Inkscape - filters magic

Inkscape is an Open Source "Free graphics vector Editor" - that you can download and use under Windows, Linux and OS X.

It doesn't work like Photoshop or Gimp - but more like Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X ; which mean you will deal with vectors instead of pixels.

The huge benefits of vector is that compared to pixels, when you zoom into the picture,  it stays crisp - you won't get large square or stairs.

You draw shape, square, triangle, stars, and color them, use gradient, you can mimic 3D ... but when it comes to textures, and photo effect, usually people start to look at Photoshop (or Gimp) - while in fact Inkscape is perfectly capable of doing it too - have a look at the scenery below.

It's in fact very basic shape for the sky, 3 layers for the grass and the tree - where some filters were applied.

Blender, Durian and Sintel

Maybe you remember that little cartoon featuring a giant white rabbit called "Big Buck Bunny" made in 2008 - still downloadable in HD - the cartoon's quality was impressive and comparable to what is made by Pixar and Dreamworks (read review).

Well, from the same producer "Ton Roosendaal" a similar "open movie project" is in production and should be available in more or less 2 months from now - that's "Sintel" (read more at the durian.blender.org)

Here's the trailer :


durian.blender.org/news/sintel-teaser

And when you're at it have a look on the process of creating characters - it's pretty interesting!
DVD training 5: Chaos Evolutions - Blender Store

Now because sharing is caring : the results of the Durian Open Movie project are being licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This includes all the data published online and on the DVDs, and all of the contents on the website.

Opera, blogger and still the "uploading picture" bug

I just updated my favorite web browser Opera (I was running version 10.10 and now I'm running 10.53) - first impression .... wow, it's a lot faster than before (kudos for that) but I still have this pesky issue when I'm blogging using blogger.com or draft.blogger.com - when I want to add a picture by uploading a new one ... there's simply no "choose file" button - the window looks like that (in blogger.com)

and same issue (with the new uploading feature of draft.blogger.com) the window looks different but same issue - no choose file button - but the bug seems to be known and reported.