Favourite Composers List - January 2016 Edition

I've been having an amazing amount of fun over the past few days working on a personal dev project over the past few days. Progress has been great - it's really exciting to see it really take shape this time... I can feel it... it's almost there... so tantalisingly close this time... just a little bit more tweaks and I think I'll have it working properly this time :D

Even more awesome is working on this while listening to some of my favourite awesome music from some of my favourite composers. So, I thought I'd post an updated list of my current favourites as they stand:

Tip: Matrix-Fu for Solving Rigging Problems

Sometimes when trying to figure out rigging problems (e.g. working out a hack to patch around some weirdness with bone rolls, or maybe coding your own little transform tools), it pays to know a few tricks about matrices. In this post, I'm going to try and provide some "practical" advice about working with matrices, particularly for those found in Blender.

Unlike many other guides about these topics you'll likely encounter, I'm going to do away with most of the formalisms and so forth that usually happens, and just tailor this specifically for Blender, and for the sole purpose of describing the 3D transforms of an object or bone. For many years I've been meaning to write a guide like this, so let's get started!

Brave New World - Goodbye Scons + Mingw

Today, I finally had to bid farewell to the build system that's been serving me so well for the past 10 years (well, apart from that brief stint where I had to switch over to msvc for a few weeks as the build was broken). Yesterday, the scons build system was finally removed from Blender, leaving just cmake.  *sob*

Christmas Travels 2015 - Highlights from Li River Cruise

Lo and behold, I've been back home now for a week, after being away on a family holiday to China (Guilin + Guangzhou) and Hong Kong over the Christmas break! (Note to Self: It's not fun to wake up feeling sick in a foreign hotel, on day 1 of a multi-week trip. It's equally not fun feeling sick again - despite being fine the night before - at the start of a new year. Gah!)

While going over the photos, I decided to do things a bit differently this time, and instead of putting together long posts of photos + text, I'm going to try turning these into little videos instead. I'll still have a few posts based on the notes I made during this trip (for a change, I did all the note making during the trip, so it'll just be a matter of digitalising them this time), but I'll put those up a bit later on. So, in the meantime, enjoy the first highlights video, from a cruise down the Li River, from Guilin to Yangshou.



The towering karsts (i.e. limestone mountains) look like they came straight out of a traditional Chinese painting. It's quite interesting how they all have such weird and wacky shapes - it's a particular highlight seeing them from the plane... on a relatively flat plain of farmland, there's a cluster of these idiosyncratic pudding-like mountains sitting in the middle of nowhere!

Happy Blender Day - 10 Years Developing Blender, and counting!

Yesterday marked 22 years since Ton wrote the first lines of code for Blender! Thanks Ton! I don't know where would we be today if Ton had instead decided to have some fun in the snow, or to just hang out having a few beers that day instead ;)

Significantly for me, 2016 marks my 10th year as a Blender developer. IIRC, I finally managed to get Blender compiling back in about May that year, and got commit access in early November.

Happy New Year

Happy 2016!

Year in Review - 2015

Bam! The end of the year is upon us again, so it's time to do a bit of customary introspection and look back at the year just passed... and what a blast 2015 has been!

Grease Pencil Roadmap - 2016 Plans

Wow, it's already the end of December! The year has really flown right by, and so it should when you're having fun! :)  As it's the end of the year, it's also time to do some customary "year end retrospectives". The first of these is for Grease Pencil. (There will also be another on general Animation System stuff too).

Christmassy Things

Siggraph Asia - Conference Notes 2

Here is the second part of my notes on the Siggraph Asia conference.

Convered: Tech Briefs session + Electronic Theatre

Wild December Weather

The weather so far this month has been crazy! Some are attributing it to the "El Nino" weather pattern that's in play this summer - IIRC, El Nino's usually the hot + dry one (i.e. most summers), while El Nina is the "cold + miserable washout" summer (i.e. like the year I was 8 or 9, and it rained for like 2 weeks straight).

 Some lumpy clouds during a break in the weather this afternoon...

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.