I just received the best email from one of our newe users. It really made me realize that people are excited about the site. Maybe these communication will answer some other people questions too. Sorry to post it straight up as it is long, but I have to get to work on the epad beta before I got out at 10:30 with (e:chris) .

Hey Paul,
I took the time to follow your link off craigslist and am glad I did. Jeez, this site has a little bit of everything, doesn't it? I was just curious as to how this all came about. Did it start as a community-building project, your thesis, a little of both? Regardless, this site is well done and I just wanted to let you know how impressed I am.

Take Care,
'jesse

Jesse,
It started out in march of 2003 as a community/hobby programming project and kind of just went from there. I am constantly looking for feedback, so whenever you have any feel free to email me. When I first developed the site, I wanted something that would help people use the internet as a tool to focus on local community.

It occurred to me that many internet users I knew in Buffalo had more intimate communication with people far away but on the same mailing lists. For example, "joe" collects atari video games from the 80s. He joins a mailinglist/forum/site and meets other collectors with similar interests. Many of his social interaction are moved to that forum. As hebecomes more deeply entrentched in that online community, his connection to his local community suffers. I liked the ideas behind the social networking of friendster and the comprehensive recording of history at blogger and wanted to combine into a local tool. I also have similar goals to blogger, that being to allow people with little computer proficiency to publish their thoughts and ideas to the web. The difference here being that you can actually meet your audience and often unknowingly do when out in the city. It often adds a little more legitmacy to the writing - although that is not always true.

I really have a lot to say about this. If you ever want to meet and discuss it over coffee. I have a million more ideas for the site but need to get a grant for most of them to happen. I decided to turn it into my thesis project after it had such a great response. Previously I had been morking with 3D modeling and virtual reality but was very dissatisfied with the void of social and political activism/interaction in the field. I am not very familiar with craig's list. At first I was worried that it would be some sort of corporate competition, especially after hodown wrote " does craig's list in Buffalo spell and end to estrip," but I have realized that our sites have very different purposes. The elmwood sites focus is more about the recording of the people's history of elmwood while craig's list is more as an information dissemination forum. Which actually benefitted us by directing traffic and users such as you to our site. I have considered using the site in other communities but have refrained at this point as I don't want to add to the globalization of communication on the internet that I was originally combatting with the site.

Thanks again,
Paul

P.S. Do you mind if I publish sections of this email to my journal?

Paul,

Thanks for writing back. I see a lot of parallels between how you started this list and how craigslist began - but you're right in saying there are major differences between the two. I don't see one taking over the territory for the other. People use craigslist because they want to get a piece of information out there, or want to retrieve a piece of information. But apart from it's address on the web, I don't see craigslist as a place... There are no user names, no chats, no journals, et
c...

One thing about craigslist is that it
i
s NOT a corporate site (even despite eBay now owning a portion) -- it has been grassroots effort from the get go.

One major component of elmwoodstrip on the other hand is really about building a community -- a person can troll through it, but to really get involved, you need to sign up for an account. People interact with each other both in person AND on the site.

This is stuff you already know... Just wanted to get most of it straight in my own mind.

I do indeed enjoy a good cup of coffee -- the trick for me is having enough time to zip down to elmwood or ANY area that has good coffee for that matter. But yeah man, at some point I wouldn't mind having a sit-down chat with you. You've not only created something that is bleeding brilliant (not just my opinion), but you're also showcasing one of the best areas of Buffalo (and the one least seen by the average passers-by).

Regardless, you are a great example of local talent -- I hope you continue to contribute to the local brain trust and stay local once you're done with UB.

Feel free to use any part of that email in your journal. Don't know if you'd be interested in this being a former 3D modeler: I used to work with Craig Good... Father of particle animation and a man with one freakin' big brain.

Talk to ya later...

'jesse

We are off to Off the Wall for epeep night followed by the Pink for Media Studies hangout night.

(e:sqb) ,
[inlink]sqb,113[/inlink], to get the full site rss feed you don't need ot log out. You just need to click on the (e:info) journal. The (e:info) journal is also the homepage. I will change the link at the top to say home intead of (e:info) as I think it might be confusing. Anyways, the (e:info) journal has the rss feed fo rthe site. Every other journal has the rss feed for that individual user.

It is the same with statistics. The user stats on the user page are fo rthat user an dthe ones on the (e:info) journal are for the whole site.

