Aligorith's Lair

Animators Wanted - "Pose Sculpt" Alpha Testing

2012-02-02T11:02:00.001+13:00

Over the past few weeks, I've been busily working on developing a set of new tools aimed at improving the ways that we can pose our rigs. Today I can finally announce that Pose Sculpting is now finally here and ready for an initial round of alpha testing out in the field!

Pose Sculpting Demo 1 from Joshua Leung on Vimeo.

So, calling for alpha testers, and importantly, feedback!

Read more »

It's all in the clouds

2012-01-30T00:29:00.000+13:00

Dunno if it's just me,but I reckon that some of these cloud formations (from the nor'west arch that formed the other day) look a lot like some of those "san-shui" paintings. (Note: I've tweaked the colours in this shot to resemble those a bit more)

Read more »

Action Constraint GUI - Revised

2012-01-27T14:27:00.001+13:00

While checking out a bug report today, I realised that the current GUI for the Action Constraint doesn't actually make any sense from a workflow/IA perspective. The following diagram explains exactly why:

Quads to Tris - Be careful with vertex orders!

2012-01-26T01:06:00.002+13:00

If you ever find yourself trying to construct a triangulated representation of a model with quads, at some point you'll run across the problem of which vertices to link together to form triangles.

In the diagram above, two such orders are shown:
- (1,2,3) + (2,3,4) on the left does not accurately represent the quad, resulting in a hole in the side + a nasty overlap
- (1,2,3) + (1,3,4) on the right is what you actually need

I mention this because Genscher checking out some vertex order bugs the other day with some physics sims (IIRC it was with fluid/cloth). Double-checking what order the rigidbody stuff I've been working on was using, we found that it had basically been doing it wrong! I've since rectified this issue in the branch, though this still doesn't seem to fix the box+plane case where both objects are meshes!

Bullet Integration Updates - 24 Jan

2012-01-24T14:21:00.004+13:00

Today I've just pushed through a bunch of updates to this branch, as well as pulling in some regular changes from SVN Trunk too. Here are the highlights:

1) Integrated Liero's script to copy settings from one object to a bunch of selected objects
2) Split Rigidbody settings in toolbar into a separate panel

3) Scaling of objects should now be taken into account
Because Bullet ignores scaling on the actual objects, the scaling needs to be applied to the collision shapes before simulation, and reapplied to the matrices obtained afterwards. There may still be some bugs here, but so far it seems to work OK.

4) Collisions shapes use triangle meshes by default now
This works better to allow complex convex shapes get used as collision targets (i.e. Suzanne falling onto rugged mountainous terrain). However, in tests so far, this has been found to cause a few troubles for flat ground-planes getting missed by targets falling down. Perhaps there's actually just a little bug here. Otherwise, it's over to the community which one would be nicer to have.

Enjoy!

Patch and Bug Tracker Triage...

2012-01-22T23:47:00.002+13:00

I've been doing a bit of a sweep of the bug and patch trackers today. It's been a while since I've gotten around to working on these things, with various distractions, projects, and deadlines in the way. There are perhaps two main news items that will be of interest to readers of this blog:

1) scuey's patch for "Drag-N-Drop Parenting in the Outliner" is now in trunk!

This patch makes it possible to use drag and drop to parent and unparent objects in the Outliner.

While I do have some reservations about drag and drop in general, especially since it is often done so badly so often, this patch and the Blender-flavoured implementation of this technique are quite nice.

Congrats to scuey for getting his second (?) patch into SVN!

2) NLA Editor - Ability to enter Tweak Mode on strips across multiple objects at the same time

Sometimes it is necessary to be able to enter Tweak Mode on multiple NLA strips (each from a different object) to edit the keyframes of all these objects relative to each other.

It is now possible to do this again. Previously it was possible for a while until fixes for a number of bad bugs ended up disabling the accidental functionality.

Fluid Sim Time Animation Restored

2012-01-22T16:50:00.001+13:00

After much pestering from ZanQdo, I've finally spent the morning (and part of last night) hacking the fluid sim to restore the ability to freeze and/or speed up fluid sims (aka the old "Fac-Tim" setting).

Just use the "Speed" setting (shown keyframed) to do this. Enjoy!

Twilight...

2012-01-12T01:04:00.002+13:00

Suicidal Light Bulbs and Stubborn Bees

2012-01-12T00:40:00.003+13:00

Wow! Tonight the light bulb over the dining table just popped out of its fitting without any provocation beforehand, shattering just beside a loaf of bread on the table, and spreading shards of glass everywhere.

Barely minutes earlier, I had just finished having a tasty sandwich (strawberry jam + tasty cheese... mmm...) for a bit of a late night snack (why does everything taste better at this hour?), and had been sitting there at the table, with the light turned on.

Read more »

PyGtk TIp - Spin Buttons and Misbehaving Arrows

2012-01-11T23:57:00.000+13:00

Just a quick tip for something that I finally found the answer to after searching fruitlessly for for a while.

