiosity-like graphics style, which is not available in ArchiCAD itself.

This software was recently updated to version 2 and from now on, educational users (students, teachers, schools) can use the software under the same conditions as the free educational version of ArchiCAD.

Some freebies for video from Zach Poff

If you work with video, from webcams, video cameras or rendered, there are several complex manipulations that can be made a bit easier with some of the free utilities for realtime video editing. The website of artist and developer Zach Poff has some free applications for download. They are Open Source, but are made in MAX/MSP, which is the commercial counterpart of Puredata. And the applications are only compiled for Mac OSX.

Some of the things he presents:

• Live Video Delay: view your video frames with a delay
• Chroma Key Live: see a rough estimate of the effect of filming against green (or blue or purple) screen, live
• Multiscreener: synchronize the playback of movies on different computers
• Video Trigger: trigger sounds when something happens on certain parts of a video capture
• ...

Some of these functionality could be done in other systems, obviously, but having it in a precompiled utility will make it easier if one of his programs already does what you need. E.g. video installation reacting in realtime to visitors.

Sintel : the Durian Open Movie Project is released

“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.

After "Elephants Dream" and "Big Buck Bunny", this is the third Open Movie, organized around the promotion and further technological improvement of the full Open Source workflow around the creation of a movie project. The main animation software, Blender, is Open Source, cross-platform and more and more up the same level of functionality as much more expensive software, such as 3ds Max, Maya, Lightwave or Cinema4D.

Edit: While the movie is high-definition and has intricate attention to detail, the story is a bit cynic. Without spoiling the plot, I have watched it to see if my kids would love it (like they loved Big Buck Bunny), but the ending is quite sad (even though there is a spark of hope left). But then again, at times I do complain about too many CGI movies trying so hard to mimic Pixar and drown the ending with moral lessons, like most US blockbuster movies. I do like to see some more 'alternative' themed quality CGI short movies arise. Good examples include Akryls (http://akryls.free.fr/), The Cathedral (http://www.platige.com/index.php?tu=27) or Pica Towers Pizza Sangre (found no 'original' link but you can find it on YouTube). They are all made with software such as LightWave, Maya or 3ds Max, but there are good results coming from Blender. The biggest problem: we are so used to see top-quality character animation, that anything that is only slightly less articulated is being criticized.

Developing Processing applets on an iPad or Android?

Just when you thought everything is getting tied into specific platforms, someone started to let the JavaScript version of Processing work on some of the current "hot" devices, such as the iPad and the Android.

http://www.jepstone.net/blog/2010/04/16/processing-js-mini-ide-for-ipad-iphone-android-chrome/

Programming on a computer for a handheld device suddenly seems cumbersome.

(with thanks to Andrea Graziano from whom I read about this)

xtra normal - making movies out of scripts or text

I saw this used to announce Python-scripting for Rhino (on OSX and Windows).

This is both a webservice and a software tool to quickly assemble a movie with an animated character, which speaks the text you type. The webservice makes it usable directly in the browser, but you have to wait till the movie is rendered on the server.

You can customize backgrounds, actors, camera angles, soundtrack... But whenever more people are using it, you will get bored seeing the same scenes again and again. But till then... enjoy.

Houdini 10 (still with free Apprentice Edition)

http://www.3dworldmag.com/page/3dworld?entry=houdini_10_released

The new release of Houdini 10 is (luckily) still available in commercial, cheap and free editions, for all major platforms (Windows, OSX and Linux).

new Open Movie project "Durian"

After "Elephants Dream" and "Big Buck Bunny", the third Open Movie project tied to the Blender Foundation developments to improve Blender in a real project is announced:

http://durian.blender.org/

Processing 1.0 released

The cross-platform, Open Source Processing environment has just turned into an official 1.0 release. It is available on all platforms, uses Java and is free to use and to adapt.

It can be used for teaching and learning programming, with a strong emphasis on interaction and visualization. You still have to write code, but the treshold has diminished to a very low level, which makes it accessible for many more people than, let's say, C++ or C#, certainly when you are interested in graphics, video, animation, 3D, audio, PDF and all kinds of other things.

Highly recommended, but remember that you still have to write code and you need to have a basic understanding about mathematics.

And if it's good enough for video clips from Radiohead, TV-commercials, several highly respected universities and visual artists, than it might as well work out for you as well.

[sorry for the slightly less objective posting...]

Antics Realtime animation in free and pro version

Antics provides a solution to develop realtime animations. It is used for pre-visualization, machinima and general multimedia purposes.

There are two versions: free and pro, with different content available and with better integration in the pro version.


http://www.antics3d.com

Available for Windows only.

Pftrack match moving trial works as a PLE version

When you register and download the evaluation version of PFTrack (PC/MAC/Linux) it will continue to work as a Personal Learning Edition (although with all exports disabled). You can save your project and work with the full functionality to learn about matchmoving. The commercial version is not cheap, although there is also a student version available.

Register for the trial/PLE version

This firm also sells a cheap version called PFHoe which is not free (about EUR 50), but is fast and streamlined and can be used in many cases.

As an historic aside, the software was originally developed in an academic project, called Icarus, where it was freely available for quite some time.

Adobe Flex free for students

According to an article from Digit Magazine Adobe will provide students free access to the Flex tools for building Rich Internet Applications, using Flex Builder 2.

Free Tracking plugin for 3ds max or Maya

At http://sfx.realviz.com/Autodesk you can download a free tracking plugin for 3ds max or Maya. MMTrack by RealVIZ is temporarily available (untill august 1, 2007) and allows tracking of video footage directly inside the 3d animation software.

WAX freeware video & compositing

http://www.debugmode.com/wax/
"Wax is a high performance and flexible video compositing and special effects software. The idea for Wax is to be very general purpose and flexible in video compositing and effects, so that you can compose your dream video sequence with ease everytime."

Een gratis programma (Windows alleen) om video te bewerken. Dit ligt in de lijn van de commerciële programma's Adobe After Effects, Autodesk Combustion en Apple Shake. Dit is geschikt voor het editeren van video, geluid, maar ook met opties voor effecten en het 'layeren' van video. Dit zijn functies die niet beschikbaar zijn in meer traditionele NLE (Non-linear Editors), zoals Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas en anderen.

Op dezelfde site vind je ook WinMorph (voor het vloeiend morphen van video) en Wink (voor het maken van videotutorials, filmpjes die tonen hoe een programma werkt). Allemaal gratis, trouwens. En WinMorph heeft ook een Linux versie.

ZS4 (free video compositing)

"ZS4, the new incarnation of Zwei-Stein, is an advanced video editing and compositing program with over 100 built-in video effects. It runs on Windows, Linux and OSX and is free for personal use."

Ik weet niet of je ooit met het vroegere Zwei-Stein gespeeld hebt, maar deze nieuwe versie is wat uitgebreider en iets vriendelijker qua interface. En nog steeds gratis, gelukkig.

digilab homepage - Voodoo Tracker

digilab homepage

Gratis (niet-commercieel) programma voor Linux en Windows voor Camera-tracking: het analyseert een sequens video en reconstrueert de camera-beweging. Dit kan je gebruiken om een video aan te vullen met bijkomende 3D-objecten, bijv. het inpassen van een ontwerp in een film van de omgeving.



Vergelijkbaar (qua concept) met dure programma's als Matchmover, Boujou en PFTracker (wat ook ooit begon als academisch onderzoek en toen tijdelijk gratis was onder de naam Icarus...).