Arno Gerretsen : Books

Real-time rendering

arno — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 16:06:00 GMT

Recently I bought an interesting book, Real-time rendering. I have not completely finished reading this book, but it contains a lot of useful information. For example I have found there solutions for some problems I had while working on my ModelConverterX tool. But the explanation of how the rendering process works also give a better insight on what has an influence on the performance when rendering. This is not only interesting to understand better how FSX works, but that is also something I can use at work when dealing with our image generators there.

Blender

arno — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:30:00 GMT

What will happen when GMax is no longer there is a favorite topic for discussion on forums for a while already now. One of the alternative modelling programs often mentioned is Blender. Personally I consider that a good alternative as it is open source and seems to have quite a big user base. A little while ago I bought a book about this tool and I am reading that now. When I have read enough I will start making some models in it to see how it works. The interface seems a bit hard to learn (but we heard to same about GMax, right?), but from the book it sounds quite easy to work with once you know how it works.

And some interesting news is that a first version of a FSX exporter for Blender has now appeared. I find this a very interesting development and look forward to contribute to this exporter once I have learned my way around in Blender. I'll keep you posted about my progress.

LibraryThing

arno — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:48:00 GMT

I have quite some books (despite my not so old age). I guess if I keep collecting them at this pace I will need a bigger house soon to store them, or I might have to give up some more space in the living room. In the past I have tried some computer programs to catalog all the books I have, but I never found any that I found easy to work with.

But last week I read in the newspaper about a site called LibraryThing. As a test I entered about two shelves of my books and I think I like the site. It makes use of different online databases, so that makes finding the books based on for example the ISBN number quite easily. And you can also see how many other people on the site have the same book and the reviews they entered for it.

And they also have a cool widget that you can use to show your collection on your blog for example. So below you can see part of the books I already entered. So if you are looking for a way to catalog your books as well, check out this site.