If for whatever reason the arrow buttons aren't behaving - as in, they won't do anything when you click on them normally, but will start zooming off increasingly fast when click+holding them - then you need to set "step_increment" on its "adjustment" object (a value of 1.0 for this serves most purposes well).

For all the failings (IMO) of Gtk, at least the "adjustment" object design is an example of one thing that they did right over other toolkits. I like this, since I've found that it makes it ridiculously easy to simply hook up all the various widgets that may be displaying a numerical value so that they update correctly when the others change, all without the need to write many tedious flushing event callbacks.

Blender-Bullet Branch Online

2012-01-10T17:52:00.003+13:00

From comments received in response to my "Bullet Todo List" post last week, there were several main themes coming through:
1) Baking, especially via Alembic support, is a very desirable prospect.
2) Phymec's work on fracturing, etc. would be nice to integrate with this (and also BGE) at some point. This fits in the "fancy stuff" basket
3) Interactions between animated objects and physics sims (and also animating when physics sims work) is an issue that many people care about. IIRC, there is some support for this already, though your mileage with overriding simulated objects mid-sim may vary.
4) Many are just dying to get their hands on this functionality.

This last point I'll address here and now :)

Sculpt Blob

2012-01-09T15:11:00.000+13:00

Just playing around with sculpt mode...

Sculpted Blob Test from Joshua Leung on Vimeo.

First time I've managed to get it to actually do anything. Apparently I've been trying to use it with meshes that were too low res for it to work!

"Help! My Animation Stopped Working" - 2.6 Animation FAQ's

2012-01-06T12:20:00.002+13:00

It's been a while since I last posted one of these FAQ's, but there have been a couple of common recurring questions over the past few months which I'll try to help resolve.

Most of this will be old news to those who've been in and around Blender or reading this blog for a while. Hopefully this will answer some of the newer questions.
Read more »

Silvereye Nest

2012-01-04T17:07:00.004+13:00

This morning, I discovered that my beloved silvereyes had built a nest in the lychee-like tree in our garden (a tree they really like eating the berries of in early autumn).

Not only are they pretty little birdies, but their nests are also delicate, fine specimens suspended over 2 metres in the air. To get this shot, I was standing on a ladder, and had to patiently stand there for a while to let to get used to seeing me before they'd go anywhere near their nest.

Bullet Integration Todo List (Poll)

2012-01-04T13:05:00.004+13:00

After reviewing the state of the preview I posted yesterday and comparing this against the demos posted by various people over the past 2 years (for what they've been doing and/or need), here is the set of current unsupported functionality that would need to be implemented before this is really suitable for mass consumption:

Ability to apply rigid bodies to large arrays of objects. These are often similar in many regards, be it shape or colour, and usually need to have the same settings applied to all. E.g. bricks or blocks making up some structure.
Ability to use rigid body constraints to define how things hold together.
Stability and integration usability polish. This includes all kinds of book-keeping things such as ensuring that copying, deleting, and changing associations all work without any crashes or weird behaviour.

Eye candy sneak peek...

2012-01-04T01:17:00.001+13:00

Sigh... why do I keep taking on extra side projects when I've got more than enough on my plate as it is...

After setting up a local Git repository to work on another Blender-related project (hopefully if it gets officially greenlit, I'll have more news to post about this later this month, otherwise, it'll go back to my pool of "ideas to work on later"), the ease of setting up the setup prompted me to get curious about trying to reboot an old favourite from the dead of unmergable SVN branches.

Read more »

Welcoming in the New Year

2012-01-02T15:17:00.001+13:00

This year, the fireworks display for New Year was in Hagley Park, the first time in over a decade. This meant one thing: fireworks visible from our yard (without having to contend with drunks ready to smash your windows at any moment in time).

Happy New Year - Sort of...

2012-01-02T02:29:00.001+13:00

Well, the clock didn't just tick midnight now.. that was over 24 hours ago now. But, nevertheless, Happy New Year to everyone! Let's hope that 2012 turns out to be a brilliant year (albeit quieter on the seismic front here in Christchurch please, if you will mother earth :) ... erm... speak of the devil... a sizeable wobbly jolt struck just moments after I finished typing that last sentence. Drat!

This morning I was shocked to find that overnight, my watch had developed a great nasty crack across its face. But it had been fine the night before, and I seriously don't remember whacking it into anything hard...

Read more »

A Taste of Linux...

2011-12-29T15:44:00.000+13:00

About a fortnight ago before the holiday break, I finally got a Linux box set up at work with the specific version of Ubuntu that the project product would operate in. Among other considerations for this setup, was the fact that this project already had a fair amount of code, and much of it using some old/obsolete versions of packages which are practically impossible to easily get for Windows or that were difficult to compile without a lot of porting work first.

Now, although I'd worked with Linux (Fedora) in the COSC labs before (and previously with a flaky partial install of Cygwin on an old computer at home), this would probably have been my first real Linux box where I could actually go through and play with setting things up (i.e. /me has admin rights). Here are some thoughts/findings so far...

Read more »

Merry Christmas

2011-12-26T12:54:00.001+13:00

A belated Merry Christmas to all!

