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The author Winston Churchill

on June 25, 2013

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The one who's running this blog is me, Erik Nordeus. I'm an imagineer (creative engineer) who's interested in the intersection between art and engineering.
This is my portfolio: Habrador.com

Bing Image Creator AI: An overview of art styles and materials you can use

The search engine Microsoft Bing has a new tool called Image Creator . This tool lets you create images from text by using an AI system called DALL·E 2 from OpenAI . If you want a superchihuahua with a red cape, just type "superchihuahua with a red cape" and you get four images in just a matter of seconds (the more images you generate the longer it will take unless you pay Microsoft some money). No-one took a photo of exactly this chihuahua dressed in a red cape - it doesn't exist in real life - it was generated by the Artificial Intelligence. Art styles The Image Creator tool can also generate images with a specific art style, such as watercolor or anime. But there's not an overview of which art styles are available, so I thought I would try a few of them and show the result here. To get a specific art style, you type "superchihuahua with a red cape, anime art style" so it understands which art style to use. The AI is smart when it comes to generate cool i

Explaining the Hybrid A Star pathfinding algorithm for selfdriving cars

Let's say you are standing somewhere in a room and would like to find the shortest path to a goal. You can see a few obstacles, such as a table, that you would like to avoid. The easiest way to solve the problem (if you are a computer) is to divide the room into many small squares (cells) and then use the common A* (A Star) search algorithm to find the shortest path. But what if you are a car and can't turn around 360 degrees like a human can, then you have a problem! Well, at least until you learn the Hybrid A Star search algorithm . With that algorithm you will be able to find a drivable path to the goal. The reason I wanted to learn the Hybrid A* algorithm was that I took a class in self-driving cars, where the teacher showed a really cool video with a car that drove around in a maze until it found the goal: The problem was that the teacher didn't explain the Hybrid A* algorithm - he just explained the classic A* algorithm , so I had to figure it out on my own

The author Winston Churchill

I have amused myself by writing a biography book on the entrepreneur Elon Musk - who has founded or co-founded companies like PayPal, Tesla Motors , SpaceX, and SolarCity - called The Engineer - Follow Elon Musk on a journey from South Africa to Mars . One of Elon Musk's role models is the former British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill. As research for the book I wrote, I decided to learn more about Churchill's life and if I could draw some parallels to Elon Musk. What I discovered was that the young Churchill had traveled around in what would become South Africa before he became the British Prime Minister. Elon Musk wasn't born at the time but his ancestor lived in the area. What Churchill did in the region was working as a reporter for a British newspaper and his main job was to cover a war that had broken out called the Second Boer War. I also learned that Churchill was in fact an author and has written several non-fictional books and one work of fiction c

How to make tank tracks in Unity and Blender

What we are going to achieve here is this: How do we make tank tracks in Blender and Unity ? One part of the problem has already been answered in a Russian tutorial, but you can translate it with Google translate, or follow the links below. Unity3D tank tutorial Part 1 Unity3D tank tutorial Part 2 Unity3D tank tutorial Part 1 (translated) Unity3D tank tutorial Part 2 (translated) In the Russian tutorial you will learn how to import a tank model in Unity and how to make it move. I don't know if it's the ultimate solution, but it's a good starting point. It uses the simplified version of tank tracks - a solid mesh that symbolizes the track and then the texture is animated so it looks like the track is moving. The other version, to model each part of the track and then join them together, will produce a more realistic track, but your computer will probably burn up from the calculations. The problem with the Russian tutorial is that it assumes we know how to

Stylized graphics - lessons learned from Sea of Thieves and Fortnite

Sea of Thieves Stylized graphics can best be described as an art style which is between realistic- and cartoonish graphics. A game that's using stylized graphics is the newly released Sea of Thieves. One of the developers of the game gave a GDC talk where he explained how they did it: Visual Adventures on Sea of Thieves . Simplify structures. The graphics should not be realistic, so you have to simplify everything. But you can still achieve a complex scene if you combine several simple objects. Paint the textures. You can't use photos as textures, so you have to try to simplify the photo reference by hand. Notice that the textures above were not used in the game because the final textures were actually more detailed: the palm leaves for example look more like real leaves but are still simplified. Use the light source to change the mode. An often forgotten parameter you can change is the light source in the scene. The stuff you add should look like it ha

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