Bag of Beans

The latest update of this free paint program was just released yesterday. Check it out.

Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing.

• Link
• Changes in v3.0

Here’s an interesting write up for a project to build a Cintiq-like interactive pen tablet.

This is hybrid screen/graphics tablet which makes me drool. The price however makes me weep, £2000ish for the 20” version. They also do a thing called the PL at 17” for a more reasonable £500ish. Occasionally they appear on the site in their bargain basement ex-demo section. Still hard for me to justify though.

Then I had one of those “spang” moments. None of the tech involved is new and all is readily available second hand, it’s just a matter of putting it together. My Wacom at work will happily operate with the stylus off the surface, after that it’s just an LCD screen, right? Anyhow where’s the fun in just buying something?

The finished product:

• Link (via hack a day)

This is a beautiful and touching piece of animation created for an animator’s master’s thesis.

• Link (via reddit)

This is one of the coolest 3D animations I’ve seen.

From the first Animusic DVD. Pipe Dream has been voted one of the 50 greatest animation projects ever (by 3D World magazine).

A group of percussion instruments perform music by way of metal balls that fly out from pipes.

• Link (via reddit)

If you’ve ever needed to generate an image of planet, here’s one easy way to do so in Photoshop.

Using just one texture in Photoshop, I’m going to teach you how to make a planet that looks somewhat realistic although, in the end, whether it looks realistic or not is entirely up to you and the way you play with settings.

• Link (via Digg)