I’ve unpacked my MDX-20 and dusted it off. Expect to see some new renderings soon. For those of you who don’t know what a Roland MDX-20 is, it’s the ultimate Dream Lab component. It’s a 3D printer and scanner. I can actually print the 3D objects that I sculpt not to mention scan a real life 3D object! This is a must have, especially for creating 3D plastic injection molds in house (or garage in my case).

For instance, check out what this fellow whipped up here.

Happy new year 2007! Okay, so not much verbage here, I thought I would at least post some more pictures from yesteryear. I have a new niece! Abrina was brought into our world shortly after Thanksgiving on December 1, 2006, Daddy’s birthday! And Seraphin is just as thrilled planting a kiss on baby Abrina!

Seraphin is looking cute as ever, chowing down on some breaky.

And here is a wayyyy over due picture father (as in Dad) Tim took from the year prior, although it feels like yesterday. Is my sister a baby machine!? Granted this happend well before this blog was started. She is still precious!!!

 
If you need real time assistance right away, try the S.O.S. link. If you need support for a product or service I’ve long forgotton, developed in the past, or need some general computer help (attention family members!), post your comment here. Or search for solutions from prior comments. I’ll be sure to post old S.O.S. sessions that may prove useful to the community as well.

Okay, so Natalie just wonders around the house full of energy. Kile and I were starting to feel guilty so we got another one! This time, its a he and his name is Jake. A yellow lab, pure breed this time for variety, and soft & cuddly. And they get along great. We don’t feel so guilty leaving them alone!

One thing I dislike about working with 3D objects is how messy links to texture maps can get. Traditionally, Caligari trueSpace embeds the complete path (including hard drive letter) to the texture map file in the 3D object file itself. Try distributing your finished 3D object and you’ll soon find out that it can be a pain if you forgot a texture map or the receiving user doesn’t have the same directory structure as you. Caligari has since streamlined how trueSpace resolves missing texture maps, but that usually involves at least a handful of prompts for the user to locate what would otherwise be obvious (like finding the same default folder where the object was opened!). And trueSpace’s archive option only works for scene files. So here is a neat little utility I wrote to clean up texture map references in Caligari trueSpace 3D objects and get them ready for distribution or storing on say a CD, without the drive letter or embedded paths in the object file. I call it trueClean and you can download it for free here.

Simply save your trueSpace or gameSpace object as a Caligari .cob file (make sure you check off the ASCII checkbox). Launch trueClean and select the object file, and include any additional search paths. The object file’s current folder is already included in the search as are any folders hard coded into the object file already. Then select an output path and a folder will automatically be created in the object file’s name with all the referenced texture maps copied into it. A new 3D object file is also copied over with the linked texture map files relative to the given folder. Now you can zip up or burn the folder to a CD and distribute it without having to worry about complicated linked paths to texture maps. This also makes it easy to move folders around and not break any texture map links. trueClean Supports references to GIF, JPG, PNG, TIF, TGA, and BMP texture maps. I needed to whip up this application before I could start distributing my 3D objects to the world -so check back for my personal object library soon!