My father is a knifemaker with long time experience in the knifemaking and he has done some of the most amazing knives I have ever seen. You can check his website here:
This holidays, while I was visiting my family in Bulgaria I had the opportunity to work with him on a pair of knives . He had some amazing blades available from two young bladesmiths and knifemakres from Norway - Jakob and Simon Nylund. My father made some amazing handles as always and I worked on the engraving and painting of the leather sheaths.
I have always been interested in aquariums and recently started my first planted aquarium. It is a 10gallon tank which is perfect for small scapes and I wanted to do something with a lot of greenery and few rocks. I had huge problems at the beginning because I didn't know a lot of things about the chemistry of the planted tanks. Until now I had only had african cichlid tanks which rarely have any plants. You can find an earlier post here about my previous Malawi tank which was a huge 500 liters one. This current one is much smaller and very different in every aspect. Water conditions, lighting, fertilizing , I have never dealt with it before and it took me a while to learn my mistakes. Currently the plants are growing extremely good and I managed to snap few pictures of the aquarium in it's current state.
Me and a friend of mine - Alex Tyemirov recently worked on an open source project together. We wanted to build a system for driving and sculpting blendshape correctives, which will be completely open source. For that we first needed to build a driver node that can read the angles properly with a cool and easy to use interface to the rigger. We came up with the idea of a locator node that is parented to a joint or another transform and reads the rotation value of another transform relative to the parent. The interface of the locator is easy to use and the output of the node should drive directly your blendshape target. I will have to make a post about how to use it, but for now I just wanted to post the page where we host it:
What is included is python scripts for easy installation of the node, python plugin, C++ plugin and a makefile for Linux. I don't have Windows and Mac so I can't test it there, but if you would like to compile it for these OSes, there shouldn't be a problem. If you would also like to collaborate in any way - please go ahead and fork the repository on GitHub and send me a pull request! All additions will be valuable. Even making makefiles for Windows or Mac will be useful. The next step is to work on a sculpting system , but with all the work we have I`m not sure when that would be ready. At least the driver can be used on it's own. Enjoy!
This is another awesome kickstarter campaing, this time launched by the infamous Japanese studio "Production I.G." and my supervisor Justin Leach.
It is a movie by Masaaki Yuasa - the director behind "Mind Game" and other awesome projects! It already reached $12k in the first day of the campaing and I am sure it will be funded with the help of the japanese animation fans.
