Monday, June 22, 2009

A rendering


This is two solid weekends of work and was done for a historical architecture award submission that was due today. It was done entirely in Blender. I plan on completing it and taking it to Luxrender.

Cross posted on Blender Artists.

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Alan Kay on User Interface

I've been starting lots of projects and finishing none of them. A newer pursuit of mine is computer programming. My language of choice is Python. Firstly, because it is very simple and consistent. And secondly, because it is applicable to most situations I would want to write a program for: shell scripting, web development, CAD automation, and most interestingly, the umpteen different ways to use Python in Blender (logic in the game engine, PyDrivers, PyNodes...).

I found a course in UC Berkley's webcasts series that can start to fill in the giant holes in my knowledge about writing programs. Anyway, the lecture that I am linking to in this post is not very technical at all. It is a talk by Alan Kay about human-computer-interaction. Alan Kay was a major player at Xerox PARC, which is considered the birthplace of the graphical-user-interface. (bio.) He shows a a demo of what must have been one of the first CAD systems, Sketchpad. It could do things that AutoCAD cannot do now without extensive scripting. The ideas that formed his thinking about user interface were visual thinking, multi-modal learning, and giving people access to the building blocks inside the computer.

The talk is in two parts. I don't think I can link to them directly. They are the September 12th and 15th classes labeled "User Interface (Alan Kay)" on the class' website. (link.)