NOTE: Change in Plans for November.
While preparing his presentation on TrueSpace, Russ discovered that the software is being discontinued on November 25!
We're all quite fortunate that Russ discovered this as soon as he did, because we might have followed through with plans to develop a PACS project using this software. Fortunately, we've been warned in time, although it does pose some problems for our workshop this coming Saturday. Thanks for all the effort you've put into this, Russ!
I've been taking a look, in the past week or so, at another freebie, Google's SketchUp, and I've already bought an O'Reilly "Missing Manual" on this subject, so I'm going to go through the first chapter and prepare a quickie presentation on SketchUp. It looks like an interesting piece of software, which isn't as powerful as Blender but seems to have an easier learning curve, and it's something we may want to take a look at in the coming months.
See y'all Saturday,
Mike Ehling
PACS board member Russ Tobias will be presenting on the free TrueSpace software, available for free from Microsoft.
Russ writes: "the main purpose is for me to introduce you to what appears to me to be a spectacular package with lots of potential in animation, virtual reality, model making, and a host of other areas, in a professionally produced package now available at a zero price. My goal will be to impart enough information to convince the group that TrueSpace is worth investigating, and possibly using as the topic for extended investigation by our SIG."
September 19
To start out the PACS season, and in honor of Software Freedom Day, we took a look at Blender, the free and open-source 3-D animation software. As we saw, Blender is very powerful but can have a steep learning curve, It's also a difficult software applciation to use on a laptop because a numberic keypad makes some of the controls a lot easier to use with "hot keys." Also, a mouse rather than a touch pad is almost an essential.
In the next few months, we will, as time permits, take a deeper look at 3-D animation and how a third axis of rotation is use to simulate depth.
October 11
Taking a break from Blender, we took a look at how Adobe ImageReady can be used to create animated GIF's like the WAM animation in the header of this webpage.
In current versions of PhotoShop, ImageReady's functions seem to have been incorporated directly into PhotoShop, but in version 9 (which I am still using) ImageReady ships along with Photoshop but as a separate executable application.
As we saw, we can use the ImageReady animation timeline, adjust the visibility of layers in each frame, and set a timer in each frame to produce an animated effect that can be exported in GIF format for use on a web page.
Also, at our October 11 meeting, PACS board member Russ Tobias briefly discussed the free TrueSpace software (now a Microsoft product)and offered to present on this subject next month.