Tag: application

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JetBrains Investigated by FBI in SolarWinds Hack Probe

JetBrains, maker of popular development software including the likes of IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, Project Rider, the Kotlin language and even the Mono font, are being investigated by the FBI as part of the SolarWinds hack probe according to the New York Times. The product in question targeted in this investigation is their build management solution TeamCity. Please keep in mind, this is just an investigation at this point, there is no guilt established and no indication JetBrains products have been compromised.

From the New York Times article, JetBrains deny any knowledge of a compromise in their software:

JetBrains said on Wednesday that it had not been contacted by government officials and was not aware of any compromise. The exact software that investigators are examining is a JetBrains product called TeamCity, which allows developers to test and exchange software code before its release. By compromising TeamCity, or exploiting gaps in how customers use the tool, cybersecurity experts say the Russian hackers could have invisibly planted back doors in an untold number of JetBrain’s clients.

Government officials are not certain how the compromise of the JetBrains software relates to the larger SolarWinds hacking. They are seeking to learn if it was a parallel way for Russia’s main intelligence agency to enter government and private systems, or whether it was the original pathway for Russian operatives to first infiltrate SolarWinds.

Information on the JetBrains investigation are limited, there is also an extremely short article on Reuters. The extent of the SolarWinds hack continue to grow daily. After the video was published, JetBrains have issued a response to the New York Times article, included in full:

The New York Times has published a story in which they point to JetBrains being under investigation and somehow related to the SolarWinds breach that recently took place.

First and foremost, JetBrains has not taken part or been involved in this attack in any way. SolarWinds is one of our customers and uses TeamCity, which is a Continuous Integration and Deployment System, used as part of building software. SolarWinds has not contacted us with any details regarding the breach and the only information we have is what has been made publicly available. It’s important to stress that TeamCity is a complex product that requires proper configuration. If TeamCity has somehow been used in this process, it could very well be due to misconfiguration, and not a specific vulnerability. Furthermore, security is our top concern and we notify and manage updates transparently in our Security Bulletin.

Secondly, we have not been contacted by any government or security agency regarding this matter, nor are we aware of being under any investigation. If such an investigation is undertaken, the authorities can count on our full cooperation.

We remain open to answering any and all questions regarding this matter and as always are committed to delivering the best possible products and services to our customers.

Thank you
Maxim Shafirov
Chief Executive Officer

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AI Powered Art Tools

Today we are going to look at two vastly different AI powered art generation tools, Luminar and NVIDIA GauGAN Beta. Luminar is a powerful art processing tool, a cross between Photoshop and Lightroom, but AI assisted. We recently covered Luminar hands-on including how to use it with Affinity Photo here and it is currently (2021-01-05) in the final 24 hours of a Humble Bundle sale.

NVIDIA GauGAN on the other-hand is a web based application that is part of the NVIDIA AI Playground. GauGAN is described as:

GauGAN, named after post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, creates photorealistic images from segmentation maps, which are labeled sketches that depict the layout of a scene.

Artists can use paintbrush and paint bucket tools to design their own landscapes with labels like river, rock and cloud. A style transfer algorithm allows creators to apply filters — changing a daytime scene to sunset, or a photorealistic image to a painting. Users can even upload their own filters to layer onto their masterpieces, or upload custom segmentation maps and landscape images as a foundation for their artwork

You can learn more about GauGAN here, while technical details of the algorithm in the open source implementation hosted on GitHub. You can try an already trained version of the algorithm in action here in your browser.

These are not unique examples in terms of machine learning or AI enhanced art creation tools. In early 2020 Unity acquired Artomatix, the creator of ArtEngine, an AI driven material creation tool. Another project that was recently featured on this site is Cascadeur, a physics based animation tool that uses machine learning to help with animations. DeepMotion Animate 3D is another recently featured machine learning based application, that takes simple 2D footage and makes a 3D rig and animation from the results.

