I have set the app age restriction on my child’s device to PEGI 3 to make sure only the most child friendly content is available. There is one exception though, my child really loves Sim City Build It which is PEGI 7 and I was okay with making an exception for that specific game.
How to actually accomplish a special exception to the general age restriction rule was not so obvious however. I thought that I could just login with the parental access code and override the limits as the parent, but Play store was still complaining about Sim City being limited by the age restriction.
The only solution I eventually found for this problem was to login to Family Link on my own device (or alternatively just using the internet browser on a desktop computer) and then temporarily change the age restriction to PEGI 7. This can be done under controls –> content restrictions –> Google Play.
After that I was able to install the app, then immediately set the age restriction back to PEGI 3. The app is still working even after dropping the age restriction back to 3, so this ended up solving the issue.
Have you ever wondered how to create a 3D-transition in which an element should fly past the camera onto the webpage? Here’s how you can do that using CSS-transforms:
See the effect in action here:
FLY IN!
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Document</title>
<style>
body{
perspective: 300px; /* the smaller, the stronger sense of perspective (like short focal lenght) */
min-height: 95vh;
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr 1fr;
grid-template-rows: 1fr 1fr 1fr;
text-align: center;
}
h1{
grid-column: 2/3; /* Just for putting the h1 to center of grid */
grid-row: 2/3; /* Just for putting the h1 to center of grid */
transform: translate3d(800px, 200px, 1500px); /* Set the start position for the element */
animation: myflyin 2s; /* Activate the animation called myflyin */
animation-fill-mode: forwards; /* Keep the position from the last keyfframe */
}
@keyframes myflyin { /* Define the keyframes */
from {
transform: translate3d(800px, 200px, 1500px); /* Starting position */
}
to {
transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); /* End position */
}
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>FLY IN!</h1>
</body>
</html>
The 3D industry has been buzzing about Nvidia’s Instant NeRF (which stands for neural radiance fields) ever since they published their first demo video.
This technology has since been in rapid development and we now have a free iPhone app called Luma AI that anyone can use to capture NeRFs.
I tested the app with a toy robot, here’s a automatically generated video of the result:
The amazing thing about NeRF renders is that they can handle light reflections and bounces in a very realistic manner. This makes it a good fit for VFX work. We can also export a textured 3D-model from the Luma AI app, but it’s not as impressive as rendering with NeRFs. It’s still quite good compared to a basic photogrammetry process, especially considering that the surface of our object was quite reflective. Here’s a screenshot from Blender:
Here is how the mesh looks like (very dense):
Here’s another cool shot from a Robotime Ball Parkour toy:
I have been testing out a lot of 3d-scanning apps for my iPhone 12 Pro recently. The Lidar sensor on the phone was one of the major reasons why I decided to make at least a temporary switch from the Android ecosystem to the iOS world. I’m especially interested in creating 3d-versions (or digital twins) of different rooms and spaces. Here are some of the apps I have already tried:
DotProduct ios app
3D Scanner app
Scandy Pro
Qlone
Kiri Engine
Widar
RTAB-Map
3D Scanner
Scaniverse
Modelar
Polycam
RoomScan
Pix4DCatch
Metascan
Heges
Trinio
ItSeez3D (iPad only)
Most of the apps in the list use the freemium model, where you can do a basic scan for free, but in-app purchases are often required at the export stage. There were two exceptions that were free from start to finish:
3D Scanner App and RTAB-Map of which the latter is open source.
I did some scans of the same space with both apps and the process was quite enjoyable with both. The quality was however somewhat more limited with the 3D Scanner App and in the end I was able to to get best results with RTAB-Map. So out of these scanner apps that I tested I would recommend RTAB-Map. It has versions not only for iPhone, but turns out it’s a very versatile app used for many purposes and it has also desktop releases for the major operating systems, including Windows, Mac and Linux.
I did experience some problems when I tried to do a really detailed scan. RTAB-map probably ran out of memory on my iPhone and crashed quite frequently when post-processing the scans. Luckily it turns out that you can simply export the database from the iPhone in order to do the processing on the desktop version instead. It might not be obvious at first how the RTAB-Map database can be accessed or exported on the iPhone, but you simply need to long-press on a scan in the library and choose “share”.
