Multithreading dependency graphs... (LibEE Paper)

Woah! I've just finished reading through the paper Dreamworks published at Siggraph this year about their new fancy multi-threaded dependency graph.

dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2370919.2370930

Some seriously cool stuff here with some interesting insights which we should take into account when working on our own revamp. Having said that, even without worrying about multi-threading (it's still an area I'm not that familiar/comfortable dealing with yet... and it'd certainly be worth having some multithread gurus around if/when we go down this path) we still have a lot of design issues to tackle to even get a basic system that tackles most of the issues that we're currently facing with our old antiquated beast.

Maker's Schedule vs Manager's Schedule

A while back, I wrote a post in response to one of Paul Graham's essays regarding how it's important/necessary for programmers (or in fact, anyone doing some form of creative activity) to hold a mental picture of all of the relevant parts of a project at hand (i.e. all of it in many cases) to do a good job very productively. As I've been slowly plowing through the writings of many other productive people, similar trends emerge time and time again: being able to hold a mental picture of an entire project when working on it appears to be a contributing factor to how we can achieve "flow" (i.e. that magical state where you're able to absolutely massacre your todo-lists, steamrolling through item after item with barely any effort, while growing manically happy at getting things done in this way).

LuxCity @ FESTA

Last night, the city hosted the "LuxCity" event as part of the inaugural Festival of Transitional Architecture (FESTA). Since it's a long weekend, naturally, I headed off to take a look with my camera. Here are some of my favourite shots:

 

Mmm.... Cake!

Colours of Spring

During spring, the weather can be quite fickle...

But we also get some colourful sights...

Distortion-Free Flip Operator for Lattices

There's nothing quite like a feature written to a scratch a particular itch... especially one for one of your own itches when actually working on stuff (vs thinking through how someone might work on stuff ;)

I've just committed such a feature for lattice editing. It's an improved tool for mirroring lattices, without the problems of the traditional mirror operator

Poor Tweedle...

A little character model and render I put together in a few hours this evening, based on a little doodle from a few nights ago. It turned out quite well I reckon, though it's still lacking a bit of the energy/organic feel of the original sketch. I'll try to upload a scan of that sometime at a more reasonable hour of the day ;)

Duckling

Today I found this duckling wandering by itself quite close to a car parking area - quite a sizable distance, especially for such a young one who can't even really walk steadily. It's perhaps the closest I've managed to get to one (the mother duck usually intervenes, if the flock don't run away first).

Breaking the feature freeze - Animation goodies post 2.64

Wooo! It feels good getting back to hacking some cool new features for Blender again after months of protracted feature freeze and being busy with coursework. Though I'm not exactly out of the woods yet with all that, this evening I got around to committing a few things I've been working on or have been planning on working on for a while now.

Blender 2.64 Released

After several months of delays, Blender 2.64 has finally been released.

In many ways, this is really the "VFX" release, featuring many of the tools developed for/as part of the Mango such as masking, color grading, and compositor improvements.

However, for animators, there have also been a few small goodies included in this release (though you won't find them listed quite so clearly in the bug lists on the wiki). Wondering what these are? Read on for more...

September Recap

Phew! September has been some fairly hard slog... just another month before I can hopefully put attending classes (+ sitting exams) behind me for good  :)