"Hex to RGBA" and other Colour Conversion Tools for Sublime Text 2/3

Today I'm announcing the first release of a new plugin for Sublime Text 3 (ST2 untested, but may well be supported too, *fingers crossed*) that makes it easier to work with various colour representations in code. As anyone who spends any time working with various colour pickers and colour-related API's on different platforms knows, at some point you're going to have to convert your colours from one representation to another for some reason, and then you suddenly have to waste heaps of time converting and transcribing colour values between different representations. Clearly this can be optimised (we're using modern text editors for goodness sakes!)  So, without further ado, the plugin can be found at the following Github repo:

https://github.com/Aligorith/Hex-to-RGBA

Key Features:
* Convert Hex (i.e. #RRGGBB) color representation to a RGBA tuple (i.e. rgba(0-255, 0-255, 0-255, 0-1))
* Convert RGB(A) tuple (i.e. rgba(0-255, 0-255, 0-255, 0-1)  OR rgb(0-255, 0-255, 0-255)) to Hex (i.e. #RRGGBB)
* Convert individual colour values from 0-255 (unsigned byte) values to/from float (0.0-1.0) values
* Accessible from menus (shown in screenshot), using hotkeys (shown in screenshot too: Ctrl-Shift-R for "Convert to rgba", and Ctrl-Shift-H for "Convert to hex"), and from the command palette (Ctrl-Shift-P - I recommend searching for "hex" or "ub")

EDIT (20180215):  I've just tested it in Sublime Text 2, and it also works there. So, it's safe to say that it works on both now :)

Blender Dev Updates - 21 Jan

(EDIT: I originally meant to post this a few weeks ago, but it's taken a while to get around to finishing the demo materials included here... but, PhD work takes priority, again...)

This week I took some time out from my PhD work (argh, creating questionaires is such a pain) to get through a bunch of simple new features I'd been meaning to code during my break... that is until continuing my holidays took priority ;)  But with the announcement that we would be pursuing a 2.79 after all, it was time to brush off the plans and get these features in.

Most of the new features are Grease Pencil related... (Some but not all of them can be seen here)

But, there's also stuff for all animators too...

Grease Pencil - Reproject Strokes tool

Yesterday, inspired by Matias's blog post about storyboarding using Grease Pencil, I hacked together a little tool to fix up your Grease Pencil sketches when you find that you'd accidentally moved the 3D cursor around while drawing, causing all the strokes to be splayed out in weird places in 3D space.

Here's a video showing off how and when to use it (thanks to Matias for letting me use the file from the blog for testing :)



From the video description and commit log:

This operator helps fix up this mess by taking the selected strokes, projecting them to screenspace (i.e. "flattening" the strokes back on to the screen), and then putting them back out into 3D space again. As a result, it should be as if you had directly drawn the whole thing again, from the current viewpoint, but without losing the pressure/strength info.

Unfortunately, if there was originally some depth information present (i.e. you already started reshaping the sketch in 3D), then that will get lost during this process. But so far, my tests indicate that this seems to work well enough.

Boom! New Animation Features - 7 July 2016

Boom! I've just pushed a bunch of features I've been working on to master. Some of these are things that you've been asking for for a long time too, so be sure to keep an eye out on the nightly builds coming out soon :)

Here's a quick list of the recent highlights:
* Animation Editors: Object datablocks are now sorted alphabetically by default  - I suddenly figured out a way to minimise the potential performance hit of having this enabled, so now you don't have to suffer with having you objects ordered however the old depsgraph thought they should be ordered (yes, that's the reason why the old ordering was as crazy as it was... blame the old depsy!)

* Dopesheet: Added "Moving Hold" as a keyframe type - Note that this will also automatically show "long keyframe" indicators between these keyframes (as you get with normal holds), so you can see at a glance where these are

* Dopesheet: Keyframe size can be adjusted as part of theme settings - For those who've been saying that by default the keyframes are bit hard to select

* Delta Transforms
   1) Added operators to make it easier to "Freeze" the current transform (either Loc/Rot/Scale together, or just Loc, Rot, or Scale by itself) into the Delta Transforms, leaving the normal transforms zeroed out again. These can be found in the Apply (Ctrl-A) menu
   2) The "Animated Transforms to Deltas" tool is now located in the Apply menu too, to make it easier to find it relative to the new tools


And from a few weeks back (for good measure):
* Ctrl-Shift-C: Made it easier to add constraints between bones in different armatures  - When the second object selected is an armature in pose mode with an active bone, the Ctrl-Shift-C operator for adding constraints will be able to pick the bone in the second armature as the target. Previously, it would only go as far as using the object

