Supa Wide Web

2D Now in 3D!

2011-10-24T01:03:00.000-04:00

Technology never ceases to amaze me. There is a new Open Source Software application out there called LuxRender that apparently allows you to render 3D objects in existing 2D photographs. This is quite an amazing effect, and seeing that LuxRender is open source, it is free to download. This means anyone with some patience can learn how do some amazing 3D rendering with photos.

You my not believe me, but it's no joke. Here is a video showing some of these effects.

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

As you can see, it's pretty amazing looking. At first I thought that the software was going to be crazy expensive, but then I saw that it was open source and had to post about it.

Here is the abstract from the video posted on Vimeo.

We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements. With a single image and a small amount of annotation, our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects with diffuse, specular, and even glowing materials while accounting for lighting interactions between the objects and the scene. We demonstrate in a user study that synthetic images produced by our method are confusable with real scenes, even for people who believe they are good at telling the difference. Further, our study shows that our method is competitive with other insertion methods while requiring less scene information. We also collected new illumination and reflectance datasets; renderings produced by our system compare well to ground truth. Our system has applications in the movie and gaming industry, as well as home decorating and user content creation, among others.

I love finding stuff like this on the Internet. This is exactly the kind of stuff that keeps me coming back for more.

It turns out that things get even better. I was just looking at the LuxRender website and it's a plugin for several popular 3D rendering programs. One of which is DAZ 3D. I went to their website to check out the software, and it is currently available for FREE until October 31st! What a score this was all together I thought, until I realized that you need this other plugin called Reality to connect DAZ 3D to LuxRender. That plugin is currently on sale for $59.96. I still feel it's worth the money if you are into doing 3D rendering at all. It looks like an amazing tool for a designers toolbox.

If you act fast, you can download DAZ 3D for free before October 31st, 2011 and at least save yourself the $49.95 for that software.

*Update - I just noticed that there is a standalone version of LuxRender available on their website. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. w00t! I so excited I didn't even read all the available options. I look forward to checking it out in the next couple of weeks. I will report my findings here. At the very least you got 2 free pieces of software out of this post. I will continue to keep my eyes peeled for freebies like this and other awesome cool new pieces of open source software.

An Interesting Look at the Alphabet

2011-10-13T00:43:00.000-04:00

I did SEO professionally for about 3 years and eventually moved onto doing Drupal web development. I continue to hone my SEO skills, but usually use them to my benefit and don't really perform many SEO services at this point. Much of my time is spent building websites. I still enjoy keeping up with the SEO industry and especially what Google is doing. It is no joke that high listings on Google can bring targeted traffic to your website for your business or community website. SEO is not just smoke and mirrors. There are many people that think it is all just a joke, but there are many quality factors that Google looks at to compute a top listing. There are actually over 100 factors according to Matt Cutts.

Enough of the SEO babble. I wanted to share something that I thought would be interesting to the Internet at large. Through Google's search suggestions dropdown, you can find out what Google thinks is the most important search term for each letter in the alphabet. It gives you 4 suggestions. It's interesting how evident their brand update is on the search results when just searching for a single letter. You can also see how some of the results are skewed based on my general location in the Philadelphia area for Phillies and SEPTA.

Below is a list of the top related keyword for each letter of the alphabet as of the time of this post.

A - AOL
B - Best Buy
C - Craigslist
D - dictionary
E - ESPN
F - Facebook
G - Google
H - Hotmail
I - iPhone 5
J - Jersey Shore
K - Kohls
L - Lowes
M - Mapquest
N - Netflix
O - Old Navy
P - Phillies
Q - QVC
R - realtor
S - SEPTA
T - Target
U - USPS
V - Verizon
W - weather
X - Xbox
Y - Youtube
Z - Zillow

I would say that if I type the letter a and only the letter a, I might be looking for the letter a, and not AOL. That could just be my opinion, but I figure this would be annoying to anyone actually looking for something other than a brand. Only 3 letters of the alphabet are not represented by a major brand or branded device. I believe that Google has embraced it's advertising department a bit too much on the Brand algorithm update. Perhaps scale it back a little? I doubt you know just by one letter that someone is looking for a brand starting with that letter.

Flicker Boasts Over 200 Million Creative Commons Licensed Images

2011-10-07T23:40:00.000-04:00

I have been a big fan of Creative Commons licensing as it helps get your creative works noticed easier, as works are free for those interested. Most Creative Commons licenses require attribution, which is a great way to promote yourself. Licensing your work as Creative Commons opens up new avenues of marketing your skills to interested parties. Let's face it, breaking into an industry like web development, graphic design, photography, or other creative professions is a difficult task. Creating more ways to get noticed and get hired for your skills is a great way to build a successful business doing your creative works.

It seems that at least Flickr photographers have caught on to this and many have started releasing their works as Creative Commons. Recently Flickr posted recently on their blog that they have surpassed 200 million Creative Commons licensed photographs. Flickr has fully embraced Creative Commons over the last few years, and is now offering several ways to search for Creative Commons photos. These new advancements in Flickr search should be quite useful to bloggers, news publications, and other sites looking to find stock photos and other types of photography for their content. The best part is that those sites that abide by the rules of Creative Commons licenses will be helping to promote the skills of creative authors around the world. Even Flickr's blog post is promoting the 11 photographers they featured in their post announcing the news.

I have also embraced this licensing format, and have released several Creative Commons Drupal themes. So far I am not quite sure how many people are using them, as I don't really have a way to track them, but I feel that even if only a few people are using each, it helps justify using that type of licensing. As long as the person using your work abides by the Creative Commons license you chose, you should be good to go. Just because you setup an easy to use license with loose terms, make sure you still check to see if your creative works are being used properly and within your specified terms. That is what the Creative Commons is for.

The Supa Wide Web Returns

2011-10-07T17:14:00.000-04:00

The Supa Wide Web returns :D We are testing out the new Dynamic Views template for the updated Blogger platform. The new look is very simplistic and clean. There is not a lot going on that can confuse you like the old interface. This one is much more point and click. Once you click, you get more options specific to that category or feature. Pretty nice looking design so far. I am wondering what the post is going to look like on the site now. Here is our first test.