Noo.... not another shake

2011-12-23T14:06:00.003+13:00

Jeepers! We've just been hit by another sudden jolt this afternoon, a few minutes ago. It's been a good few months since the last significant event that I felt!

It went on for a half a minute or so, and was followed by a few smaller aftershocks in quick succession.

Thankfully everything is fine (though some things did get knocked over). More details later...

EDIT:
- there is the constant sound of sirens coming from the mall, and heavy traffic moving around.
- Geonet reports it was a 5.8 quake out at Lyttleton. Crap, this means we're going to have a few more sleepless nights for a while again.

EDIT 2: (3:28pm)
We've just had a second, even more destructive quake - it felt much worse than any of the others so far. Deja vu all over again (June 13th).

Was watching some cabinets just swaying violently, stuff clinking around, and the house jelloing for a while afterwards.

After over an hour, Geonet now reports this as a 6.0 @ 6km deep. Gah!

Garden Flowers and Hungry Beaks

2011-12-23T13:58:00.001+13:00

Strawberry Platter

2011-12-17T18:04:00.003+13:00

This year is turning out to be quite a bumper season for the strawberries in our garden. These were all harvested the other day...

PyGTK - Collapsible Panels

2011-12-17T16:19:00.003+13:00

Mwahahaha... last night I finally managed to coerce PyGTK into giving me collapsible panels that looked the way I wanted.

Avoiding Degenerative Coding Practices - My Coding Style Guide (C-Style)

2011-12-17T15:50:00.006+13:00

I'm quite pedantic about many aspects about how code looks. After all, you're going to be looking at, and editing it quite a bit, so it does pay to spend some time making it more pleasant in the long run.

This particular guide applies to C-like languages. I have another one for Python-code which shares some similarities, but also some differences.

Read more »

Diagramming Tools - A call to action!

2011-12-16T13:00:00.004+13:00

It has been bothering me for a while now, especially after each and every frustrating, multi-hour-long session: the world's diagramming tools suck. Big time.

It's really a wonder that after over two decades and countless billions of dollars being pumped into research and development, that no-one has really managed to create a diagramming tool which can match the immediacy or flexibility of pen and paper, let alone bring anything "new" to the table in terms of "enhancing human intelligence".

Read more »

Moar Pretty Solar Garden Lights

2011-12-11T00:30:00.001+13:00

After seeing how beautiful the two birdie garden lights were, we decided to get some more. Unfortunately, there were no more of the birdie ones, though perhaps that wasn't such a bad thing after all ;)

Bumper Strawberry Harvest

2011-12-07T00:25:00.001+13:00

When the Santa parade comes to a street near you...

2011-12-04T23:40:00.001+13:00

As a result of the quakes we've had here in Christchurch, this year the Santa Parade had to be moved from its usual route down Colombo St in the CBD to none other than the main road passing by a few blocks away from home.

Although the weather forecasts had predicted heavy rain for today, the sunny weather we've been having for the past week held until after the parade was over.

Read more »

Link Dump - Some interesting articles...

2011-12-03T15:17:00.001+13:00

Recently I've been doing quite a bit of reading instead of active coding in the evenings (the product of having spent the rest of the day being productive on other projects I guess). So this afternoon, on a warm sunny summer day with a slightly overheating computer (post compile), here are a list of interesting links...

Read more »

PyGTK Documentation Rant

2011-12-01T17:01:00.001+13:00

So, continuing on my series about PyGTK, today I'm going to be discussing one of those issues which every new users of some tool or toolset comes across (hopefully, if it even exists): documentation.

Fortunately, in this case, they DO have some documentation. Heck, they've got some tutorials and a reference manual. On the surface it's all well and good, until you start running into a few things which start to become gradually more annoying as time goes by.

Read more »

GTK Quick Tip - Toggling icons on toolbars

2011-11-30T14:52:00.001+13:00

Just a quick tip when using GTK to try and set up a toggle button, with an icon that changes appearance when the state changes.

When initialising the images for use on the button, remember to do ".show()" on BOTH of the icons, otherwise, only the one visible on the button on startup will be visible later on.

Disclaimer: I'm still getting my head around GTK (PyGTK), so the following code snippet may not be considered "best practice" in these cricles.

Read more »

Vala - Interesting hybrid language

2011-11-29T19:42:00.001+13:00

Earlier this evening, I stumbled across an interesting programming language in development in the Linux world: Vala.

Read more »

Cathedral Sq. Walkway

2011-11-27T19:25:00.001+13:00

This weekend, the officials finally opened up a walkway for us to walk around the heart of the CBD - down Columbo St to Cathedral Square, and stand in front of the damaged cathedral (or as The Wizard called it, "auld stumpy")...

Of course, the usual disclaimers about "danger", "distress", and limited access (300 people at a time, for 1 hour max) applied, but that didn't stop the crowds of people who showed up for the blink of an eyelid.

Read more »

Christchurch CBD - High St

2011-11-27T19:06:00.001+13:00

With the progressive reopening (sometimes temporarily only) of the CBD, us Cantabs have a new passtime over the weekends: roaming, gawking, and "reclaiming" our battered city.

