Mirror, Mirror
posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 1:03 PM
Once I got into creating the download area on my new site, I was pleasantly surprised that, in selecting wordpress as the platform for publishing new articles, I now had on my hands a much more flexible and easy to maintain system for listing all of the downloads than I have here. I can easily now put more detail about the downloads and include images. Instead of just serving as a backup, it is turning out to have better potential as a way to communicate about our files. So, I am actually going to include a link here to this new download page. There is still much for me to enter to fill out the page, but as a way of launching the creation of the downloads page, I have put up a new WIP file for you all to download, the Ohlone Urban Park pack. It is a bunch of new-old stuff from last year that is the kernel of what will eventually be the follow-up to the Gilman pack of models -- there are even a couple of complete and textured models in there to go along with the numerous WIP files. I'll be posting the stuff I mentioned in the last post in the next few weeks -- I wanted to get the foundations built first. Enjoy!
This also brings me to something else I wanted to discuss. The biggest bottleneck in the whole process of distributing models through this project has been in the organization, exporting, and deployment of new files. This, along with just a general lack of time, has been the biggest part of the process that has caused me to delay releasing new material this year. Whenever I have said "A lot of work has been going on behind the scenes", it is has been a roundabout way of saying that collecting and distributing any new material has become such a drain on our meager amounts of time, that it comes last. As part of the effort to flow work to you all on a more regular basis, I am cutting out some of the work I do on the file wrangling. From this point forward, I will be distributing fewer file formats in the downloads. For WIP files, the downloads will include a Blender file and maybe a texture file. For complete models, I will be including the Blender file, an .obj file, and a flattened texture file in .png format at the size it was created (most often 1024 x 1024). This places more of the responsibility on you to convert the file to the format you need for your development pipeline, but I have found over the past three years that people are using such a wide variety of tools with our files that there is no way we can deliver something that will work for everyone. If you need to you could always download Blender and use it as a conversion tool if nothing else. I'm just trying to keep things as simple as possible and keep the people on our team doing what we do best -- making art.
Try out my new detailed download page. If anyone else wants to volunteer to mirror our files, let me know.
Stay free
~shs~
Last time I touched briefly on the fact that I've recently started up a new project. Much of the reason for its existence is to provide a place for me to experiment and talk about things beyond the scope of the coop's community mission. I'll be getting more into that later, but for now I just wanted to talk a little about one of the aspects of the new site I have been creating. Last summer when the lowpolycoop site phased out of existence for a couple weeks (it was a dns server issue -- we were still actually here the whole time), I finally admitted to myself that something as valuable to the community as this site is needs some sort of backup in case it ever goes away again. Although we have not done much in the way of new work this year, the site still gets a few hundred visitors per day, dozens of downloads, and links to our tutorials and files are featured in the wikis for a number of very-well travelled open source projects. There is definitely a need for the continuance and permanence of the work we have all done, and one of the best ways to achieve that is to spread the load and responsibility of carrying the torch amongst more than one central location. In creating my new site, I wanted to include as part of its foundation a way to mirror and backup the content that you get here.
Once I got into creating the download area on my new site, I was pleasantly surprised that, in selecting wordpress as the platform for publishing new articles, I now had on my hands a much more flexible and easy to maintain system for listing all of the downloads than I have here. I can easily now put more detail about the downloads and include images. Instead of just serving as a backup, it is turning out to have better potential as a way to communicate about our files. So, I am actually going to include a link here to this new download page. There is still much for me to enter to fill out the page, but as a way of launching the creation of the downloads page, I have put up a new WIP file for you all to download, the Ohlone Urban Park pack. It is a bunch of new-old stuff from last year that is the kernel of what will eventually be the follow-up to the Gilman pack of models -- there are even a couple of complete and textured models in there to go along with the numerous WIP files. I'll be posting the stuff I mentioned in the last post in the next few weeks -- I wanted to get the foundations built first. Enjoy!
This also brings me to something else I wanted to discuss. The biggest bottleneck in the whole process of distributing models through this project has been in the organization, exporting, and deployment of new files. This, along with just a general lack of time, has been the biggest part of the process that has caused me to delay releasing new material this year. Whenever I have said "A lot of work has been going on behind the scenes", it is has been a roundabout way of saying that collecting and distributing any new material has become such a drain on our meager amounts of time, that it comes last. As part of the effort to flow work to you all on a more regular basis, I am cutting out some of the work I do on the file wrangling. From this point forward, I will be distributing fewer file formats in the downloads. For WIP files, the downloads will include a Blender file and maybe a texture file. For complete models, I will be including the Blender file, an .obj file, and a flattened texture file in .png format at the size it was created (most often 1024 x 1024). This places more of the responsibility on you to convert the file to the format you need for your development pipeline, but I have found over the past three years that people are using such a wide variety of tools with our files that there is no way we can deliver something that will work for everyone. If you need to you could always download Blender and use it as a conversion tool if nothing else. I'm just trying to keep things as simple as possible and keep the people on our team doing what we do best -- making art.
Try out my new detailed download page. If anyone else wants to volunteer to mirror our files, let me know.
Stay free
~shs~
posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 1:03 PM
|
3 comments
links to this post
RSS Feed