Click to view full image

Just an experiment in some things. For the image:

• Texturing
  • This failed :/ I wanted to try to make the tree look as realistic as possible. Unfortunately, the texture I used was too low of a resolution and I couldn’t get the bump map to work out the way I wanted. Also, I couldn’t figure out how to properly texture the vines. UGH
• Lighting
  • I think this turned out ok I wanted to make the tree blend in with the background. I should have changed the angle of the lighting a bit but it’s not bad I think. Also messing around with HDRI maps, and global illumination.
• Modeling
  • Modeling of the tree, and the vines. Mostly trying to get micro-triangle modeling to work…worked out decently for the vines – couldn’t get it to work at all for the tree
• Compositing
  • Getting the tree to blend in with the background and not look out of place. Pretty much failed here too lol

This is what the image looked like before I edited it in photoshop...

The video was just to see how it the global illumination would hold up in an animation. Some methods end up producing a lot of weird artifacts once you start trying to animate and such. I still have to try to build a scene and move things around inside of it instead of just the camera and see how that turns out. I also did a small bit of post processing on the video – added some film grain, color correcting, and other little things here and there. Since I rendered the video at a very odd resolution, Youtube decided to sample it down to an even lower res. Meh. The video download probably looks a bit better.

Video: Download

Click here to view the embedded video.

Back to list

Related posts:

1. video+cross posting test
2. Da Stank Bank “Uploader”
3. Da Stank Bank Uploader – progress!

So first thing’s first, I’m not going to dive in straight to a game. Nope. We have to create a hello, world app first! At this point I’ve already installed the Android SDK and Eclipse, along with the ADT plugin and a virtual device (run: android create avd –target 2 –name my_avd or use the SDK Setup.exe program included in the Android SDK). I really have no idea when I did this, but I found the folders all ready and configured on my system Hurray past me! There’s lots of documentation on how to set this all up, and it’s relatively straight-forward so I’m not going to go through it all here. Follow the links if you’re having trouble. I’m also going to assume you have at least basic experience working with the Eclipse IDE and know enough Java to follow along.

Hello, World!

Note: A lot of this section is taken from the Hello, World tutorial found on the android website as that’s what I followed myself.

Create Project

Settings for creating the Hello, World Android Project

Begin by creating a new Android project in Eclipse. Press CTRL+N (or File -> New -> Other from the menu) and choose Android -> Android Project. Give your project a name, and choose a Build Target. If none show up, then you must use the Android SDK to download the libraries you wish to use. Personally, I set mine to target Android 2.1-update1 as that’s what a lot of phones currently have (or will have soon) and also what the phone I’m getting will ship with. After that, set your Application Name – this will show to your users in their android phone menu. It can be changed later if you like.  The Package Name is what your java classes will live under; I used theootz.helloworld. The Activity is the class that will be created for you by the IDE. An android application is a collection of one or more activities. I just called mine the same as the Application name. Finally, the Min SDK Version tells Android what your application requires to run. If you look at the Build Targets you will see an API Level column. Any of these numbers is valid for the Min SDK Version. But you’d probably want to set it to be the same as what you chose for your Build Target. If you picked Android 2.1-update1, then this is 7. Once all your information is set, you can click Finish.

O, hai dere world!

And now to get to some actual coding. Creating a Hello, World! app in Android is actually pleasantly simple. The IDE will have created a base class for your application to start with, so lets go ahead and open that up. In your project, use the package explorer to browse to src -> your.package.name -> activity_name.java and open it in the editor. The actual path will vary depending on what you chose when you created the project but there’s only one file so it should be easy enough to find You’ll get some code that looks similar to the following:

package theootz.helloworld;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;

public class HelloWorld extends Activity {
    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
    }
}

Now we want to create our View (a drawable object to use in our UI) and set the text to “Hello, World!”. So naturally, we’ll use the TextView object Replace line 11 with the following lines of code:

        TextView tv = new TextView(this);
        tv.setText("Hello, World!");
        setContentView(tv);

What we’re doing is creating a TextView object, setting it’s text value, and then telling our application to use this View for our Activity’s UI. You may notice that the TextView class will not get picked up as a valid object by the IDE. This is because we haven’t imported the right package. You can either add the following line:

import android.widget.TextView;

Or use Eclipse’s awesome package management to do this for you by pressing Ctrl+Shift+O.

Your final code should look like this and is now ready to run:

package theootz.helloworld;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.widget.TextView;

public class HelloWorld extends Activity {
    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        // display our text
        TextView tv = new TextView(this);
        tv.setText("Hello, World!");
        setContentView(tv);
    }
}

Hello, World! Running an Android Virtual Device

Go ahead and run the project, and if all goes well the android emulator should start up and begin your application!