Last weekend, I headed off on foot to an area I haven't seen in months, which is hidden from view to passing traffic behind copious amounts of chicken-wire fencing placed in odd arrangements and the odd army sentry holed away in one of the wooden huts manning the checkpoints.

Read more »

Pretty Lights - Birdy Garden Lights

2011-11-27T00:53:00.001+13:00

We recently came across some nifty little solar garden lights while wandering around the shops. Compared to the solar lights we saw in the past, these are fancy...

Silvereyes - Birdie on a branch (3)

2011-11-19T23:33:00.001+13:00

A pretty pair of silvereyes visited late this afternoon, for some of IMO my best shots yet!

Silvereyes - Cluster of Flowers (2)

2011-11-18T19:34:00.001+13:00

The light wasn't that great this time (cloudy and nearing sunset), but nonetheless, it was fun trying to grab shots of the birdies with a tripod-mounted and teetered camera, having waited several days...

Hackers Beware - SVN 1.6 vs 1.7

2011-11-18T10:56:00.001+13:00

This morning I've been trying to debug why the "From Existing Checkout" option in DualitySvn isn't working on the office computer (despite it having worked on every other computer I've tested it on so far).

Apparently starting from SVN 1.7 (computer in question runs 1.7.1), the subversion developers have gone and changed the format of the internals of the .svn folders. Well, they were well within their rights to... after all, those folders are kindof "private metadata" that SVN uses, that we really shouldn't be dipping our toes into! Having said that, it was kindof convenient grovelling around in there in the past.

Read more »

Return of the Silvereyes

2011-11-16T14:07:00.001+13:00

After waiting for a few days, the silvereyes have finally come to feast on the bottlebrush flowering outside my window.

Rainy Afternoon

2011-11-12T15:56:00.000+13:00

After a week of mostly fine weather, today we've been having a bit of a southerly change.

MARS-CT GUI Summer Project

2011-11-09T23:30:00.000+13:00

Tomorrow I officially begin work on a summer project at the HITLab on a Summer Scholarship scheme offered by UC. I'll be working on designing a proper GUI for a "spectral computed tomography" scanner being developed by the multidisciplinary MARS (Medipix All Resolution System) group.

CBD Reopening

2011-11-07T00:44:00.002+13:00

Last weekend, the CBD reopened again, well partially, after months of being off bounds. This weekend, I finally had some time to make the pilgrammage...

The skyline, or what's left of it

Johnson's Grocer in the temporary Cashel St Mall

Performance Timing Tools

2011-11-01T15:06:00.000+13:00

One of the more interesting presentations (so I've gathered) from the recent Blender Conference was a talk by Benjamin Walther-Franks titled "Performance Timing Tools". Although I haven't managed to find a recording of this to watch yet (it would've been on in the middle of the night here... far too late to watch realtime ;) I have managed to find the link to the the page for this:

http://dm.tzi.de/en/research/hci/performance-timing/

Beans!

2011-10-31T14:38:00.004+13:00

A rant for the cats in the neighbourhood...

2011-10-31T01:43:00.002+13:00

Enough is enough!

My garden is NOT a public toilet. Specifically, it is not YOUR (Knightly, light-brown turquoise, ugly-black-horny-rag, or the other sunbathing tabbies') toilet.

Public enemy #1 - "Knightley" just after doing the deed, and preparing to/contemplating do it again in another spot

What must I do to make this clear?

Read more »

Weekend Outings - Ilam Homestead

2011-10-30T00:53:00.000+13:00

The weather was nice and warm on Saturday afternoon, so I went out for a bit of a walk. Perhaps not such a great time for photos (being just after lunchtime with light), but on the other hand, it lends itself nicely to some dramatic results at times...

Doodle of the day

2011-10-26T13:53:00.002+13:00

The turntable vs trackball wars...

2011-10-24T14:52:00.000+13:00

It's taken just under 3 months, but I see that someone finally noticed that the change to the viewport rotation default. For a while there, I was beginning to suspect that finally, after so many years of endless, heated debates filled with personal attacks trotting out well worn battle lines like the blasted blackbirds patrolling our garden do everyday, that finally we'd see some peace when this change occurred.

Read more »

Saturday Afternoon Photos

2011-10-22T17:17:00.000+13:00

Probing around the kitchen with a looking for interesting looking stuff again...

Blender 2.60 Released

2011-10-20T13:10:00.001+13:00

Today marks a new era in Blender development, with the first release of the 2.6 series.

After a lengthy and tortuous period of bughunting and stabilisation following the initial 2.5 releases, we're finally getting back to a state of developing new features and improvements. It's great to see forward progress again, and hopefully as my own (increasingly busy) schedules allow, some cool new features too.

Read more »

Moodle is a crappy bugfarm!

2011-10-19T01:05:00.001+13:00

... or perhaps just the current version rolled out on the servers I've used it on was (though I wouldn't be surprised if most of the bugs still held)...

