Grease Pencil Dev Updates

Here is a quick update of some of the things I've been working on with the Grease Pencil integration since my last update.




EDIT: Now in master
https://developer.blender.org/rB14b951747f6a93a8e87a25f5001d9e3afc6528b1

Hooray! Back again...

Yay! After an eventful 48 hours, I've finally gotten the last of the big remaining hurdles for this year over and done with, leaving me with more time to spend working on fun projects again :)

Some of our Slim Whitman daffodils from a few months back :)

Silvereyes - Low Key

Here are some shots of the silvereyes from a particularly good day last week, taken just before a hail storm passed through. There are quite a few shots here I'm quite happy with :)

"Grafitti" Eggplant

I'm not really a fan of eggplant, but this "graffiti eggplant" certainly looks interesting - like some kind of exotic ceramics or gumboots!

Regarding the "Experimental Testbuilds" Workflow/Setup...

I've never been really comfortable with the workflow that's in place for doing the experimental testbuilds using the buildbot infrastructure on b.org. Specifically, there are two weaknesses in the current scheme (and also the previous one):

1. Needing to push squashed commits and revert them via a publicly visible branch, on the canonical reference repository when using a distributed version control system is quite ugly. It amounts to polluting the project history (which everyone has a copy of) with 3 commits per build, in order to satisfy the arcane requirements/limits of a centralised single-instance service/tool - which, not everyone can really use to create builds.
2. The sequence of steps required  to generate one of these test builds is convoluted and prone to user error. I've gone back and counted them, and there are seven! Yep, 7 individual steps - and that's provided there are no conflicts/typos which mangle things up at some point and require more drastic interventions.

Text Editor Project Started

With a long weekend holiday here, I finally bit the bullet and started work on building a new text editor for myself. This comes after years of trialling different solutions - including giving some of the latest newfangled web-tech based ones out there a second chance with an open mind (in the end, a combination of critical quirky flaws and horrid colour schemes inducing eye pain - including one nasty bout of red-eyed discomfort for a few hours) as replacements or "secondaries"... Unfortunately, nothing is quite cutting it anymore :/

So, introducing "Nippy" - a PyQt + QScintilla based text editor, heavily inspired by Notepad++

https://github.com/Aligorith/nippy

Currently, there's not much to see. It's only a single-document text editor window right now, with a lexer hardcoded to treat everything as Python code, and with no session storage. But at least I can use it to load up any of the code for my Python-based projects, and use it for some simple coding tasks (bookmarks, duplicate-lines, move up/down, go to line, tab-based indentation, and file open/save all work, with the rest provided by QScintilla already - in other words, the bare basics I need from an editor to do stuff; a working function list + find in files + multiple tabs would just make things easier).

Violin Improv Clips

This afternoon, I spent a bit of time mucking around with my violin for a while. It's been quite a while since I've played (probably several months from my recording logs), but today the time seemed right to do this. As with all these recordings, these are completely improvised on the go, and without any warmups/practice/whatnot in ages...

Dev Ramblings - Grease Pencil OpenGL Render Exports

While doing some testing of the Grease Pencil functionality last week, I came across some weird/unexpected behaviour regarding how some of the OpenGL renders were working. As many will know, these are currently the only way to get Grease Pencil drawings out of Blender. And as I found out, there are quite a few annoying quirks that I came across, the most serious of which is shown below:

Blegh! What is up with those regions that are completely transparent, and fringed with light gray?!

Silvereyes Bonanza - An Afternoon Feast

This afternoon, I had an absolute blast capturing a bunch of shots I'm quite pleased with. It was slightly overcast, a "conveniently located" branch of the bottlebrush was starting to go into full bloom, and I still had my camera in 8fps AF drive from yesterday's bread-feeding frenzy...

These are just some of favourites from the set.. More are included down below

First Silvereye Shots of the Season

Although the silvereyes now come to our garden a lot more often these days, November is special - It's what I call: "Silvereye Season", as the bottlebrush right outside my window starts to flower, attracting the silvereyes to come in quite close.

Today marked the first day I was able to get some decent shots (on previous days when they had come, they were mostly foraging around near the ground, so it wasn't too fruitful on those days).

Matching Colour Food Macros

Here are some food macros from yesterday. It's interesting how so many complimentary coloured things happened to be around to be conveniently added to these shots.

A walk around Riccarton House gardens

With the nice fine weather today, I spent some time outside walking around the Riccarton House gardens - the first time I've been there since the earthquake remediation works were completed.