* FCurve Auto Colours: "XYZ to RGB" works for Quaternions too now  - The "W" channel uses a Yellow colour (blended from the X and Y axis colours).  (Note: If I knew what I know now, we would have had some stuff in place to ensure that colour animation was done in any colour space other than sRGB - even HSV as used here would be a lot better for a lot of people)

* Dopesheet: Circle and Lasso select now work  - These were relatively new additions to the Graph Editor (like only added in the past 1-2 years, from Gooseberry or so), so that's why they weren't there for the dopesheet yet

* GPencil: Eraser respects "Selection Mask" when in EditMode


I've got a bunch of other stuff planned, but for now, I'm not sure when I'll have time to get around to them yet. Hopefully soon (fingers crossed) :)

Happy animating!

Bendy Bones Dev Update

It's been a busy few months since I first announced that I was working on bringing Pepeland's Improved Bendy Bones to Blender. After being tied up with many other projects for the past few months, I just spent the weekend having a fun hackathon to get this functionality polished up and ready for general use in Blender proper. Along the way, I've also added a few cool new features, which really take B-Bones to the next level! Here's a sneak peak of some of these in action!

In each of these screenshots, you're seeing just a single B-Bone - no hidden stuff, no tricks. Just a single B-Bone...

UPDATE: It's now in master! (After a little fight with git to let me merge the branch successfully...) Woohoo!

Driver Workflow Improvements - "Property Eyedropper" for Quicker Setup, and Other Features

It's taken a few days of intense hacking and investigation, but late this afternoon I finally succeeded in implementing a new way workflow for setting up drivers that should help streamline the process. Many have been requesting a faster way of doing this for years and it's been on my todo list for a while now until I finally got around to it this Easter.

Here's a little demo of how this now works:

Blender 2.77 Released

After weeks of delays as we continued to find regressions (including quite a few from OpenGL related code cleanups), Blender 2.77 has finally been released!

Perhaps one of the big highlights of this release is that it features all the new Grease Pencil features and development that I've been working on for the past few months. In particular, this includes all the stroke sculpting, UI tweaks, and many other cool things this brings!

Enjoy!

New Animation Feature - "New Keyframe Type" Setting

Yippee! I've finally gotten around to finishing off a little feature I've been trying to get into Blender for a while now: A per-scene option for controlling the type of keyframes that get created when inserting keyframes.

The "New Keyframe Type" setting in action - It can be found on the Timeline header, between the Auto Keying toggle and the Keying Set selector.

This setting is useful if you use a conventional multi-pass "pose-to-pose" method for animating, where after blocking in all your key poses, you might start creating breakdowns, then doing other in-between stuff. With this setting, once you've finished your initial pass, you can just click on the next keyframe type that you'll be using for your next pass, and all the keyframes you insert from that point onwards will be the right colour.

Grease Pencil News - Stroke Sculpting, etc. Now in Master

Breaking news! This evening I merged the work that's been going on in the GPencil_Editing_Stage3 branch to master! Keep an eye out for the test builds coming out from later today or tomorrow to get your hands on these new features.



In other news, as promised, I've uploaded a video demonstrating how the "Additive Drawing" option can be used. I've got a few other demos of this I'd like to record + upload, but there are some other more pressing issues to deal with in the meantime. So I'll get to those when I can.

Blender 2.75 Released

Good news everyone! Blender 2.75 has finally been released, with this lovely splash screen from the Gooseberry project!

On the animation front, there are several key features in this release:
1) New Dependency Graph - Most driver setups should now work
2) More tools and polish for the Action Management tools -
3) Time and Influence keyframes on NLA Strips now update correctly without lag

Other smaller improvements include:
* Proportional Editing in the Graph Editor
* Realtime Updates (Live Search) for Animation Channel filtering
* Added a new mode ("Selected Keyframes") for the Propagate Pose tool, as well as a shortcut (Alt-F)
* Numeric input now works for the Push, Relax, and Breakdowner tools
* GPencil: Status indicator for Strokes EditMode, and hotkeys for toggling visibility of layers

Full details about all of these can be found on the release notes page, which I've been keeping up to date with all the changes since the start of the release cycle. What I'm going to do here instead is to point out some of the more interesting points, specifically those which relate to things that people have been requesting!

Some Quick BlenderDev Updates

Woah! Where has the past month gone?! Time sure flies...

