GPencil V2 Has Landed

In case you've missed the news, Antonio's "Grease Pencil v2" branch landed in master earlier today. Check out the upcoming nightly builds for the new goodies :)

And now for some obligatory doodles I made while giving the tools a bit of a shake down :)

Texture Painted Cube Test - Palettes

Just a short turntable anim of a texture painted cube for fun this evening....



The story behind this:
I was trying to find a way to test the "Palettes" system in Blender (which I'd just only recently heard of). Apparently it's only for the texture/image paint stuff (?), so I went ahead and started texture painting a cube!

Lo and behold, a few random dabs of colour using my tablet later, it turns out to look pretty darned interesting! Hence the turnaround, and a quick BI render of it.

GPencil Anim Test - "Curls"

While testing Antonio's patch for fixing the way that fills for concave shapes get drawn, I got inspired to create a little animation of some of these shapes in motion!



While testing the patch, I kept running into some issues with certain U-shaped filled strokes, where there would randomly be some extra triangles getting created. After drawing heaps of those recently, to figure out whether there were any trends/reasons for this to fail, I realised that they would look pretty awesome in motion.... So, I had a bit of fun + relaxation doing some straight-ahead animation with Grease Pencil :)

Workspace Upgrade: New 27'' Monitor

Today, I finally went out and got myself a nice big 27 inch 4k IPS monitor for use at home. I'd been stewing and investigating move this for several weeks now (though the idea of getting a larger external monitor for use at home has probably been floating around over half a year now).

Linux Dual Booting Adventures - Part 2: Installed at Last!

As of about 2 hours ago, Linux Mint has been installed on my laptop, and as of just under an hour ago, I've managed to get it into a stable configuration so that I can start it up normally :)

Say Hello "hippoalpha"

The setup process has not been without some very hairy moments. And, the setup I've got right now is not actually completely configured correctly yet...

Linux Dual Booting Adventures - Part 1: Getting the LiveCD Working

Last Wednesday, I finally managed to get the Linux Mint Live CD running on my new laptop, after over a week of failed attempts and a lot of reading online. Moments later, there was a strange wind outside, and the sky looked something like below:

Sir, would you like that camel shrink wrapped?

Yyyaaarrggggh!!! Death to topology bugs!

Mask Modifier 'Armature' Option

A few years ago, I introduced the Mask Modifier to Blender. It was originally intended as a tool for riggers which would make it possible to design rigs where the regions controlled by the selected bones are highlighted on the meshes themselves, and with hardly any bones in sight (inspired by this thread over on BlenderArtists). At the time, I ran into some technical difficulties which prevented it from being used for its intended purposes, though the other modes that were working have found their way into numerous production pipelines since.

Today at long last, I finally solved these lingering problems, and the Mask Modifier can be used as originally intended. Clutter-free rigs just got one step closer again...

New Rig Tests - Cartoon Guy

Just a little test with a newly released rig floating around...

See this thread (http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?217823-Cartoon-Guy-Rig) over at BlenderArtists for details.