Mwahahaha... It lives! (The MSVC Muffler)

Many of you will probably have heard my ramblings (or more accurately, rants) about the verbosity of MSVC, in particular its annoying habit of echoing the name of the file (or if provided with a temp file containing a long list of files, the entire contents of said temp file) as the first thing it does. Making matters worse is that there is absolutely no compiler flag that can turn this annoying braindead crap off (though they fortunately had the decency to allow you to turn off the versioning+copyright notice).

In the name of "science" (actually, just an excuse in this case to finally rid my compiles of this plague), I finally set out to investigate how I could vanquish this thing forever...

Blender 2.63 Released

At long last, the "mythical BMesh" has finally come to fruition, and is finally included in an official release at last.

Animation-wise, there aren't really any big new things in this release (really, this was the long-awaited "modelling release", with mesh modelling and sculpting improvements across the board). Having said that, there are a few notable changes:

• Absolute Shape Keys are back - Admittedly, there have been times when I've questioned their worth, not to mention always being confused by a few quirks they had (the 0-100 range for instance). Nevertheless, for whoever uses these, they're back for your enjoyment again.
• Keying Sets play nice with translations (and now have an additional "description" property too)
• Current frame indicator on Motion Paths was drawn incorrectly when it wasn't outside the viewable range.
• Clamp To Constraint now uses a more efficient method for calculating part of the position lookups

Silvereye and Berries

Better late than never. This year the strawberry tree's berries seems to have ripened nearly a whole month later than in previous years, but finally they're ready for the silvereyes.

GSoC12 and Bullet Integration Updates 24 April

This year's Google Summer of Code projects have been announced today, with the Blender Foundation getting 16 students this time round! Congrats to all the successful students, and for the newcomers, welcome to the club!

Unfortunately, owing to a heavier workload this year at Uni, I will not working on a project myself. Instead I've entering a new stage of participation in GSoC... from "the other side of the fence" so to speak.

Congrats to Sergej Reich (sergof) who'll be working on finishing and polishing up the work on Bullet Integration. Over the past few weeks Sergej has already been working on making various bugfixes and improvements, so it's going to be a great summer.


Speaking of bugfixes, I've just merged a bunch bugfixes from Sergej's branch. This includes various fixes for crashes, defaults, and other UI polish.

Matters of Time - A few notes from the development file...

Time. It's certainly something I wish I had more of everyday (and also for all the deadlines lined up and nipping at my heels soon). But it turns out that playing with time might not be such a straightforward affair either.

In response to some questions recently from ROUBAL over on BlenderArtists regarding various time-related relics from 2.4x and their fate in 2.5+, I'll briefly cover some of the issues regarding time management in Blender relating back to the early days of 2.5 and Animato.

Hagley Park - Autumn Afternoon

Recent spate of quakes...

It's been all over the news these past 24 hours, firstly Indonesia (8.7) and now Mexico (7.0). Yes, our long foe the "strong earthquake" has been rattling people again.

Just minutes ago, there was yet another small-ish tremor here in Christchurch (and apparently, there have been some small ones overnight too), to add to a sequence of small shakes we've started having again over the past month, after having relative silence for a few months.

Bullet Updates - 9 April

Just a few routine updates (nothing fancy this time) round...

I've just merged a few bugfixes from Sergof's branch. The highlights follow:

• WARNING: old files may not work totally correctly as a number of settings were renamed. Namely deactivation/damping thresholds and bounciness.
• Fixes for ranges of various properties
• Stability fixes for removing rigid body worlds (namely ensuring that objects are removed from said dynamic worlds).

Also, merged in recent commits from SVN trunk.


EDIT: 
I just noticed these interesting stats on an earlier update post about this... ;)

A walk on the pier...

It's been quite a while since I've been out to New Brighton (one of the few beach suburbs around here). In fact, probably, the first time since after the Feb quake last year. New Brighton lies on the east coast, facing straight off into the Pacific Ocean. The weather has been really nice over Easter this year - a warm 22 deg Celcius today, which is not too bad for the middle of autumn.