OH NOES! “ERROR: unknown virtual device name”

Oh gawd, an error… but it’s only a Hello, World! app what can possibly go wrong?!

Not everyone will get this, and if you didn’t then you can go ahead and skip to the next part. If you did, you’re probably on windows :/ Turns out that the Android SDK will look for the Virtual Devices in “%USERPROFILE%\.android” but the SDK will create the .android folder in “X:\.android” where X is the drive letter you installed to. So this leaves you with two options:

1. Move the folder to your user profile folder (start -> run -> %USERPROFILE%). The problem with this is, if you create new virtual devices you’ll have to manually move them each time as well.
2. Create a symbolic link. This is the route I went.

So how do you create a Symbolic Link? Start by opening a command prompt (start -> run -> cmd). Browse to your User Profile folder (something like C:\users\<username>). Then type the following command:

mklink /D .android X:\.android

Replace X with the drive letter that has your actual .android folder. And that’s it! Run your application from Eclipse again and you should see the Virtual Device pop up with your app

What’s Next?

Well, for me it will be creating a first game. If  you want to take smaller steps in between then you can read the rest of the Hello, World! tutorial or others on their dev site.

Thoughts

So developing on android, at least on a simple app, seems fairly comparable to creating a Windows Phone 7 app. I think I prefer the MS approach at this point because it uses a lot of systems I’m already accustomed to – i.e. .NET and WPF. Also, I’ve grown to like the .NET development environment (at least in ASP .NET) over the last few months as I’ve been using it at work. It seems to grow on you pretty quickly. Granted, I haven’t created a full out app in either system yet, so hard to say how it will be once I dive a bit deeper.

Buuuuuuuut I will be creating my game soon for Android and will be creating a post as I do to keep track of everything that happens (already started, actually..but its hiding from the world as a Draft). Eventually, I’d like to re-create the same game in the Windows Phone 7 system and see what I like/dislike about each platform. I thought about doing the same with the iPhone but I’m not gonna buy a mac just so I can develop on Jobs’ precious – so forget that. If by some chance I end up buying an iPhone instead of the Galaxy S, then I’ll consider finding a work-around (a VM seems most likely solution).

Related posts:

1. Creating a Windows Phone 7 Series application

With the release of the Windows Phone 7 Series (I really really hate that name so I’m gonna just use winmo7) SDK, I decided to give it a shot and see how hard (or even easy?) creating an application on the platform would be.

I should probably mention I have very little experience coding in SilverLight and only dabbled with it a while ago, and I’ve been coding in C# for a good half year or so now but once again not quite that much experience in the language. On top of that, most C# applications I’ve written use Windows Forms and not WPF. I’ve also decided that my first application will be a simple browser for Amazon S3 (considering how much I’ve been fiddling with it recently), of whose API I have zero experience with as well. So from what I can tell, I have quite a learning curve ahead of me

I’m not going to go over any problems I have over the IDE, APIs, language, etc… but I’m going to try to focus on the experience of creating an actual application for the platform.

Initial Setup

The download and install of the SDK was relatively painless. It did take quite a while though because I had the beta of Visual Studio 2010 still installed and the SDK requires either the RC or it will install Visual Studio 2010 Express on its own. I didn’t really feel like downloading and installing Visual Studio 2010 again, so I had to uninstall VS2010 along with the .Net 4 beta. After which, the SDK installer downloaded and installed the RC for me. It was kind of annoying how it didn’t really tell me why the beta simply HAD to be uninstalled and I had to search through the depths of their forums to figure it out, but I guess most shouldn’t have this problem.

One thing to remember if you’re using the Express version of VS2010 though, I don’t think it’s possible to have any VCS integration so you’ll have to do it outside the IDE.

My First App

Opening up VS2010, I’m presented with a few nice big buttons on pre-set winmo7 specific projects. You can create a Windows Phone App, a Windows Phone List App (not sure what this is exactly but it’s somehow specific to “list and navigation controls”) and a Windows Phone Library.

I figured I want an application and I’ll code in a simple library for working with S3 inside that.

So I went ahead and choose the first option and it creates a nice looking UI preview for me with the phone chrome and all so I can see exactly how it will look. Not bad. Running the program launches the emulator (which takes quite a while :/) and launches my app which currently does nothing. Good enough of a Hello World for me!

Also of interest, the emulator need only be loaded ONCE. It can then be used for multiple debug/run sessions, very nice considering how long it took to load up!