Like many other educational institutions around NZ, UC has been getting in on the whole "online learning" thing with a Moodle-based CMS (aptly named after a naming contest yielded the "best entry" by some random unknown as "Learn"). As diligent COSC student, and also dedicated UI design (semi-)professional, paying attention to the small details of how computer systems work and present themselves to users is what we do, and is also where we can aim to score brownie points over our competitors ;)

Read more »

Duckings...

2011-10-18T00:56:00.003+13:00

Time for a break

2011-10-17T13:58:00.000+13:00

Yipee! Assignments all done at last! Now off for a good rest before exams :D

Days of plumbers, assignments, and other madness...

2011-10-14T01:06:00.003+13:00

Phew! What a manic mess the past two days have been.

This week has been assignments crunch time, with several assignments for several papers all due today and tomorrow. Having easily dispatched an exam on Monday evening (thank goodness none of the really brain-churning material presented ended up in it), and finished the two halves of another assignment (which I'd been procastinating on for a while, but also been admittedly stumped by for a while) within a "day" (11am to 3am), we get to where the story starts.

Read more »

Why do we do it?

2011-10-11T01:05:00.000+13:00

Thanks Campbell for the link (see recent thread on bf-committers ;)

Photo Dump

2011-10-08T16:32:00.003+13:00

Just taking a short break before bunkering down for another week of mayhem, late nights, and assessments...

Raking in the dough!

SVN Tip: Making a local copy of a SVN Repository (with history) on Windows

2011-10-08T00:50:00.002+13:00

This evening I needed a way of making a copy of some externally hosted SVN repository, complete with history before it went down. After searching for a while and only turning up results with how to do it on Linux, I finally found the solution.

http://iacoware.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/howto-use-svnsync-to-mirror-a-repository-on-windows/

Thanks for the tutorial "Massimo Iacolare". Works like a treat here.

Read more »

G6 Feedback

2011-10-07T12:56:00.000+13:00

After a year of work, it's time to present G6 Feedback, an "Audience Response System". Written in Java (this was a requirement, not a free/willing choice), this system allows you to create and run polls, and have participants answer these polls using their laptops or Android smartphones.

Read more »

RIP Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T00:52:00.001+13:00

Yesterday, an influential figure in the technology world died after a long battle with illness. Although I am not an Apple fan (and perhaps at times been perplexed by their products), under Steve Jobs' leadership, they've clearly released some fairly influential new products which have changed the world forever. And let us not forget, we wouldn't have Pixar without the guy...

After his shock resignation just over a month ago, it was certainly a bit of a surprise that just 6 weeks later he's gone. Oh well... there's life and there's death.

Impressive new rendering paper...

2011-10-04T01:17:00.000+13:00

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

Spring Sights...

2011-10-02T00:19:00.000+13:00

Over the past month and a bit, I've been quite busy with Uni stuff, possibly working on far too many interesting things at a time, so it's been a bit quiet around here. Combined with having had all the concrete around our house being dug up and relaid over a several week period, it's meant that I've nearly missed out on getting out amongst the spring flowers this year. Then again, apparently that's quite a common complaint from many people round these parts atm, so at least I'm not alone in that respect...

Eeekadoodle - Firefox 7.0 out already?!

2011-09-29T14:50:00.002+13:00

An Open Letter to the Firefox Developers

Dear Firefox Developers,

While I've been a Firefox user for the past few years, I'm not a fan of Firefox's new "rapid release" strategy, where we're getting major release numbers nearly every month but with hardly any of the "major release gloss" (or seemingly significant features warranting a major release number).

For the nth time today, I booted up my computer looking to quickly check my email before heading off, and boom! I get a prompt that Firefox wants to update itself. Now, unless I'm mistaken, the last time I last had that happen was less than a month ago (for a minor bugfix release), and just over a month since the last version came bursting out.

Unfortunately, the problem with such frequent releases though is that apart from enduring the 10 seconds it takes for the updater to check that all of my addons still work (it seems to make a habit of slowly killing off a few everytime and/or silently breaking a few others), I have to click through a combination of 5-6 UAC prompts in addition to a certain "password bank" software prompts I've never used or found a way to disable, each of which duly takes its ~3 seconds to show up before ~2 seconds of locking up computer and 1 second to dismiss and wait for the next one. Now, if you have to go through this every few weeks when trying to just quickly check on things at the start of a day, then this is a huge annoyance.

While as a software developer, I am slightly predisposed to being interested in new software, this is simply getting excessive. In a way, this smells like the latest space race, except this time, for who can reach the highest version number in the shortest period of time (at last check, Opera was at 11, IE at 9, and Chrome at 15...); hrm.... version number envy...

If you're going to keep pushing out incremental releases like this, please consider one or more of the following things in the immediate future:

Make the updating process more invisible - if your main aim is to ensure that everyone gets to use a recent version, do what Chrome does and just install it for them!
Make some adaptations to your update processes which allow delta upgrades instead of wholesale reinstalls - perhaps not truly relevant anymore, but the recent releases have muddled the lines between what the update process does anymore
Use smaller version numbers - point releases for the monthly increments you release, and bump major numbers once a year. You're basically doing minor tweaks during these monthly increments anyway, so there's no point for a major bump which signals potential radical UI changes...