The key thing in all of these tools thus far is they don’t seek to replace the artist, but augment them using deep or machine learning algorithms. You can check out NVIDIA GauGAN and Luminar in action in the video below. For a VERY limited time you can get Luminar on Humble Bundle here. [Expires 01/06! — GFS can receive a commission on Humble purchases]. So what do you say, are AI powered art tools the future?

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Easy Anime Character Creation with VRoid Studio and Blender

Creating anime characters for game development has never been easier with tools like VRoid Studio and Blender. In this tutorial we showcase using VRoid Studio, a free tool for creating textured and animated anime avatars. If VRoid Studio sounds familiar, we featured this tool as recently as 2019.

In the video below we walk through the following processes:

  • Using VRoid Studio
  • Exporting VRM files
  • Importing VRM into Blender
  • Creating a simple animation
  • Exporting from Blender in GLB/GLTF format
  • Importing GLB formats into the Godot game engine
  • Exporting VRoid characters to Mixamo for animting

In addition to VRoid Studio you need the VRM importer for Blender. If you are using the Unity game engine, there is a Unity importer for VRM files available as well, although we wont be covering it in the video below.

One area of importance with any tool, especially free tools, are what the license terms are. You can see the list of appropriate uses here, which specifically includes “Selling video games and other products featuring characters created with VRoid Studio”. Once you have all the appropriate tools, check out the video below for step by step instruction son how to create an animated anime character for use in Godot using VRoid Studio and Blender.

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VoxEdit Beta Hands-On

VoxEdit is a free 3D Voxel graphics editor you can freely download for Windows and Mac OS here, with a Linux version mentioned as “coming soon”. The application is actually designed as the content creation tool for The Sandbox a voxel based game platform where artists can monetize their voxel creations. That said, the modelling portions support exporting in OBJ, FBX and GLTF formats making it useful for use with other engines and DCC tools. The animation tools however cannot export except to the Sandbox marketplace.

The modelling tools have the following features:

  • All-in-One software (Model, Rig, and Animate)
  • Incredible performance
  • Available for Windows and Mac
  • Amazing voxel creation tools
  • High level of detail models
  • Advanced Renderer
  • Versatile Color Palette
  • Friendly 3D environment

These are the key features if you are using VoxEdit as a straight out voxel modelling tool. However if you are intending to publish on the Sandbox marketplace, the tool also has advanced animation features, as well as the ability to define and texture voxel blocks. Neither of these features however support exporting into “open” file formats.

If VoxEdit isn’t to your taste for Voxel modelling, be sure to check out BlockBench or possibly MagicaVoxel for alternatives. You can learn more about VoxEdit in the video below.

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Hands-On With Sound Particles

Sound Particles is a one of a kind program for rendering 3D audio, capable of supporting thousands to millions of sounds in your simulation. Sound Particles has been battle tested used in big budgets movies such as Alita, Ready Player One and the new Star Wars films, as well as games such as Assassins Creed Origin.

Features of Sound Particles:

Sound Particles is a sound design software application capable of generating thousands (even millions) of sounds in a virtual 3D audio world. This immersive audio application will enable you to create highly complex sounds on the fly, which will ultimately enable you to design sound better and faster than ever.

Sound Design
The best 3D software for complex sound design. Used for film, videogames and virtual reality.

Postproduction
Working in postproduction? Use Sound Particles to add depth and richness to your sounds.

Immersive Audio
Supports immersive audio formats, such as Ambisonics, Dolby Atmos, Auro 3d and much more.

If you are interested in trying this unique audio application they have a fully functional demonstration available for Windows and Mac available here. All licenses are currently 50% off during Black Friday/Cyber Monday from indie to enterprise licenses. You can see Sound Particles in action in the video below. Sounds used during this demo were all downloaded from the excellent FreeSound.org website.

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Quixel Mixer 2020.1.6 Released

Hot on the heels of the Quixel Bridge release, today Quixel released version 2020.1.6 of Quixel Mixer. Quixel Mixer is a texture generation tool that is completely free for everybody and includes MegaScans integration for Unreal Engine users. The 2020.1.6 release adds the ability to export masks, as well as 65 new free smart materials.