Paul

I have so many stories to tell, I am going to publish them as 5 journal entries throughout the evening. I found this letter I wrote to my grandparents back in 1996. I found it at nonna's today while doing yardwork and learning about tomato canning (next journal.) Everything has changed since 1996. I am not married to Jessica (e:hodown) , I loved germany after that first month of feeling foreign(so much I lived there for two years), my grandfather (nonno) is dead. My toroise died (not basra), I never made it to London, etc

Here is the letter:
Nonno and Nonna,
I miss you very much. Not a day goes by without me whinking of you. I think - made the wrong choice coming here because I realized now that I do not like germany all that much. The people here are unbelievable cold and rude. At least the in the north. No one is helpful at all. I am however having fun traveling. I can't wait to see my cousin jennifer in london and to go to italy.

School is really easy here. There are no tests or homework. It seems ridiculous. I wish I could come home for christmas because I really miss you guys a lot.

The big new is that I got engaged to jessica. I know that it is not practical or possible for us to get married for a few years but we are so in love and decided to just get enaged anyways. I wrote her a letter asking her to get enaged while I was in italy . When I got back she had written me and the answer was yes. I really miss my tortoises too. I have there pictured all over my wall.

Well i'm going to go to bed now. It's strange but sometimes when I think of you before I go to sleep I still hear that song you used to sing to me when I was a kid. Neena ho or something.

Love,
Paul

[size=m]SGI's Performer[/size]
Currently at UB our modeling for the VR environemnt based on SGI's Performer is limited to polygon models. A newer version of Performer (3.1.1) does offer some limited support for NURBS and subdivision models. Version 3.1 also offers a native Maya plugin for Maya 4.5.

[size=m]Creating models for Performer[/size]
Because we are using Performer 3.0.1 I will be talking about polygon modeling exclusively. Just because we are making our final export as a polygon mesh, does not mean that we are limited to polygons when modeling. Examples, the theatre curtains below.





[size=m]UV mapping polygon objects[/size]
Once your model is created and converted to polygons it is best to texture it using one single texture map. Performer, accets texture maps of any size, but must natively convert them to powers of 2, so it makes sense to start with textures that are powers of 2. E.g. 128 x128, 1024x 1024, they do not have to be proportional e.g. 128 x 512.

Using a single texture map has several advantages over multiple texture images.

[list]
Saves on RAM. Only one textuer needs to load into video am. There is also much less wasted space on a texture.
Easy to organise, one texture file per object
Texture image can span across polygon borders.
[/list]

In the below example I created a model with very low poly cont, textured it using Cinema 4Ds Bodypaint and then exported it using Kaydara's FBX format into Maya 6. The FBX format is a universal 3D model format for moving meshes between modeling and animation packages. Alias just bought kaydara and has promised to continue development of the free plugins. they can be found at





Brought into Maya for further manipulation and rendering.



[size=m]Reducing Polygons[/size]
Reducing Polygons is vital when working in a Realtime environment. The fewer polygon in the final mesh, the better. Maya's polygon reduction tools are excellent at reducing the number of polygons in an object and most often preserve the texture coordinates very well. make sur eto use the heads up display to see details. FOund in Display ->Heads up Display -> polycount





[size=m]Checking Normals[/size]
Make sure the object has polygon normals facing outward. In maya this is found under Display -> Polygon Component -> normals

[size=m]Obect Axis[/size]
Make sure to center the object axis where you want the scaling and rotation and transormatiosn to occur. In maya this is done by hitting the insert key and moving the axis where you want it to be.

If the model is going to be moved around in the scene, it may be wise to center it at 0,0,0 in the world coordinate system. If it is part of a statiic envirnment, you may want to export it with the transformation already made, so that those calculations don't have to be made by the GPU during processing.

[size=m]Exporting[/size]
You may want to change to z-up in maya. This is done in the preferences as performer is Z up. This can also be done afterwards by performing a rotation on the model. It is, however, easiest to do it at this stage in the process.

Next, enable the obje xport plugin in Maya and export the object to obj. If you have performer installed you can now go ahead and convert the model to a pfb using the pfconv command at the command prompt. This can also be done in linux afterwards. Change to the folder with the obj model, mtl file, and texture file.

Make sure the ob
ject texture is in rgb fo
rm
at. If it is not, simply convert it using phothsop or the gimp and rename all the file ending to .rgb in the .mtl file. Then type the following to convert

pfconv input_filename output_filename

To view your model in performer, make sure you are still in the directory with the pfb model and type
perfly your_model.pfb

Edit the .mtl file and change all Kd calues to 1.0 instead of 0.0 and reconvert if you object appears black.




You can find example models from the project here: