When I woke up last Sunday morning, I noticed the BlenderNation entry about a LuxRender shaders database.

I don’t use LuxRender but Yafaray. This renderer is the successor of the well-known Yafray, and it’s a full rewrite to achieve great speed and nice functionnalities.

I thought : “It’s a shame a famous renderer like Yafaray doesn’t have a shaders database on its own”. So I started to create one from scratch this morning.

As of now it’s already the 2nd version online : check it out now : http://yafaray.thomasbaron.net

This is a really fresh project, so don’t expect to see it full of great shaders at this stage. Current goal is to enhance the site to achieve something suitable for daily use. Features are, as of writting :

• Free accounts opened right now
• Download a standardized scene to achieve consistent previews
• Upload your shader easily
• Browse the existing categories
• Create your own categories
• Use the built-in search engine

The SMC community is helding another great official contest : Real World Racer. As they states :

Ever dreamed of driving a race-car? I know I have… How about designing your own? If that’s a big 10-4 for you too, than SMC has got an engine-oil-soaked treat for you…

this particular SMCars.net Contest is asking you to do the following; Pick a car, or design your own, and tailor it towards a certain motorsport. That is it. We want this Contest kept simple to allow your imaginations to run wild and naked throughout SMC. We don’t want them too wild and naked though, so the only limits are technology to the present day, so no light-speed hovering space jet-ski racers, mkay? Other than that, go for gold!!

Some examples of what we’re looking for? A Lamborghini Countach modified to compete is the Paris-Dakar Rally, a Fiat 500 stripped and suped to race in the SuperGT leagues, a Honda Civic made to break the land-speed record… Getting the idea??

The goal is clear, and the contenders brought some crazy projects :

• Volkswagen Passat Wagon with Pike’s Peak style
• Holden Commodore intended for Dakar
• Mitsubishi Lancer for street racing
• Zagato Perana as a FIA GT
• Toyota Hilux as a drift machine

And for the first time for SMC, there is not only medails to win, but your choice a single die-cast model from Die-Cast Model Cars to the value of $100 !

To learn more about it : http://www.smcars.net/forums/contest-forum/30321-real-world-racer.html. To see all the entries : http://www.smcars.net/forums/real-world-racer/. To engage : www.smcars.net.

PS : Of course I’m in…

I’m glad and happy to introduce the new version of my site.

The previous one has been powered by Wordpress for the full first year. It’s time to say good bye to it, welcome to my own personal blog engine. It’s developed with CakePHP and MySQL, using Eclipse and PDT.

In a very Web2.0 fashion, I consider the site as beta. I would be very happy to heard of any bug you can encounter here. Please also don’t hesitate to report me any idea / suggestion you can get.

I hope the next year will show as much as progress for my skills as the previous one.

Thanks for reading !

Since I restart some attempts to get a realistic car paint shader, I searched over the net. And I’ve found rather interesting articles.

Both are from Matt Ebb, you can show his site at http://mke3.net/.

Read the rest of this entry »

This site will be down from August 02, 2006 to August 20, 2006, due to server powerdown.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

As a break from real cars projects, I tried a few weeks ago to model some Lego assemblies. Here are some of the pictures I produced :

These pictures show the progress from page 1 to 11 of the book for the model #8448. I found scan for this model on a wonderful site about this topic : http://www.hccamsterdam.nl/brickfactory/theme/index.htm (see in Technic #3)

Here is the topic I opened on SMCars.net to show model avancement.

I will post a short Howto to explain the way I did it, if anyone is interested.

I just experienced the need for an autosave in Blender (yes I didn’t save after almost 2 plenty hours of work, too dumb I am…).

And thanks to the team behind it, there is already one !

When looking in my ~/.blender directory, I find several .blend files, with names like 34521 or 6318. I assume these numbers are PID for the several Blender processes which have runned on my station. These are usual .blend files, which can be opened with Blender. Looking as the most recent one, I found almost last state of my work (well, about 5 minutes before the X server crashed making me kill it from another host)

This is default behaviour for Blender, so make sure to check in ~/.blender (for Linux hosts, I don’t know for other OSes) when you need it.