Sorry about the lack of updates here. Since my last posts, I've been quite busy bunkering down between trying to get a long chapter of stuff written up, teaching/marking (Argh! See Note 1 at the end), and trying to get enough sleep (or to get over a sleep deficit) caused by the disruptive schedules imposed by the university's timetabling team (damn you... whoever you faceless people hiding behind the mask of a buggy timetable algorithm are! Wednesdays have been complete writeoffs for me this past month!).

Unfortunately, that has not left much time or energy left to do much Blender dev (even though even short doses of that are enough to increase net productivity for several days afterwards), and even less for writing blog posts (it seems I only have a fixed tolerance/daily quota of verbiage I'm inclined to try to write).

With this long weekend (and term break for 3 weeks), I finally have a bit of a reprieve from all that now. As you may have noticed from the commit logs these past 2 days, it's been quite good to finally be able to let loose on the long list of smaller things I've been meaning to do for ages. Truth be told though, none of these things are really the things I most want to work on - though, there's another kind of satisfaction that comes from just powering through these more mundane but more pressing/important things first :)

Blender 2.73 Released

In case you haven't already noticed, Blender 2.73 was released a few days ago with the Stage I improvements for Grease Pencil.

Grab a build from Blender.org, or check out the release notes for an overview of what's been added so far.

In other news, work on Stage II is in progress now. Most notably, there is now a copy and paste buffer in place, and color swatches are now displayed for both strokes and fills. More work is taking place when and where possible (in between trying to wrap up the core of the depsgraph, and soon resuming my uni research commitments). If you've got any feedback, suggestions, or would like to discuss ways we could develop these tools, feel free to send an email to the bf-animsys mailing list.

Grease Pencil Dev Updates

Here is a quick update of some of the things I've been working on with the Grease Pencil integration since my last update.




EDIT: Now in master
https://developer.blender.org/rB14b951747f6a93a8e87a25f5001d9e3afc6528b1

Grease Pencil Dev - Filled Strokes

I've just committed an initial version of support for drawing filled strokes to the GPencil_FillStrokes branch on git.blender.org (NOTE: I accidentally pushed that branch to gbo in a bit of a sleepy haze, forgetting that it wasn't set to default to using the GitHub repo instead). No harm done though, since it'll all end up in master eventually ;)

It's still an initial implementation which just uses the native OpenGL "polygon" drawing mode, with the associated problems when trying to draw concave shapes (i.e. the cause of those overlap artifacts). But, for most cases where fills are required, this hopefully shouldn't be too much of an issue... Next up, checking if the Blender scanfill code can do a better job and for realtime usage :)

Grease Pencil Stroke Editing - An Update

Here's another update on what I've been up to with the Grease Pencil tools:

See if you can tell what's different from yesterday's screenshot ;)

Blender 2.70 Released

It's taken a few weeks to finalise, but today Blender 2.70 has finally been released at last! Among other things, this release includes features developed for Caminandes 2, and the first round of changes made by the UI team.

In this post, I'll be taking a customary look at the new features and changes introduced for animators and riggers in this release.

Learnings from Promo Video Project - Improvements Needed for Blender

In this post, I'll go over some of the problems I encountered while working on the promo video, along with some proposed solutions for some of these. As always, this process has only highlighted the need for developers to seriously use the software they (and/or their fellow devs) write: it's only through such exercises that we can really pick up on things that are a pain in actual usage (vs any largely hypothetical assumptions we may hold/have held).

NOTE: At least one of these improvements is now in trunk. Namely, the "reverse" option for the Build Modifier (5c74ac2). More details later...

Release Notes for Blender 2.68 and 2.69

It's been a few months since I last made a post highlighting some of the changes to animation-related features in Blender. During that time, we've had 2 (!) major releases. So, it's probably time that we caught up on things a bit :)

Since it has been quite a few months, I may have missed some changes in the following highlights. Also, since it's getting a bit difficult to remember which version exactly some of these changes occurred in, I've just clustered these by category instead.

WIP Bugfix Patch - Displaying shortcuts set using WM_OT_context_* operators

This evening, I decided to spend some time working on a (what I assumed) would be a neat little fix to a problem that's been bugging me for a while (and apparently has also been noticed by others too, as can be seen in this bug report).

Namely, there are many properties that have hotkeys assigned to toggle/cycle through their values, but there is no easy way to see what hotkeys have been assigned for that purpose. Sure, you can fire up the keymaps editor in the User Preferences, but it's quite tricky digging around in there to find what you want, if you even know where to start looking...

Blender 2.67 Released

You've probably heard by now that Blender 2.67 was released yesterday. If not, you now know :)

As usual, I'll be giving a quick overview of some main features in this release, but also highlighting some of the animation-related features and goodies that you'll find.