Cheers,
Aligorith

Read more »

Driver "Variables" - Why they exist

2011-09-28T01:25:00.003+13:00

I'm aware that there has been a bit of angst among some users of the driver system in 2.5 over the need to define "variables" for drivers to recognise their dependencies correctly and update accordingly (assuming that this is one of the few cases the depsgraph allows us to safely achieve).

Read more »

Drag and Drop = Evil!

2011-09-20T01:19:00.001+12:00

Perhaps it's just me, but I've never really liked or had much luck with drag and drop over the years. While in some ways, some people may claim that "drag and drop is intuitive" (in certain contexts, yes, it probably is, but not everywhere that it often springs up), I think that in the grander scheme of things, it probably does more harm than good. Primarily when considering the following factors: ergonomics, efficiency, and error rates.

Read more »

Spring has Sprung

2011-09-17T17:17:00.000+12:00

Flowers from around the garden...

Blender Compiling - mingw - Quick Tip

2011-09-17T01:00:00.000+12:00

In case anyone has been having any issues linking Blender when compiling trunk (r.40258) using scons+mingw, here are a few quick tips to help:

WITH_BF_INTERNATIONAL = False

This is due to some recent changes in trunk this week, which mean that the "textdomain__" and "bindtextdomain___" symbols aren't found.

WITH_BF_OPENEXR = False

This one is a slightly older hack, but it had something to do with OpenEXR lib versions (IIRC, the mingw versions are older than the msvc ones, or may have been depending on some msvc things). Either way, this didn't compile

Blast from the past... "Developer Art"

2011-09-16T01:41:00.002+12:00

"Goldfish Pond"

This is almost 2 years old now - it was a screenshot I made when I was working on Grease Pencil back in 2009. I think at the time I was just randomly trying to see what the strokes would look like if/when they overlaid each other, so I set about drawing a bunch of random squiggles - one layer per colour I think - which resulted in the image above.

Recently, I've been using this image as a convenient test image for some stuff I've been working on which is currently taking up quite a bit of time (this particular project has been in crunch this week, with a deadline end of next week).

9/11

2011-09-11T23:30:00.000+12:00

As you'll probably have heard in the news already, today is the one-decade-on anniversary of the terrorist attacks in America on September 11, 2001.

10 years later, this event has changed the world:

"Terrorist" and "Terrorism" are big buzzwords that crop up whenever state leaders meet and/or large events take place, whereas they were hardly (or perhaps I just wasn't aware at the time) any mention of this before this time
All air travellers are now treated as guilty until proven innocent, with thorough scanning and increasingly absurd restrictions on what can be taken on a flight. Airports are also less people friendly as a result in quite a few ways.
"Bin Laden" became a household name, top of the wanted list, and finally floating in the depths of the deep blue sea
The "War on Terror" was launched, and to this day still hasn't concluded, spanning 2 countries, and probably contributing a large amount to the current to American debt

What a brave new world...

A slow render...

2011-09-08T14:31:00.003+12:00

First render of a "proper" mesh from the renderer I've been working on as part of a uni assignment.

Of course, without any fancy acceleration structures whatsoever (including no bounding box checks yet), the rendertimes on this were probably to be expected (though I suspect, still on the slow side of that).

EDIT: a simple boundbox test on just the top-level is sufficient to reduce the time by to just a quarter of the raw "stupid" time

One year on...

2011-09-03T19:14:00.001+12:00

Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the first quake which started it all, the 7.1 Darfield Quake at 4:35 am.

What a difference a button makes...

2011-09-02T00:36:00.000+12:00

While triaging some of the latest bugreports we've been receiving over the past 24 hours (man, it's as if someone opened the bug reporting floodgates again), a comment was brought up about Blender's popup panels for tweaking operator settings.

An example here is renaming PoseLib poses (or you may consider the Move to Layer popups instead). What these popups have in common is that they have no obvious button to click on when you're done.
Read more »

Wedged!

2011-09-01T23:09:00.004+12:00

The first day of spring! Now, for a little fun tail (excuse the pun)...

Taken a few weeks back when migrating my fish over to his new replacement tank several months post major quakes (touchwood ;) ...

I'd barely been out of the room for 5 minutes and then come back find that the fish had managed to sneak behind the backdrop, wedging itself and looking glumly at me!

Read more »

GSoC11 - Pepper branch merged back to trunk!

2011-08-30T21:38:00.000+12:00

As of revision 39792, the Pepper GSoC11 branch has been merged back to trunk. So, finally, many of the bug fixes which have been bottled up for a few months now will now be available as part of the main codebase leading up to 2.60

For a comprehensive (though maybe not complete) list of all of the tweaks I've been working on, please see my earlier post

Enjoy!

GSoC11 - Final Evaluation Done...

2011-08-23T23:56:00.001+12:00

Right, just went through and filled out final evaluation form for GSoC. This year they've made it much simpler/more compact than in the past, making it quicker to fill in. Cheers Carol!

Now, on to other paperwork that needs to be done around the place...

