Friday, July 31, 2015

Winter Visitors - Late Afternoon Silvereye Feeding

This afternoon, I had some lovely visitors...


Aww... Isn't that one cute plump silvereye :)   Given that it's mid-winter here, with temperatures in the single digits (and often feeling a lot chillier) in the late afternoons, it's no wonder that they need to fluff up quite a bit to keep warm!


Saturday, July 11, 2015

GPencil Dev - Stroke Sculpting Demo 1

A quick update on what I've been up to with Grease Pencil development recently...


Hopefully Mr Snowman brings a smile to your day (especially anyone currently melting from the summer heat up in the Northern Hemisphere... I'm sending up some nice cool breezes from the --5 C overnight chills we have here ;)

This demo shows off some of the new "Stroke Sculpting" tools that I've been developing as another way for editing Grease Pencil strokes. In particular, the primary impetus for this work has been to introduce a tool for smoothing strokes to remove jitter/wobbliness, kinks, jaggies, and other undesirable artifacts affecting stroke quality (especially when zoomed in). Some other tools that are a natural fit include a "Grab" brush, and a tool to adjust the thickness of strokes.

To try this for yourself, checkout the "GPencil_Editing_Stage3" branch on the git.blender.org

(EDIT: The crash mentioned in the video should be fixed now... It turned out that I just forgot a small change when adding a bunch of new brush types)

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Grandpa - Retro HK Commercial

Recently, my uncle sent us a link to a retro Hong Kong commercial from the 80's that apparently my Grandpa had featured in (at 00:20).


Saturday, July 4, 2015

Solar Impulse Pacific Crossing

Congratulations to all the Solar Impulse team and pilot Andre Borschberg on successfully completing the first part of the epic crossing of the Pacific Ocean from Asia to Hawaii!




Thursday, July 2, 2015

Blender 2.75 Released

Good news everyone! Blender 2.75 has finally been released, with this lovely splash screen from the Gooseberry project!


On the animation front, there are several key features in this release:
1) New Dependency Graph - Most driver setups should now work
2) More tools and polish for the Action Management tools -
3) Time and Influence keyframes on NLA Strips now update correctly without lag

Other smaller improvements include:
* Proportional Editing in the Graph Editor
* Realtime Updates (Live Search) for Animation Channel filtering
* Added a new mode ("Selected Keyframes") for the Propagate Pose tool, as well as a shortcut (Alt-F)
* Numeric input now works for the Push, Relax, and Breakdowner tools
* GPencil: Status indicator for Strokes EditMode, and hotkeys for toggling visibility of layers

Full details about all of these can be found on the release notes page, which I've been keeping up to date with all the changes since the start of the release cycle. What I'm going to do here instead is to point out some of the more interesting points, specifically those which relate to things that people have been requesting!