Port Hills Fires - Violin Layering Tracks

Last week, a series of out of control wildfires raged across the Port Hills to the south of Christchurch, destroying houses, sending massive plumes of smoke billowing into the sky (and visible from space), and leaving thousands of hill-suburb residents temporarily homeless (after often getting only minutes to evacuate).

Feb 22 - Violin Layering Tribute

Today marks 6 years since the devastating Feb22 quakes here in Christchurch. Here are a bunch of tracks I recorded to commemorate the event this year.

Crazy Ideas Folder: OpenGL Renders in "Background" Mode via Mesa GL?

This evening, I caught a mid-conversation snippet that had me thinking, "Is that really so? I'm not so certain about that..."  (or perhaps my supervisor's frequent utterings during our meetings have been starting to get ingrained in my mind XD).  Anyway, the quote in question was:

"it's not possible to do opengl render in a background mode"

Really?!  I know it's not **currently** possible to do an OpenGL render in background mode, and perhaps there are limits to what we can achieve (especially if you're not allowed to spawn any windows and/or there's no graphics card on the rendermachine).

However, something from the vague hazy memories of the past tell me that this is not a cut-and-dried certainty.

Quick Tip/Hack: Getting MSBuild to Stop on First Error

One of the most annoying and common problems (as a bit of Googling soon reveals) when compiling a big project with MSBuild (multi-process) is that even if compilation fails on one of the files (due to a syntax error or some other error condition), it will keep compiling the rest of the codebase. This is bad for two reasons:
  1)  You won't be able to link the program in the end anyway. At least in my experience, even if you could link the program (and that's not a given in every case), it doesn't make much (if any) sense to have an unreproducable chimera of old + new code (though exactly which bits they are you probably won't remember a little down the track)

  2)  You'll probably have to recompile all the code again once you fix the error anyway. More often than not, I've mainly had these errors show up when changnig code in a popular header file that large swathes of the program used. So, if a compile error like this showed up, the computer would have already wasted a lot of time/energy compiling a lot of files (many of them unsuccessfully too), work that would have to be redone when you've fixed the error anyway.

After a few false starts, I ended up finding a neat (if somewhat evil) little hack to solve this problem once and for all.

Custom MSBuild Loggers for Blender Devs on Windows

Given that it was a long weekend here in NZ, I decided to take a little time off to work on a little "weekend project" I'd been wanting to work on for ages. (BTW, it wasn't the only weekend project I worked on this weekend, but it's the only one that will be of much interest to anyone else :)

Here's an obligatory screenshot showing the results of my work.

 The "cleaned up" Blender build output as a result of my project: blender_msbuild_loggers

Blender Dev Updates - 21 Jan

(EDIT: I originally meant to post this a few weeks ago, but it's taken a while to get around to finishing the demo materials included here... but, PhD work takes priority, again...)

This week I took some time out from my PhD work (argh, creating questionaires is such a pain) to get through a bunch of simple new features I'd been meaning to code during my break... that is until continuing my holidays took priority ;)  But with the announcement that we would be pursuing a 2.79 after all, it was time to brush off the plans and get these features in.

Most of the new features are Grease Pencil related... (Some but not all of them can be seen here)

But, there's also stuff for all animators too...

After the Rain

Here's one more set of photos to clear some of the backlog of photos I'd been meaning to post here (I'll leave the sunsets for another day, since there've been quite a few of those recently :)

There's a magical moment shortly after the rain has cleared, when the flowers in the garden are bathed in a fesh coating of fine little glassy crystals...

Seagulls up Close

A few weeks ago, I had a lovely walk around the CBD for the first time in ages. Along the way, I found a nice shady spot on the riverbank to sit and watch a flock of gulls preening, sleeping, and otherwise doing a whole lot of interesting things you don't often get to see them doing. For instance, who would've known that aside from squaking aggressively and trying to steal your lunch, these things can also look kindof cute - especially when they stand on one leg looking like a moggy with a bad case of fleas!

From certain angles, there's a bit of cuteness in there... Somehow, this shot reminds me of Piper. (I think it might be the rounded head and the placement of the two dot-like eyes on there that does it)...

The Sea - On an overcast day

With the lack of kites to photograph, I ended up turning my attention to the waves crashing upon the shore (as seen from the pier). In recent times, everytime I've headed out to the coast, I've been really quite captivated by the magesty and power of the waves...

Kite Day 2017

Over the weekend, the annual "Kite Day" was held at New Brighton beach, on a warm but overcast summer day.

While in previous years, there would be large displays of a variety of massive novelty kites, this year, they were in short supply... As I later discovered, there was apparently too little wind to get them up into the air that day (despite the day before, and day after being really windy...). However, in place of the large display kites, it was fun to see so many families out and about having fun trying to fly their own kites :)