Sydney Landmarks

I decided to give the IDE a break for a few days and took up Blender to make some simple models in .x format for use with World Wind Model Feature. Here are the results of a few hours of labour, a couple of simplistic models of Sydney Landmarks.

This is a call to all aspiring modelers to add some contributions to our collection. Various global landmarks are appreciated. Failing that, be selfish and model your own house or office. Help us grow World Wind.

World Wind Video with Cinematic Effects

Fabrice has come up with a nice World Wind Video complete with lens flare and cloud transitions. The idea is to deliver the world to the palm of your hand.

Viva Las Vegas

The most detailed Planet 9 Model available for World Wind - Las Vegas works in version 1.4 with a simple camera fix and boy it looks good. I could not resist. Here is the best of Vegas, money comes from 3G's Girls, Gambling and Games.

World Wind 1.4 and 3D Cities

It was a long and painful labour and at times the parents threatened to shoot the doctor, but finally World Wind 1.4 is out of the SVN as a release. I cross posted on the Google Earth Boards hoping to get some flame, but not much luck yet. There might be new forums for GE, need to check that out.

It is good to see more creative and progressive companies using World Wind as delivery platform for their creations and ideas. World Wind has similar potentials as Second Life in this respect and can create a significant trading ecosystem. Planet 9 Studios which specializes in 3D Modelling of buildings and cityscapes has several cities available in World Wind. The World Wind team is working to turn this into a suitable business idea for paying clients.

How Now Brown Cow ?

So now we have an integrated Collada parser which constructs a mesh from the vertices , but Textures are not there yet. The Object selection code is also half way there, so someone can make a plugin with farm animal noises, click on the cow and it says ... moo! No better way to teach animal sounds to kids.

Here is a Collada cow staring at the stars and pondering general relativity.

TV Tuner and Curried Sausages

My flatmate got a new all black mac book pro with a TV Tuner card, so in a fit I dug up my old TV Tuner card and watched the Australia-New Zealand match. It only works halfway with an external antenna. I really need a better card and antenna. Luckily Australia won. So it was worth my while.

I also managed to watch Al Gore's documentary, "The Inconvenient Truth". Apart from the obvious political spin, he does make some valid points about Global Warming our responsibility. So Withak's Global Flood Plugin is rather timely. It still has some Z-Buffer issues and I am looking at adding the transparency and wave shaders for localized water to it. Otherwise it does a good job.

I also tried a new dish - sausages curried with red paste and mustard. It turned out pretty well and goes with a nice beer. Now time to enjoy the Australian Summer and wonder why the weather is suddenly changing from Mediterranean to Monsoon.

GDAL PALSAR Complex Driver

About 1 year ago I wrote the ALOS-PALSAR Driver for RAT in IDL. Since then I have replaced IDL with scientific Python in my kit. The objective is to eventually get RAT functions implemented into a Python Based Radar Toolkit which will attract greater developer and user base.

GDAL has a quite usable Python API and is great for getting Geographic Rasters into code for manipulation. So with some help from Frank Warmerdam and following the minimalistic tutorial I wrote a driver for the PALSAR Complex Level 1.1 products. Level 1.5 products are already supported in GDAL via the generic SAR_CEOS driver. I am planning to add the gcp support to the driver next so that polarimetric processing information can be interpreted in real world coordinates.