Hedgehog Sighting

This evening, I spotted a hedgehog in our garden! For some reason, it looked to me like it should be called "Boris"... Maybe since it was quite a large one, or due to the look on its face? In any case, I hope that, judging from its size that gotten that way from eating all of the slugs that trying to destroy all our plants ;)

Yay! I finally got a nice clear shot of a hedgehog!

GPencil - Development Updates (Sculpting Update 2)

A little demo of some of the new features available in the GPencil_Editing_Stage3 branch since the Stroke Sculpting update.



EDIT - My Windows 64-bit (mingw64) build of the branch. Everyone else will need to compile their own:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4vhukynexuz83n4/AAA--3ajpwm0aarYBzChG1TPa?dl=0

Siggraph Asia 2015 - Schedule Announced

It's official: The schedule for all sessions has just been posted on the Siggraph Asia 2015 website.

I'll be presenting our paper about Grease Pencil on Monday 2 November, during the 4pm - 6pm session on Animation, in Room 501.

http://sa2015.siggraph.org/en/attendees/technical-briefs.html?view=event&type=briefs&event=213

The paper itself will be up on the ACM Digital Library from next week :)

Naughty Cat Stalking Silvereye Chicks

As much as I like looking at pics of cute/fluffy/beautiful cats on the internet, it's sickening seeing them do *this*! Especially when, just days earlier, the silvereyes were busily feeding a nest of chicks in that very part of the tree!

Perhaps the only consolation is that the AFAIK, the silvereye nest in question has been empty since the weekend, when some strong winds came through and probably damaged it. I hope the babies were ok - that is, I hope they were old enough to have tried flying away, as their nest became uninhabitable. Either that, or today was our furball's greedy return visit for "seconds"...

GPencil - Using bpy to generate strokes programatically

In response to a question on BlenderArtists this morning, I spent a few minutes poking around with the Python API to check whether it is possible to generate GPencil strokes using a script.

Example output from my test script - It just generates a set of 5 lines in 3D space as a demo of how to use this api

For the benefit of everyone, I've included the test/demo script I wrote at the end of this post. You should be able to just copy and paste it into a text editor (fingers crossed it doesn't grab any of the HTML crap in the process) and start playing around.

Use cases for being able to create Grease Pencil strokes using Python include loading in stroke data from other apps, or for providing addon developers additional ways of adding in-viewport annotations without having to hack around with bgl and draw handlers.

Fiery Sunset

This evening, the sunset was quite spectacular! It's been a while since we've had any really interesting ones - with all the foul overcast weather we've been having over the past month.  Over the past 2 days though, we've been having a period of nice warm weather, with some norwest breezes and generally unsettled spring weather which would've contributed to the display :)