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A Simple PBR Shader NodeGroup in Blender 3D

1/3/2016

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Over the last few months I've been working to push my modelling and texturing skills. I've been practising on assorted projects in Blender 3D and Unity 5 (using Blender models). While searching for better tools to improve one of my weakest skills, texturing, I came across Allegorithmic's Substance Painter. It has quickly become an essential part of my workflow. I love the toolset; It's quick, it's well laid out, it has some robust generators and effects, and it feels familiar to anyone who has used Photoshop in the past. My biggest problem has been converting Substance Painter's PBR Metal/Roughness maps into materials within Blender's shader nodes. For every project I was basically creating a new node tree, playing with it until I got something that looked relatively pretty in Cycles, but was often inconsistent to what I was seeing in Substance Painter. This week, I finally made a single simple nodegroup which takes Substance Painter's PBR maps and turns them into Blender Shaders. All you have to do is append the nodegroup into your project, plug in your maps, and that's it! Let's take a look at its construction! 

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Basic Python Ciphers

5/6/2015

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I've started reading the book "Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python" just for some fun inspiration, and the introduction is about Caesar Cipher's caught my attention. Basically, the old school 'encryption' you'd do in elementary school where A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, etc... but then you could shift it so that A = 5, B = 6, C= 7, etc... Here's the basic code I've implemented in Python so far. Haven't touched Python in at least a year, except to rewrite a basic Fibonacci Sequence formula for laughs occasionally (set it to go to 10,000 and watch the numbers print out looking like the screens from The Matrix...), so I'm quite chuffed with the results. Enjoy!
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Experimenting with String Parsing (VB)

2/25/2015

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This is a really short one today, this is just some programming experiments I've been doing in class working on contextual string parsing; breaking up words based on spaces no matter how many words are typed, and searching through a string in order to find a specific substring and isolate it from the rest of the characters.
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Hotel Room Change Calculator (VB)

1/27/2015

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This is one of the projects early on in our Visual Basic book for my SSC course, but I kinda took it to a whole other level. I added a lot of tiny features and functionality to make it more appealing and more user friendly, such as input boxes automatically going red if they cannot be converted into a decimal for the calculations, an error box getting thrown if you try to calculate with a bad number, and a pop-up settings menu that allows you to change the tax rate for your region.

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Reddit Traffic Analysis v1.3 (VB)

1/9/2015

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Starting the new quarter with a college course on Visual Basic, I've gone back to my old Reddit Traffic Analysis program, rewritten it in Visual Basic, and added some new features. There's now a label for the vote threshold box which should make it easier to understand, and a web browser to view the pages you're going to and what the tool is parsing from. The URL bar doesn't currently reflect the page you're on if you click a link because I ran into a lot of issues where the URL bar was ending up just displaying the address of the advertisement servers instead of the main URL of the subreddit, but it does still work as before allowing you to copy and paste a specific subreddit address, or just put in "/r/SubredditName". The output box below also has run into some formatting issues as the new line doesn't seem to be working. As before, it doesn't parse anything but a subreddit because it is looking for the sitetable and document nodes to read from. There's also now separate buttons for going to a URL and parsing the page you're on. 

Description from the original version:
This is a relatively simple Windows Forms Application I've been working on in Visual Studio to try and start learning C# and Windows Forms. It's a fixed window with a URL input bar at the top which accepts a link to a subreddit, or the name of the subreddit in the format "/r/subredditname". It then opens that subreddit, checks for all the posts that are above the vote score threshold set just under the URL bar, and returns the average score, time of day, and day of the week for these posts in the attempt to help you see when the most popular posts are made on any given subreddit. It was made with the help of the HTML Agility Pack in order to load and locate the nodes in the Reddit HTML code. 

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Reddit Traffic Analysis v1.2 (C#)

11/19/2014

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This is an iteration on yesterday's Reddit Analysis tool, which contains an overall exception catching in the case that an improper or malformed URL is put into the box.

Using yesterday's description:
This is a relatively simple Windows Forms Application I've been working on in Visual Studio to try and start learning C# and Windows Forms. It's a fixed window with a URL input bar at the top which accepts a link to a subreddit, or the name of the subreddit in the format "/r/subredditname". It then opens that subreddit, checks for all the posts that are above the vote score threshold set just under the URL bar, and returns the average score, time of day, and day of the week for these posts in the attempt to help you see when the most popular posts are made on any given subreddit. It was made with the help of the HTML Agility Pack in order to load and locate the nodes in the Reddit HTML code. 
reddit_traffic_analysis_1.2.zip
File Size: 173 kb
File Type: zip
Download File


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Reddit Traffic Analysis Program (C#)

11/18/2014

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This is a relatively simple Windows Forms Application I've been working on in Visual Studio to try and start learning C# and Windows Forms. It's a fixed window with a URL input bar at the top which accepts a link to a subreddit, or the name of the subreddit in the format "/r/subredditname". It then opens that subreddit, checks for all the posts that are above the vote score threshold set just under the URL bar, and returns the average score, time of day, and day of the week for these posts in the attempt to help you see when the most popular posts are made on any given subreddit. It was made with the help of the HTML Agility Pack in order to load and locate the nodes in the Reddit HTML code. 
reddit_traffic_analysis_1.1.zip
File Size: 153 kb
File Type: zip
Download File


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Getting Back into Command Line Programming

11/5/2014

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As part of a prerequisite for dual-enrollment, I've been working in a Fundamental of Programming Class. We've finally moved on from flow-charts into programming, starting with C and C++. Myself, I hadn't touched C++ in about a year since I'd put together an 800 line Command Line Tic Tac Toe game with a basic AI, but I've been working with the essence of C since then with GML for Game Maker Studio which is an abstraction of C, C# work in Unity, and some C# form work for fun. Getting back into C++ felt good, though it took a little time to get reacquainted with the syntax and statements. 

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    My name is Jeffrey Hepburn, and I'm a young writer, graphic design artist, and aspiring filmmaker.

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