Designing the S3 Browser

So at this point I need to figure out how I want the program to look and behave. I’ve decided to use this desktop S3 Browser by NetSDK Software as a basis on functionality. At the bare minimum, I’m going to need a way for users to enter in their keys and save them (because typing them in every time on a mobile device will DEFINITELY be annoying). They then need to be able to view buckets, and then be able to explore the contents of each bucket. Perhaps even adding in the ability to upload, download, delete and rename files if possible. Though at this point, I’m not even sure if winmo7 has a concept of a user accessible file system or if it’s abstracted/sandboxed like the iPhone.

Login Screen Design

Screens will probably be something akin to:

(1) Login/Key Manager -> (2) Buckets -> (3) Browse

(To the left you can see my first stab at the login screen using the built in controls.)

I’m going to have screen (1) act as a login screen for now, no saving of multiple accounts. That can be added later. Screen (2) will simply list buckets, and then later allow creation/deletion of them as well possibly. And finally screen (3) will list all your files and other functionality to be added later.

The actual design of each screen may be somewhat trivial, but I want the look and feel of application to be as if its a part of the operating system. A quick google search shows that there ARE a set of guidelines so I’m going to have to read them over and figure it out. From what I can tell though, as long as I’m using the Controls that are given to me then most of it should follow the look/feel anyways.

Initial Thoughts

So far, it seems that Microsoft has gone out of their to make it very easy to develop for the platform – leveraging technologies that developers should already be familiar with: Visual Studio, .Net, Expression Blend, SilverLight, etc…

I suspect that the SDK will become better as time goes on. For example, being based on .Net it wouldn’t surprise me if they allow programmers to use languages other than C#. Also from what I’ve been reading, a lot of people have had success porting over their existing SilverLight applications relatively easily and quickly to the new platform.

What’s Next?

Well, I’ve gotta make a library of some sort to connect to S3. I’ve gotta figure out how to use WPF but that shouldn’t be too difficult. Then I’ve gotta get it all working in the emulator. I’ll post updates as I have them, for now my project is available below along with a repository (SVN where it also turns out I managed to misspell theootz as theooz :/) link – feel free to check it out.

Back to list

Related posts:

1. Swan-dive into Android development!

I managed to add effectively full (for the program’s purposes anyways) youtube support to the program now. So it’ll batch render the mp3s to videos, and then upload all of them to youtube. The user can choose a youtube description for each file or just use the default one, as well as tags, the youtube category (synch’d with their schema), tags, etc…

Next up is figuring out the wordpress API to make posts on there, changing album art and video art per file. I might also decide to change the way it uploads the file to youtube and do it manually instead of using their .net library so I can add a progress bar but that would come after I’ve finished the more necessary features.

Related posts:

1. Da Stank Bank “Uploader”
2. An experiment in 3D Max :o
3. Da Stank Bank!

The current process goes somewhat like this:

• Open premiere.
  • Add our background image.
  • Add the mp3 file in an audio track.
  • Change the background image’s length to match the audio track.
  • Render (or queue) the file to be made into a video (usually an .flv).
• Go to youtube.
  • Upload the video(s).
  • Enter all the information: title, tags, description, etc…
  • Wait for it to process and get the embed code.
• Go to our blog.
  • Write a new post.
  • Add the same title, same tags, etc…
  • Set it’s category (dub/dnb/etc…)
  • Add the album art, and our embedded video below.
  • Save and publish the post.

As you can see, this can be quite the lengthy process for each video. So I figured I should be able to create my own program to make this easier.

My intended work flow would try to simplify a lot of the processes. So far, I see it working something like this:

• Open program
  • If it’s the first time, put in your youtube+wordpress login info
• Add all the mp3 files to be converted
• Set the background image
• For each mp3 file, enter the main information (extracting from ID3 tags first if possible). This includes:
  • Artist name, song title, album art, tags (using the tags from wordpress), category (using the categories from wordpress), background image (defaulting to a single image to be used on all tracks but can be changed for individual songs if required.)
• Click a button to render+upload.
  • The program will then render all the files to videos, upload them to youtube and fill in all data, get the embed code and make a wordpress post with all data as well.

Seems a hell of a lot simpler to me.

I started work on this last night, and so far I’ve got a basic program I’ve written up in C#. Right now it has the functionality there to be able to convert batches of mp3s to video files (I’m using windows media 9 to convert to wmv files – can’t seem to figure out how to make it an FLV file.) It also already logs in to your youtube account and I can get data from there, but haven’t figured out the uploading yet.

All in all, I figure this would make a cool week-long-ish project for me to do during the break so we’ll see how it goes

Related posts:

1. Da Stank Bank Uploader – progress!
2. An experiment in 3D Max :o
3. video+cross posting test