Remember growing up with paper and crayons when you were a kid? Remember handing your doodles to your parents to hang on the refrigerator? Ah, fond memories. Kids and art may be timeless, but the methods sure have changed! A true child of the digital age, my little girl just made her first 3D model and asked me if I would post it on my blog. So here it is. 🙂

It’s a candlestick. Pretty cool, eh?

Want to know what the Mars lander is up to right this minute? Read the Mars Phoenix twitter. Best part: it’s written in the first person from the pov of the craft! 🙂

A new version of the AC3D texture monitor plugin is available! This version adds a “smart update” feature that prevents the same texture from being reloaded multiple times, even if you use the texture multiple times in your scene. The texture monitor now also ignores files who’s “last modified” time stamp has not changed on disk within the last 10 minutes, so textures you haven’t changed don’t get reloaded. This should make load times much faster, especially in large, heavily-textured scenes.

Enjoy!

Read about the texture monitor or download the file here.

This plugin adds displacement map support to AC3D. Displacement mapping is a technique that deforms the current geometry, displacing the vertices in accordance with elevation values stored in a texture map. This technique is useful for “painting on” details onto a very high resolution mesh.

Displacement maps can be painted with 2D art tools such as Corel, Photoshop or Gimp; or, they can be exported from 3D sculpting programs such as ZBrush or Mudbox. The AC3D displacement map plugin supports 8-bit grayscale and 16-bit red-green (POV-Ray format) displacement maps.

If you are new to displacement mapping, this tutorial explains the process in more detail.

Download the plugin. (Requires Windows XP, AC3D 6.2 or above.)

If this isn’t the coolest new geek-toy, I don’t know what is! Fold.it is a new game by Rosetta@home where players fold proteins for high scores. Shockingly, it’s actually a lot of fun–you can think of it sort of like a super-advanced version of Tetris. A training mode walks players through the basics, and a challenge mode allows players to compete worldwide to see who has the most l33t folding skillz.

Fold.It – Who says serious games can’t be fun, too?

The goals of the research project are to learn what strategies human players use to solve the very complex problem of protein folding so the same techniques can be taught to computers. In addition, players will soon be able to solve protein folding “puzzles” that computers haven’t yet solved. While the puzzles currently available are all proteins where the real-life structure is known, plans are to release proteins where the structure is unknown in the very near future–allowing players to participate in real-world research and help save lives. If any break-throughs do occur, researchers have promised to share credit with the player who solved it. How cool is that?

Eventually, players may even be able to design their own proteins!

Download it now: Fold-It