Details of the release from the Quixel blog:

Following the support of 3D Texturing and Smart Materials, this Quixel Mixer 2020.1.6 adds 65 new scan-based Smart Materials along with a powerful new feature: advanced mask export. This highly requested feature enables you to combine, channel pack and export advanced masks, leveraging Mixer’s versatile mask stack and material blending engine.

The ability to utilize these masks in other applications allows you to easily create high-quality variations of your materials directly inside the app of your choice.

Mixer is available for everyone, for free, forever, including its enormous base library of hundreds of free scans and Smart Materials. What’s more — Unreal Engine users have access to the entire Megascans library for free, right within Mixer. 

Quixel is available for download here for Windows and Mac OS. You can learn more about the 2020.1.6 release in the video below.

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Quixel Release Quixel Bridge 2020.4

Quixel have just released Quixel Bridge 2020.4 with a heavy focus on making the tool easier to use. Quixel Bridge is a cross platform (Linux, Windows and Mac), free tool for organizing your textures, as well as acting as a communication tool between your data and your game engine or DCC tool of choice. Quixel Bridge also acts as a handy interface to Megascans massive texture and 3D object library, a library that is completely free for Unreal Engine users!

Highlights of the 2020.4 release from the Quixel blog:

At the beginning of this year, we overhauled the Bridge browsing experience to help you discover new, relevant content faster than ever before. As part of this ongoing effort to simplify the creative experience for artists, this latest update comes packed with enhancements to the Asset Preview Panel, the download and export settings, and other improvements that make Bridge even easier to use.

Key new features include:

  • Redesigned Asset Preview Panel
  • Simplified download and export settings
  • Managing Plugins made easier
  • Simpler initial set up
  • Deeper categorization

Quixel Bridge is available as a free download here and you can learn more about the 2020.4 release in the video below.

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Beepbox Easy Online Music Sketching Application

Beepbox is a free online tool for quickly generating music via sketching. It’s written in a combination of JavaScript and TypeScript with the source code available on GitHub under the very permissive MIT license. Getting started with Beepbox is as simple as going to the website and starting to lay down some notes. There are a variety of instruments available and you can layer multiple tracks of sounds to easily create music.

Perhaps coolest of all, as you create your song, the song’s data is encoded into the URL. You can simply share your songs URL and others can either open it in the player or they can open it in the editor and make changes. You can also download your song in .mid or .json formats for later updating, or you can export out into WAV format for use in your game engine of choice. In addition to BeepBox is there a modified more complex version called ModBox you can check out here. It is forked from the same source code but offers additional tools and levels of control at the cost of complexity.

You can learn more about BeepBox and see it in action in the video below.

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City Generator Hands-On

City Generator is a free and open-source procedural generation tool for creating American-style grid based cities. The source code is available on GitHub under the GPL 3 license, composed almost entirely of TypeScript code.

Features of City Generator include:

  • .png download
  • .png heightmap download
  • .svg download
  • .stl download
  • Several colour themes including Google Maps, Apple Maps, and hand-drawn styles
  • Pseudo-3D buildings
  • Open source

City Generator can export STL files that can then be imported into a 3D tool of choice for creating 3D levels. We should this process in Blender as well as the process of generating a city in City Generator in the video below.

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Blockbench 3D Modelling Application Review

BlockBench is a free 3d modelling, texturing and animation application for creating Minecraft style models. Blockbench is available on Windows, Mac and Linux, as well online.

Blockbench features include:

  • Blockbench is an all in one 3D Editor and Animator for Minecraft and other games and applications
  • Blockbench comes with a powerful animation editor. Animations can later be exported to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, rendered in Blender or Maya, or shared on Sketchfab.
  • Customize Blockbench with the built-in plugin store. Or create your own plugin and add a new feature or new format.
  • Collaborate with your friends on models, textures and animations – in real time, over the internet!
  • Blockbench is available in 12 languages, and the number is growing.
  • Create, edit and paint texture right inside the program. Create or import palettes, paint, draw shapes or automatically create templates.

You can learn more about Blockbench and see it in action in the video below.