Driver Workflow Improvements - "Property Eyedropper" for Quicker Setup, and Other Features

It's taken a few days of intense hacking and investigation, but late this afternoon I finally succeeded in implementing a new way workflow for setting up drivers that should help streamline the process. Many have been requesting a faster way of doing this for years and it's been on my todo list for a while now until I finally got around to it this Easter.

Here's a little demo of how this now works:

Elephants Dream - 10 Years of Open Movies

What a neat mashup - the Cycles renders look gorgeous!  (I have to say though, that the more you think about the dialog in this little shot and the rest of the scene, the more confusing it gets, and the less it all makes sense... hahaha)

EDIT: On rewatching again a few days later, a new interpretation that somewhat makes sense does come to mind... hmm... 

Blender 2.77 Released

After weeks of delays as we continued to find regressions (including quite a few from OpenGL related code cleanups), Blender 2.77 has finally been released!

Perhaps one of the big highlights of this release is that it features all the new Grease Pencil features and development that I've been working on for the past few months. In particular, this includes all the stroke sculpting, UI tweaks, and many other cool things this brings!

Enjoy!

Incomplete List of Things to Try for Troubleshooting Blender Cloth/Sims

I was fielding some questions about debugging problems where a cloth sim was passing through an animated character mesh this afternoon. So, I thought I'd just include a list of the common things to check on when a Blender Cloth or Physics sim doesn't collide correctly.

Disclaimer: I'm by no means an expert or too experienced with the particulars of the Blender cloth sim. However, I have played around with these enough and/or come across enough bug reports on this stuff to have a few ideas about common issues that can occur. Hopefully this will be of some use to someone out there :)

LinkDump: DIY 3D Printed Orthodontics

It is with a mixture of surprise and mild horror that I came across a blog post today where the author went and made his own set of 3D printed clear-plastic-teeth-adjusting-things to self medicate his crooked teeth.

 Source: http://amosdudley.com/weblog/Ortho

My reaction to this post (and in particular, the screenshot copied above) can be summed up as follows:
* Surprise at the audacity of being a human guinea-pig for doing this DIY (with what appears to be no medical supervision), but also that to create the sequence of 3D printed inserts, he not only used Blender (eek!) for his 3D needs, but used the animation tools in Blender to generate the sequence of progressive steps needed to perform the teeth adjustments (double eek!).

* Mild Horror - It's one thing to work on animation tools for animating fluffy bunnies bouncing around on screen... it's another though to find that these tools were used to generate medical molds (*gulp*)...

New Animation Feature - "New Keyframe Type" Setting

Yippee! I've finally gotten around to finishing off a little feature I've been trying to get into Blender for a while now: A per-scene option for controlling the type of keyframes that get created when inserting keyframes.

The "New Keyframe Type" setting in action - It can be found on the Timeline header, between the Auto Keying toggle and the Keying Set selector.

This setting is useful if you use a conventional multi-pass "pose-to-pose" method for animating, where after blocking in all your key poses, you might start creating breakdowns, then doing other in-between stuff. With this setting, once you've finished your initial pass, you can just click on the next keyframe type that you'll be using for your next pass, and all the keyframes you insert from that point onwards will be the right colour.

Ladybug Macro Photos

I came home this afternoon to find a ladybug sitting on the edge of my desk. Naturally, it was a great opportunity to take some photos!

Workspace Upgrade: New 27'' Monitor

Today, I finally went out and got myself a nice big 27 inch 4k IPS monitor for use at home. I'd been stewing and investigating move this for several weeks now (though the idea of getting a larger external monitor for use at home has probably been floating around over half a year now).

NZ Flag Doodle

Although I'm not in favour of changing the NZ flag, I nevertheless got inspired by some recent rants flying around to have a bit of a doodle for fun over lunch today. Here's what I came up with...

It turned out a bit like the "Red Peak" design in certain notable ways... it wasn't intentional, but that's just the way it ended up coming out organically... However, considering that I did come to see it as being a bit more agreeable than the other ugly disasters that the official committee ended up with, this quick hack also has some interesting properties I guess.

Super Saturday Sunrise

As you may have guessed already, I'm more a night owl than an early riser.... mornings have never really been my thing :)  Yet, last Saturday, "Super Saturday" (more on this in a moment), I happened to wake at the crack of dawn. One thing lead to another, and before long, not only was I out of bed, but I was out of the house, then out of the garden and across the road, and still clad in just pj's and flip flops (sans socks)! Fortunately, there weren't many people out at that hour, and the weather was not too cold (it was already quite mild, though slightly on the chilly side - it had after been in the low 30's for the past 2 days at that point!)

I have not done any post-pro to any of these images. These are practically all straight out of camera!