Studio@jumpers-inn.de

As you may have probably noticed, I have moved my digital photography efforts to Flickr. It’s just way more convenient to host and organize the pictures there, plus they get more exposure I found some nice plugins though for WordPress to link my Flickr account into the site. On the right you can see the latest pictures of my photo stream and on the photography page here there’s an up to date list of all my Flickr collections.

If you’re into digital photography you should definitely consider creating a Flickr account. For me, the switch was good as it motivates me more to post process my images and put them online. Otherwise they catch virtual dust on the hard drive and no one ever gets to see them.

Time to try some new technology and get onto the app/extension bandwagon! So, this post is created with the ScribeFire extension and when you read this, it obviously worked out well

To make this post a bit more useful and Blender related, I’m pointing you to a cool tutorial demonstrating a nice feature in Blender: GLSL bump painting.

GLSL Bump Painting and baking from David Radford on Vimeo.

Just read on BlenderNation of a new texture site that has lots and lots of free textures to download. Free means in this case really free, no subscription, no limit, no license stuff. Just download as much as you want and use it for whatever you want. Really cool!

Oh, and here’s the link: http://www.texturemate.com

New camera, the Canon EOS 550d (Image from www.amazon.de)

After having thought about buying a new camera for ages now, I finally made a decision and bought a Canon DSLR, namely the EOS 550d. Being the newest kid in the Canon sub-professional DSLR-family it sports tons of features and a APS-C sensor with 18 megapixels that is said to be quite good. For all of the glory technical details of this camera I’d like to refer you to one of the numerous dedicated websites that review these things.

So, why did I buy such a rather expensive camera? I think mainly it’s because I like good photographs. I’d also like to be able to create good photographs myself. “You don’t need a pricey camera to make good pictures!” I hear you say? Right so, but even though I only took a couple of shots with this new baby, I can tell it’s a whole different feeling than using my old compact camera! I feel like having good equipment motivates me much more to look out for better shots and to educate myself on how to execute them properly. Now that I have such a capable camera I want to put it to good use.

Of course if I manage to get rather good at photography, with this equipment I won’t have to worry about technical barriers. If I can’t take the picture the way I want to it will be solely my fault, not the cameras!

So, what will be the main things I’ll use this for? Currently I don’t think I’ll delve into potrait shots, but rather photographing nature. But as this is also a blog about Blender…you probably guessed it: reference images and textures!

I’m sure it won’t be long until you can see the first results here.

Since I’m a steady follower of the Durian blog, I was intrigued by the fact that the people there work exclusively in Linux. Up until now I only noticed Linux as a software developing OS but it seems the open source community has worked hard to make sure the art department in the software collection available has gotten a lot bigger and better. By investigating about this I stumbled upon a special flavour of the Ubuntu distribution aimed specifically at artists, named Ubuntu Studio.

So after shuffling around some partitions on my PC I installed Ubuntu Studio on my machine. Having experience with setting up Ubuntu everything went very smooth. After the first start up I was a bit disappointed though, since the login screen was probably the most ugly one I’ve ever seen and did look nothing like in the screenshots. The desktop also was not really what I was used to from regular Ubuntu as the starters in the panel have a strange placing and the panel at the bottom of the screen was missing entirely. This meant a little fudging with the settings but now everything seems ok. Now it was time to see what the software was capable of.

Since I’m a 3D and drawing guy I only tried Blender and Gimp at first. Those two run out of the box at very good speed. My Wacom Bamboo Fun was also recognized out of the box and works flawlessly. Next thing I did was trying to make my own SVN build of Blender 2.5. And this is where Ubunut really shines! Installing dependencies and building Blender is easy as pie.

Last thing I tested was building MyPaint. This did take a little longer as the dependencies are not well documented, but once everything was in place building went smoothly. And boy, MyPaint is really a cool tool! Super responsive to the tablet, a cool selection of pre-made brushes and good usablity. The other day I played around with the free trial of Autodesk Sketchbook Pro which is also a very cool program, but I think I’ll stick with MyPaint as it offers essentially the same and is open source.

Hopefully I will be able to post some first results using MyPaint with Ubuntu Studio. So if you have a bit of experience with Ubuntu or Linux and like to have the latest art applications built by yourself, I highly recommend Ubuntu Studio. Though you might as well use a regular Ubuntu version since Studio only differs in the bundled software and some eyecandy.