What a day...

Following quite a tumultuous day, we had a nice and pretty sunset this evening (though it was starting to get quite chilly too)

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 Dev Roadmap

Since several of you have been asking, here's my roadmap/plan/todo-list of things which will be happening with Grease Pencil development in the near to short term (with the aim of release in 2.73). There are also some longer-term "wishlist" items which others are free to try picking up.

RIP Baby Silvereyes (WARNING: Graphic Photos)

Today is bit of a sad day... I woke to find a bird nest with two dead babies lying motionless on the ground lying by our back door. It turns out that this was the very same silvereye nest that had been high up in our tree just last night :(

Making it all the more galling was the nest was found on the opposite side of the house from the tree, the branch where the nest had been built was snapped at the base (and hanging limply from the tree - with small snapped branches all over the ground under the tree), and that there was a large splotch/splash of blood on the ground near one of the bodies.

I have little doubt that this was an act of savage cruelty on the part of some twisted, rotten soul. Whoever the perpetrators were (and it's likely they are the same culprits who have to date vandalised 4 chains of solar lights by tearing/ripping some of the protective covers off one of the LED's and proceeding to sever the cables), DAMN YOU!

(WARNING: What follow are some somewhat graphic images... Carry on at your own discretion)

Yay! The silvereyes are here

For the past few days, I've been hearing the distinctive metallic chirping of some baby silvereyes crying near a tree in our garden, but couldn't figure out where exactly the nest was. This afternoon, I finally saw it: a really small, compact little messy cup, adorned with heaps of leaves from the tree, and rather well hidden high up on a flimsy side-branch of a side branch of the lychee tree. Woohoo!

A silvereye briefly resting on my pine tree - After so many years, they finally consider it a tree! Yay!

Dev Test - Using GLU Quadrics for Drawing Grease Pencil Strokes

While playing around with ways of implementing stroke-filling, a thought occurred to try experimenting with using GLU Quadrics (specifically, the disc primitive) for drawing the 3D points too (and perhaps for the strokes themselves).

Without further ado, here's a little demo vid showing what the effect looks like:



If you want to get your hands on this to play with it, you can find this on my GitHub Blender Repo:
https://github.com/Aligorith/blender/tree/GPencil_FillStrokes

(Just to clarify things: the main branch for Grease Pencil stroke editing tools is still on developer.blender.org - https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/browse/GPencil_EditStrokes/
The GitHub branch is purely for experimental hacks at this stage)

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 ;)

Development Sneak Peek - Grease Pencil Stroke Editing

Here's a sneak peek at some stuff I've been having tons of fun hacking away on over the past few days...

You can try this out from the branch - GPencil_EditStrokes - on the git.blender.org repository. Beware that there may still be bugs (it randomly crashed at one point this afternoon). I'll have more details in a later post as it's getting late now, but hopefully this will give you a taste of things to come...

Ahh... it feels good to be going on a hacking spree in the Blender codebase again :)

Blood Moon

Woohoo! I just got back from watching the total lunar eclipse (aka "Blood Moon") for the first time this evening. Usually, whenever there's stuff like this in the sky, there will be lots of cloud that night here in Christchurch. But lo and behold, tonight, it was perfectly crystal clear!

Illustrations of Wing Movement Patterns

I just came across the following set of illustrations, which may be of some use to animators out there - especially if you've got anything with wings ;)

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/10/deconstructed-bird-and-insect-wing-patterns-by-eleanor-lutz/