Filing another complaint to the tax department asking for my money back AGAIN... I'd hoped I wouldn't need to do this again this year after having had to do it last year and double-checking the stuff I sent in this time, but noo... Probably just another thing to blame on the quakes, ripping an unexpected shortfall in the public purse again ;)
Finishing up a report for an assignment I'd worked on all the way back in February (but didn't finish the report for, and have now nearly completely forgotten what I'd done), for a course which got cancelled then and has now been resurrected, with all of this now due in two weeks. Hmm...
Eyeballing some summer scholarship projects being offered by uni, and figuring out which/whether to apply with deadline looming in a few days time
Meanwhile, trying not to spend all the rest of my time on hacking raytracer assignment for the sheer fun of tackling some things I'd always have liked to see...

... if only it were all as simple as this... *sigh*

GSoC11 - End of "Summer" Report

2011-08-23T01:40:00.001+12:00

I guess I'd better make a little summary of the stuff that I've been working on this year as part of my Google Summer of Code Project, so here goes...

2011-08-22T23:07:00.000+12:00

Six months on...

2011-08-22T22:54:00.001+12:00

So, today, it has apparently been 6 months since the February 22 quake here in Christchurch which has changed so many things for good. How time flies...

In a vacant lot on Victoria St

Animator Poll - Frame Change Undo

2011-08-22T00:27:00.000+12:00

This evening, the old issue of when (and if) frame changes should get their own entries in the Undo Stack. The key question is: Is the current approach in Blender good, or if not, what should be happening?

Read more »

Rapid fire ranting

2011-08-19T02:11:00.000+12:00

Just some ranting that needs to be done today...

1) Park Royal hotel latest official casualty of the Christchurch quakes

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/christchurch-earthquake-2011/5469380/Crowne-Plaza-to-come-down

Read more »

Introducing Mr Snow

2011-08-16T14:42:00.000+12:00

He's looking at you...

Winter Wonderland

2011-08-16T08:09:00.001+12:00

The pictures say it all...

GSoC11 - Select Grouped by Keying Set

2011-08-15T23:47:00.000+12:00

Just a quick feature update: I've just added tools to the "Select Grouped" operators (Shift-G) which allows you to select all the objects/bones that are affected by the active Keying Set.

Example Uses
In Object mode, this is mostly useful for selecting all objects that a absolute Keying Set includes.
1) for doing mass prop animation, you'd include all their location properties in a Keying Set
2) for checking which objects already have animation, change the active Keying Set to "Available" and run this operator. This will get you all the objects which have animation channels already, which can have further keyframes added

In Pose mode, the uses for this are more obvious:
1) Select all bones included in an absolute Keying Set to just move those which are keyable
2) With "Whole Character" Keying Set, use to check which bones it will affect

There are probably many more uses for this kind of functionality. But use your creativity!

Read more »

Return of the snow

2011-08-15T22:18:00.000+12:00

Overnight, we got another great helping from the polar freezer: a fresh dump of snow in the morning, and bitterly cold and gusty winds throughout the day, with intermittent hail showers.

GSoC11 - Numerically editing keyframe properties

2011-08-14T16:02:00.000+12:00

One issue which I know has been bugging people for a while is about how the editing the "Active Keyframe" settings in the Graph Editor properties panel is a bit clunky, if not downright nasty to use.

Since I started writing this post, I ~~have~~ had (long) since committed a fix for these problems.

AFAIK, there ~~are~~ were 2 major problems UI-wise:
1) Handle updates don't occur, leaving things potentially outdated
2) Units displayed for the key values don't match up with the visual representation

Read more »

Blender 2.59 Released

2011-08-14T15:08:00.000+12:00

So at last we're nearing the end of the 2.5 series... 2 or was it 3 years since it all began, with the past few effectively having been spent in "feature freeze". It's a bit of a pity that the tweaks I've been working on with my SoC didn't get merged for this release in the end, though on the other hand, perhaps that's a good thing to have "the next step up" with the upcoming 2.6 series :)

And now for a little piece of trivia: As nicely noted by ZanQdo, history has repeated itself with our splash screens...

2.59 splash, compared with...

2.33 splash

For me, this holds a bit of significance, since 2.33 was the version that I really started to using Blender all those years ago. Hopefully this version will sow the seeds for some more future greatness in years to come...

So, here's to a momentous release. Bring on 2.6!

FAQ - Importing actions from 2.4x to 2.5

2011-08-13T13:59:00.000+12:00

For the nth time in as many weeks, someone has run into (and complained) that they couldn't import their actions from 2.4x to 2.5.

The simple answer is this: Do NOT MIX 2.4 and 2.5 files.

If you need to do anything with 2.4x files in 2.5, go through and save copies of them in 2.5 first, and then work with the 2.5 versions.

Read more »

A busy week...

2011-08-13T00:01:00.000+12:00

What a week it's been!

