Qt4/OpenGL: Pose Editor

Last week I've published an automated "Puppet Animation" to show how Skeletal Animation and OpenGL works. Today, I've made something more to help you in the Animation Design Process.

The Qt code is really simple, it was just an UI with some slider connected to the Model Bones Matrix to performs Rotations and Translations and a QGLWidget that displays the OpenGL that you've already seen in the last post. I've also added a Useful ListWidget to display textures that are loaded by the model.

To get some cool models you can start by checking Blender's Open Projects that allows you to download models from Elephants Dream (see the screenshot above), Big Buck Bunny or Yo Frankie!. I'm still working on a better way to export Bones from Blender, If you've already tried and want to share some information, give me a mail! (thanks).

For this example, I've made a Big Package that contains the OpenGL engine that allows you to load and drows models and the Qt4 Pose Editor Tool that you can easily find in tools/ folder. The Source code is available here: Qt4/OpenGL Pose Editor Source Code.

Backups and Files Deduplication

Yesterday, I've heard about a "No Space Left" on Backup Machine, obviously the first solutions arrived was like "Buy a new disk, they don't cost so much" or "Try this ultra branded backup product"... and then there's my custom and easy solution that was rejected. :)

So, If you're a little bit brave and you're able to write a couple of lines in Python you can have a very flexible backup system with files deduplication.

The main idea is...

• Foreach home directory that you've to backup, store a key/value list with file_path/shasum (or an hash function that you trust).


• Foreach file in the home directory check if the file is already on the backup server (Store files on Backup Server with shasum as name). If the file was not present upload it.

In this way on the Backup server there're "two folders" one that contains all the backed-up files (storing by shasum, means that one file was on server just once), and one that contains home-th30z-10-Nov-2009.list, home-th30z-11-Nov-2009.list, and so on.

In this way you can say... Hei, fully restore my home at "specified date" or just peek a file that you've in another specified date.. and maybe all the features that you want.

This is a easy and flexible way to store your backup, without wasting space and have a great granularity level of restore...

If you've really groked the idea, you can start your start-up company focused on backups. :D

OpenGL: Skeletal Animation

Drawing meshes with OpenGL is really nice, but animating it's even funnier!

I've published the source code at gitHub git://github.com/matteobertozzi/GDEngine.git it's incomplete and buggy but it works for this kind of experiments.