After you haved shared your database and downloaded it to your desktop computer, you can simply import it to the desktop version of RTAB-Map. I must say I found the interface to be rather confusing. For example, when I was looking for the option to export a textured mesh, the way to do it was to choose the “export 3d clouds” option, although one might thing that a mesh is not exactly a “cloud”. And there wasn’t a typical option to just “export a textured mesh” but you have to check the “meshing” checkbox and then the “texturing” checkbox for the texture options. And after that I actually had to close and the re-open the export to be able to see the “save” button. So quite quirky, but it worked out well in the end.
One more piece of information I want to share about using the RTAB-map on the iPhone: one time I had it crash right after a scan and at first I thought the scan had disappeared completely but after some searches in the “issues” page of their Github, I found out that some kind of recovery might be possible in the latest version. The problem was that I just couldn’t find any recovery option in the app interface. Finally I gave up and decided to do a rescan and when I chose to do a new scan, that’s when the recovery dialogue for the previous scan finally appeared and I was able to recover my crashed scan.
If you are working with laser scans and lidar data, the chances are you have bumped into e57-files, which are often used for point clouds.
Finding a good tool for opening the e57-files can be a challenge, since many of the solutions are proprietary and quite expensive.
Luckily, there is an open source tool that can import many different data formats, including e57-files. It’s called Meshlab and it has builds for Windows, Mac and Linux. The ability to open e57-files was added to the program quite recently, but it works well.
Have you ever needed to force refresh a website with the Brave browser on a mobile device like iPhone or Android phone?
The need to do that may arise, for example, when developing websites for WordPress, because WordPress will attempt to cache the CSS files and your latest changes might not be reflected even if you reload the page.
Many websites advice you to go to the browser cache settings and clear the entire cache. But that is an overkill -there is a better and simpler way:
The easiest way to force Brave to force refresh on your mobile device is to switch the browser to desktop mode from the menu with the three dots. The feature is called “Request desktop site”. After switching to that, you can then switch back to a regular mobile page and the cache should be updated.
If you are getting a “Could not read source map for file” error in the console when trying to link to a JavaScript library like Tensorflow, the solution is simple. You propably don’t need the source map anyways unless you are planning to really digging into the code base of the library. So simply:
Open the script file in your code editor
Scroll all the way down
Remove the source map link at the bottom of the file
Drag and drop folders of footage into Resolve with their folder structures intact. No more creating bins in Resolve for your various footage items. The solution is to drag and drop the folder from your operating system on the area which says “Master” which is typically on the left side of the Media pool. This will automatically preserve all your folder structures.
Auto sync audio and video files. Many professional video productions will involve separate audio files from the video. Typically you have a low quality audio track embedded to the video coming from the video camera’s microphone and then you have a high quality set of audio files recorded with a boom or lavalier. When you start to edit such a setup in Resolve, one of the first steps is to sync the high quality audio with the video. To do that, simply select both the audio and the video clips (or even just the bins containing the audio and the bins containing the video) in the media pool and right click and choose “Auto Sync Audio”. From there I prefer the “Based on waveform and append tracks” because it will keep also the original audio in place for some sanity checks. It might take a while to complete and then it will give you a summary of the results. If you closed the summary, don’t worry, you can easily see which clips were synced with the audio by looking at them on the timeline. The ones that were successfully synced, will contain two audio tracks instead of just one.
Use the 3D qualifier for great results when doing secondary color grading. You can find it in the qualifier tab. Then just draw a stroke over the colors you want to isolate for grading. View the matte from the magic wand looking symbol above the video monitor.
4. Temporarily disable/enable snapping mid-operation with the N-key. When you are dragging a clip on the timeline and realize that the snapping preference is not working for you, you can press N to temporarily diasable or enable snapping.
5. Automatically name your exported video using the project name. If you typically export your video files from the render queue using the name of the actual project, it may be a bit annoying to type in the File Name field, since you have already typed it once when naming the project. It would be nice if Resolve could automatically suggest the project name as the export name, but in the meanwhile you can type %Project Name in the field and then hit “Add to Render Queue” to get the same result. There are other variables you can access as well like %Timeline Name and %Render Resolution. The easiest way to access the variables in to just type a % in the field and Resolve will suggest all kinds of possible variables to you. It’s enough to just type %Proj and then hit enter in order to get the Project Name variable.