Long days doing assignment hacking, holding meetings, attending classes, and also managing to fit in some R&D hacking in the midst of all that (*). Oh, and having my birthday fall in the middle of the chaos (BTW, it was a great day; with nice, sunny, warm weather; even the parking meters played nice and had free parking but just on that day only :D)

Unfortunately, that has meant that Blender development work has had to take a backseat for a short while. Hopefully in just over a week, I'll finally have time to work on more Blender related stuff again. Perhaps even starting work on some long postponed projects there...

Read more »

Weekend photo break

2011-08-06T17:41:00.000+12:00

From around the house...

All of these were just with natural light in a dark-ish room.
Read more »

Linux Ranting - MMB Paste - Can it be disabled?

2011-08-06T01:09:00.000+12:00

Recently I've been busy working on things (i.e. coding) from the Linux workstations at Uni.

During this time, I've also run into an annoying "feature" which has been causing me endless grief: MMB paste. I'd first encountered it about 3 years ago, but at the time blamed a particularly crappy little IDE for being that cause of that with some potentially weird keymappings. However, in recent times, this has started becoming a significant productivity killer, having struck on average 1-2 times a session over several days.

Here's why...

Read more »

GSoC11 - Exploring and Improving Auto Clamped Handles

2011-08-05T22:53:00.001+12:00

One of the long standing quirks of Blender's animation system for animators both new and old has been the handle types. In particular, "auto-clamped" handles...

Auto-clamped handles in action

Note how as the handles of the selected keyframe approach gradually taper off as they approach the neighbouring keyframe instead of "overshooting" (i.e. pushing the curve past the neighbouring extremes).

GSoC11 - Animation Channel Renaming

2011-08-03T18:57:00.000+12:00

It's taken a while (including being distracted with other work for a few days), but finally it is now possible to rename animation channels by Ctrl-LMB clicking on their names in the Animation Editors (just like in the Outliner).

For instance, it's possible to rename Objects...

Actions...

Action Groups...

and more!

GSoC11 - startup.blend tweaks

2011-07-27T02:01:00.000+12:00

I've just gone ahead and made those startup.blend ("defaults") changes for the Graph Editor, which I've been putting off for a while, namely:
1) Larger handle circle sizes
2) 'Only Selected' DopeSheet filter enabled by default (for Graph Editor) - useful when trying to just tweak animation of selected bones, though may be a bit of a pain when using the Drivers mode (?)
3) 'Only Selected Keyframe Handles' enabled by default - hides the handles of non-selected keyframes to reduce clutter

The main reason I've postponed these is because they introduce hard-to-merge stuff, though I think we should be fine now to do this.

GSoC11 - Experimental curve drawing tweak

2011-07-27T00:49:00.000+12:00

I've just committed a small tweak which makes the active F-Curve draw thicker than non-active ones in the Graph Editor.

Pros:
- It's easier to see which one is active (i.e. the one you're editing), especially with the handle options that most people use.
- Thickness + opacity combined are much stronger than just opacity alone

Cons:
- Perhaps it's less visually accurate - harder to tell exactly where value lies with regard to the curve line. This is a major reason I've avoided doing this before, though I suspect that it's not likely to be that much of an issue in practice (i.e. people will zoom in several times before they need more precision)

Thoughts?

The great thaw

2011-07-26T23:24:00.000+12:00

As is customary in these parts, snow falls only last a day...

Waking up in winter wonderland...

2011-07-25T12:42:00.000+12:00

It's been snowing all night and right through the morning, with a reported 10cm of snow on the ground. Yay!

Snow!

2011-07-25T00:38:00.002+12:00

It's been a long time coming (3 years) since our last snowfall, but tonight, it had finally arrived!

GSoC11 - RNA Property Updates working for AnimSys

2011-07-24T17:46:00.002+12:00

So, on a cold winter's afternoon while waiting for the first snowfall in 3 years to come (it started falling by the time I finished, but more on that in another post :D) I set to work on a problem which people have been running into for a while: RNA property updates weren't getting run by the animation system.

This hopefully shall be a useful reference for either myself or anyone who may need to modify this system due to changes later.

EDIT: the obligatory demo video...

RNA Updates demo video from Joshua Leung on Vimeo.
Read more »

GSoC11 - Animator Poll #4 - Theme Colours

2011-07-22T01:42:00.000+12:00

It's time for another poll. While I'm still working through the results from previous polls, here are some more things I'd like some feedback on, which will (depending on the result) be included on my todo-list of stuff to bunch together for a single defaults-file update.

1) Colour of Current Frame Indicator
As from the screenshots you're probably seen in previous posts of my blog, I've been trialling using a red time indicator (the traditional Blender one is green). After a while, I have to admit that it kind of grows on you. So, should we keep the old green colour, or move towards the red that I've been using?

2) Handle Colours
At the end of the day, this probably won't change to keep consistency with the 3d view, but the colours of the lines for the keyframe handles are perhaps not that clear. Thoughts on whether a new set of colours is needed here, and/or what they might be?

3) Active/Selected F-Curve in Graph Editor - do we need to highlight this better, perhaps using a white glow behind it, or go the Maya route and just highlight it in white?

More Sintel Posing Fun

2011-07-22T01:34:00.001+12:00

Experimenting with camera angles and backgrounds...