Pose Sculpting - Dev Update 2

To clarify any confusion, the previous post (about "bendy bones") is NOT Pose Sculpting. That said, I absolutely intend to do some experiments with combining the two later down the track :)

What then is Pose Sculpting? This latest update might give you a clue...


In this video, I demonstrate one of the latest sculpt brushes that I've been working on recently. While not quite the elusive "Draw Brush" that I've been seeking, this technique still very useful in its own right. (It's also provided me with a few ideas about how I might pursue the holy grail).

Then of course, there are still many other things which I haven't shown yet! There are quite a few nice new things that are present here that weren't around in the first version, along with a massive list of things I'm still planning on trying (no, I'm not going to post this... IMO, the techniques you've seen so far pale in comparison when some of the things I've dreamed up are functional <evilgrin>)

Dev Experiments - Pepeland's Improved Bendy Bones

Over the weekend, I've been doing some experiments with the bendy bone improvements patch (original code by Jose Molina) that pepeland demoed at BConf15. To remind you of what this is about, here's are a few screenshots of the patch in action:

Three bones showing off how the bendy bone settings work: 1) Curve X/Y properties, 2) Scale In/Out, 3) Roll In/Out

Each coloured segment is a single bone

EDIT: Just to clarify any confusion, this is NOT Pose Sculpting. That is a separate project. See this instead for the latest updates.

OUI-Blendish - An interesting widget toolkit based on Blender's UI

I was just looking through one of my newsfeeds just now, and stumbled across a rather interesting little ui/widget toolkit that seems to have slipped under the radar till now. For everyone who's been whining about wanting about a Blender-styled widget toolkit they can use in their own projects, this may be what they've been waiting for!

Presenting:   Leonard Ritter's (Duangle)  "OUI-Blendish"

CMake + MSVC Frustrations - Solutions Wanted

It's been several weeks since Blender switched over to CMake. While some teething troubles while adapting to a new setup are to be expected, some are more disruptive than others... and it's usually these that are the ones that won't go away!

Having used this new setup for a few weeks, unfortunately, I have to say that there are a few quirks with this new CMake + MSVC setup which are currently very much inferior to my old setup with Scons + Mingw. (Part of the pain has been spared by the fact that I'm working on a pet project in a separate branch that I've purposefully left in a pre-scons-removal state... it will stay that way for as long as possible). If anyone is aware of any solutions to any of these problems, do let me know!

Summer Has Returned - Tonight's Sunset

After several weeks of windy/wet/overcast/chilly weather, summer finally returned today, with a high of 28 C (+ warm night), a colourful sunset, and another hot sunny day tomorrow with 30 C

Bubu Day

Favourite Composers List - January 2016 Edition

I've been having an amazing amount of fun over the past few days working on a personal dev project over the past few days. Progress has been great - it's really exciting to see it really take shape this time... I can feel it... it's almost there... so tantalisingly close this time... just a little bit more tweaks and I think I'll have it working properly this time :D

Even more awesome is working on this while listening to some of my favourite awesome music from some of my favourite composers. So, I thought I'd post an updated list of my current favourites as they stand:

Tip: Matrix-Fu for Solving Rigging Problems

Sometimes when trying to figure out rigging problems (e.g. working out a hack to patch around some weirdness with bone rolls, or maybe coding your own little transform tools), it pays to know a few tricks about matrices. In this post, I'm going to try and provide some "practical" advice about working with matrices, particularly for those found in Blender.

Unlike many other guides about these topics you'll likely encounter, I'm going to do away with most of the formalisms and so forth that usually happens, and just tailor this specifically for Blender, and for the sole purpose of describing the 3D transforms of an object or bone. For many years I've been meaning to write a guide like this, so let's get started!

Brave New World - Goodbye Scons + Mingw

Today, I finally had to bid farewell to the build system that's been serving me so well for the past 10 years (well, apart from that brief stint where I had to switch over to msvc for a few weeks as the build was broken). Yesterday, the scons build system was finally removed from Blender, leaving just cmake.  *sob*

Christmas Travels 2015 - Highlights from Li River Cruise

Lo and behold, I've been back home now for a week, after being away on a family holiday to China (Guilin + Guangzhou) and Hong Kong over the Christmas break! (Note to Self: It's not fun to wake up feeling sick in a foreign hotel, on day 1 of a multi-week trip. It's equally not fun feeling sick again - despite being fine the night before - at the start of a new year. Gah!)

While going over the photos, I decided to do things a bit differently this time, and instead of putting together long posts of photos + text, I'm going to try turning these into little videos instead. I'll still have a few posts based on the notes I made during this trip (for a change, I did all the note making during the trip, so it'll just be a matter of digitalising them this time), but I'll put those up a bit later on. So, in the meantime, enjoy the first highlights video, from a cruise down the Li River, from Guilin to Yangshou.



The towering karsts (i.e. limestone mountains) look like they came straight out of a traditional Chinese painting. It's quite interesting how they all have such weird and wacky shapes - it's a particular highlight seeing them from the plane... on a relatively flat plain of farmland, there's a cluster of these idiosyncratic pudding-like mountains sitting in the middle of nowhere!

Happy Blender Day - 10 Years Developing Blender, and counting!

Yesterday marked 22 years since Ton wrote the first lines of code for Blender! Thanks Ton! I don't know where would we be today if Ton had instead decided to have some fun in the snow, or to just hang out having a few beers that day instead ;)

Significantly for me, 2016 marks my 10th year as a Blender developer. IIRC, I finally managed to get Blender compiling back in about May that year, and got commit access in early November.

Happy New Year

Happy 2016!