The Live DVD build CAE Linux is a complete engineering toolkit for designing, simulating, testing, and creating/printing your own projects. Everything in the build is free and open source software, allowing you to design your device, do multiphysics simulations to optimize it, and generate the code for building it with 3D printing & milling. You can also design and develop your own printed circuit boards, and microcontroller circuits for automation. Not only do you not need to pay for a license for any of this (because of the GNU/Creative Commons licensing it comes with), you don’t even have to install it on your computer; it all runs directly off the DVD, being a Live Disc. This is pretty much the most powerful open source engineering package I know of, if you have any interest in the design and creation of anything from toy cars to advanced robotics, do yourself a favor and check out this build. You can find the download here, although I recommend visiting their home page to learn all about it and see what kind of support resources are also available.
It started out as a project to patch Android so you could run the open source operating system on netbooks and laggy tablets. They still have a long way to go before they have a run-anywhere version, but Release Candidate 1 of Android x86 shows some promise. With this build, you should be able to run Android on any computer, quite an improvement over having it stuck on your smart phone. Once they get the bugs out of it, it ought to be a lot of fun to be able to run all of those apps on your desktop.
Daz 3D is a powerful free 3D modeling and animation software package that has everything you could want to create your own animations. Mind, if you are not careful, the content store may drain your wallet in short order. But that is mostly a problem for the lazy, who are not willing to do the work to create their own stuff when they can just buy it off the shelf.
Once you have downloaded and installed the free software package, knowing how to use it would be pretty useful, so some tutorials would help out. As with most training and tutorials, any of these concepts apply equally to a lot of different software packages that do the same general job. The major real differences between them are what the buttons are called and which menu they live in, although each program seems to have 1 to 3 things it can do with a click that the other programs need a procedure for. So if you use a different program for your 3D modeling and rendering, most of the info will apply once you figure out where those buttons live in your software.
The first one is a basic intro to 3D modeling and animation, demonstrating the basic components any animation is made of. Once you understand what the components are, it is just a mater of learning how to do each of them in whichever program you prefer, and finally how to put them together to create your finished product. The second tutorial is about the program itself, Daz Studio, showing you where these functions live in this software and how to use them. Again, most of the concepts work in any software, so you might want to at least watch it once, even if you use a different program. And if you don’t already have a 3D modeling software package you prefer to work in, then I recommend downloading and installing either Daz or Blender, as the best free 3D programs on the market today. There are more tutorials where these came from, keep your eyes open and you will find a lot of good ones.
Yes, this is a step-by-step tutorial about how to build your own Minions in Blender, a powerful free open source 3D modeling program. Since I personally love Despicable Me (both of them), this seemed like a great project to learn from. Download your free copy of Blender and start creating today.
If you are into science in any form, or any kind of educational software, Scientific Linux is your best choice. It is put together by the folks at Fermilab in collaboration with the team at CERN, and you would be hard pressed to find a better group of pure scientists on the planet. It has install distro’s, which is where the real power is; the packages you install will determine what all it can do. Right out of the box it comes with Apache installed and ready to run, like any good variant of Enterprise Linux, and it uses the openafs file system, making it fully compatible with most education and research facilities. To start with I recommend going for the Live CD or Live DVD, which you can run right off the disk, without touching your currently installed operating system. That will give you the opportunity to get familiar with the operating system before you decide to install it, as well as give you a collection of office, programming, internet, and multimedia software. If you have an older system you want to install it to, it has the option of using icewm as your desktop rather thane Gnome or KDE, which need a lot more RAM. It is built on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is an incredibly stable environment. And if you think it is missing some important software, one of the kinds of tool sets it has are things that allow you to install it, install whatever additional software packages you like, and then make your own Live CD, Live DVD, or boot-able memory stick from it, using things like revisor, livecd-tools, or liveusb-creator. The latest version, 6.5, was just released and is ready to be run.
SIGGRAPH is a venerable name in the world of computer graphics, the name itself being their usenet newsgroup identifier, Special Interest Group, Graphics, from the days before the Web. At last year’s ACM SIGGRAPH convention, for the first time they held a series of four classes they consolidated under the banner of SIGGRAPH University. They are approximately 3 hours each, and they are university level courses in some aspect of creating computer animation. After watching any of these, you will understand the basics of how to create, not just a picture, but an entire project with timelines and interactions between components.
The one I am embedding on this page is Introduction to 3D Computer Graphics, where you get a bit of the history of how the technology got to this point, but you mostly get a complete mental map of how to create your own animated movie from the ground up, in excellent detail, using whichever set of software you prefer. As you might have guessed by now, I prefer to use a boot-from-DVD Linux build that includes free versions of all the different kinds of multimedia production software you could ever need. If you would like to burn your own arsenal of amazing free multimedia creations tools, check out these other posts and select the one that looks best to you: Musix GNU+Linux 3.0 (mostly music recording, mastering, production, some graphics and video), Ubuntu Studio Live DVD (a complete multimedia suite that has everything you need for most projects, organized by workflow, one of the best builds), Open Artist Live DVD (They took the kitchen sink approach, throwing in every piece of free and open source software that might be useful, and compiled them into folders organized by the type of task you were trying to accomplish), and AV Linux 6.0.2, a personal favorite of mine when it comes to A/V Production that will go live tomorrow.
The other classes in this series are:
An Introduction to OpenGL Programming
The Digital Production Pipeline
Mobile Game Creation for Everyone
And there are more coming up later this year, at Vancouver SIGGRAPH 2014!