How to enable the Genius Gpen 560 pen tablet in Ubuntu

Getting a Gpen 560 to work in Ubuntu Intrepid and Jaunty is easy. It is recognized as an Aiptek tablet. So get the aiptek driver by opening a terminal (or using synaptic) and typing:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-aiptek

Open a text editor and create a file and save it as 10-aiptek.fdi .

You'll need to type the following code in the file, but don't copy and paste the code below because you might copy html codes needed to display it in Blogger. Instead download the 10-aiptek.fdi.zip file (0.38 kb) and extract it somewhere.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->

<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.product" contains="Aiptek">
<merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">aiptek </merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true </merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Type" type="string">stylus </merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Mode" type="string">absolute </merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.zMin" type="string">0</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.zMax" type="string">1024</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

cd to where you downloaded the file 10-aiptek.fdi and change the owner of the file by typing, then copy it to /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty:

sudo chown root:root 10-aiptek.fdi

sudo cp 10-aiptek.fdi /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty

plug in the gpen tablet.


Making the tablet work in Gimp

Open Gimp. Click Edit->Preferences.
Select Input Devices in the left panel of the Preferences dialog box.
Click on Configure Extended Input Devices...

In the Configure Input Devices dialog box, click the Device: dropdown menu. Aiptek should appear in the list. Select that and in Mode: select Screen. Hit Save and have fun.

In Blender it works like a charm. All buttons work.


For further information see this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AiptekTablet

Stopmotion animation with a webcam in UbuntuStudio

The Stopmotion software for stop motion animation is included in the distribution of UbuntuStudio. The demo here was done with UbuntuStudio 8.04 based on Intrepid.

I used an A4Tech web cam which is v4l2. Stopmotion has a problem with these kind of web cameras so you'll need to follow Aearenda's solution here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=931208 . I do hope they've already solved this in Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04.

Create an mplayer video import device in Stopmotion


Start Stopmotion and in the menu find settings->configure stopmotion or ctrl-P.

Click add button.

Resize the dialog box to see the start deamon & stop deamon text boxes.

Click video import tab.

In the start deamon text box enter the following (change the ~/RENDER/stopmotion/ folder with your preference):

~/RENDER/stopmotion/startmplayer $VIDEODEVICE $IMAGEFILE 2 0.25s .tempjpgs &

In the stop deamon text box enter this code:

killall startmplayer && killall mplayer

Download my startmplayer file from: http://www.mediafire.com/file/zm2ytmnqa2j/startmplayer.zip.

Extract this startmplayer file in the ~/RENDER/stopmotion/ folder, you can change this folder.

Then follow this demo:



Finished product (a bit crude):

Taking a break on proyektong halo-halo.

I currently taking a break on this project because of my research assignments for my courses in Masters of Distance Education. I will try to catch up later.

Monkey's head

Monkey's face

I am beginning the mesh of matsing.

Some more daga renders

It also appears that lighting have a lot to do with the appearance of the fur. These were done with the default lamp:



Compare with these done with 2 hemis, top and bottom:





And these with 2 hemis top and bottom, plus 1 spot:

Daga blend file release 1.0

Download link:

daga01.zip (2.69 MB)


I am not particularly happy with this release but I have to suspend my tweaking of this model to move on to the last main character. This is a dirty rat, licensed under licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Please document any modifications in the text info file.

Includes footroll.py from http://graphicall.org/bbb/chars/pyconstraints/footroll.py which is
copyright Blender Foundation|www.bigbuckbunny.org | http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/about/. footroll.py python script is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

Problems that I could not solve at the moment includes:
1. The bone driver for blinking doesn't work.
2. The tail flattens when in a particular position like so:



3. The shoulders have ugly deformations in some positions:

Rest position



Deformed position, thankfully the fur hides some of it:



On the positive side is that I did manage to implement footroll, I just don't know if this is correct:



I also made use of a normal map for the details of the ears. The normal map was made using the procedure in Ken Bayer's tutorial "Baking normal maps from a high poly model" in BlenderArt magazine 20 (www.blenderart.org).

Rat fur

I still need a few tweaks. But something odd happened to my cameras. I can no longer render with more than one camera. When I ctrl-0 another camera, it still renders the view of the last camera. I wonder if this was caused by mesh deform or I accidentally enabled/disabled something.

Test pose for dirty rat.

Working with the mesh deform modifier is difficult because it cause some unwanted deformations. In this model, I had to exclude the arms from the mesh deformer because it was flattening out the arms. Perhaps this is the reason why the Big Buck Bunny characters had a python script for keeping the volume of the arms.

Mesh deformer of daga

This is the first time I'll be using the mesh deform modifier. Here is the cage of the dirty rat.

Final mesh for Daga

This first render was done in gelato.



The rest are blender internal render.

Dirty Rat Character mesh

Node material setting of Pagong's body and render

Pagong blend file, minor upgrade to 1.1

Minor upgrade to Pagong (turtle). I forgot to parent the blinker bones to the head, so it's now corrected. I also tried to reduce the specularity of the shell.


Download link: Pagong 1.1 (7.67 MB)

License info

Pagong's mesh, rig, and textures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Please document any modifications in the text info file.

Includes footroll.py from http://graphicall.org/bbb/chars/pyconstraints/footroll.py which is
copyright Blender Foundation|www.bigbuckbunny.org | http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/about/. footroll.py python script is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

Pagong blend file release 1.0

Announcing my first release of Pagong (turtle). Mesh, rig, and textures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Please document any modifications in the text info file.

Includes footroll.py from http://graphicall.org/bbb/chars/pyconstraints/footroll.py which is
copyright Blender Foundation|www.bigbuckbunny.org | http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/about/. footroll.py python script is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

This turtle is a character in my halo-halo project animation. It makes use of multiple materials that are vertex assigned and node materials. You can even consider it a walking demo for blender 2.48 materials and textures.

Download link

Pagong 1.0 (7.67 MB)

Enjoy :-)

Test pose for Pagong: Tucked position