20 Years and Counting as a Professional Software Engineer

Ooh... earlier today, I was suddenly reminded that this year marks 20 years since I've been developing software in a professional / semi-professional capacity (i.e. working with a medium-sized team, on an established codebase with millions of lines of code, wrangling bug trackers + wikis, and supporting software for which there are real users of the stuff we're building who depend on that to get their work done)

I started in around May 2006 (*), after managing to get Blender's code compiling on my machine at last, which enabled me to start tackling a few of my pet peeves...

It also happened that one of the first feature film productions using Blender was kicking off around that time too in Argentina (i.e. "Plumiferos" at "Manos Digitales" (sp?) IIRC), and had posted a long list of feature requests that happened to overlap with quite a few of the things on my list! In short, that's how I ended up entering the industry - burning through that feature request list, and becoming one of the major contributors to Blender for over a decade!

(*) I had actually been programming since early 2000, but had only worked on my own private "from scratch" projects up till then

Blender Addon - Hand Drawn Timing Chart Paths to Animation (3rd-Party / Not Mine)

It's been a while since I've posted about any Blender or animation related stuff on here, having moved onto other pursuits these days. But tonight, I'm going to briefly break my silence to link to the following demo clip for an addon that I've gotta say is pretty awesome looking!

  

Well done to everyone involved in making this happen! Very nicely done! Simple yet effective  😍 

 

Flow - Blender Animated Feature Film

As many in the Blender world will know by know, Flow - a Latvian animated film created by a small team in Blender, and rendered using Eevee just won this year's Oscar for Best Animated Film!

Woah! What a moment! The first Blender animated Best Animated Feature award winner! WOW!  😱🤯😍🥳

A *VERY* big congratulations to all the team who worked on this!!! A very well deserved win!

LOL... The "Genius" Developer Who Created Grease Pencil?! 😂

Was pretty chuffed to get sent a link to a YT video the other day with a pretty fun title LOL 😂😂😂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6XqricCPPY

30 Years of Blender

It seems that this year marks the 30th Birthday of Blender (which is observed on the 2nd January every year). What a milestone!

 

On a personal level, I am forever grateful for role that Blender has and continues to play in my life. In many ways, you can say that Blender and I grew up together - right time, right place, all that sort of thing:

From starting out as a kid in his early teens in NZ wanting to make his own animated short films; to starting to put my self-taught programming skills to use tweaking and modifying this software to scratch my own itches; to starting to help the nascent few professional studios starting to use Blender to scratch their itches; and finally, spending the better part of a decade or so fighting hard to propel our favourite open source 3D content creation suite from "just a little hobbyist toy" to "serious film-production ready software on-par with (if not outright superior to) the other much more lauded 'industry standard' software".

I think it's fair to say that we've definitely achieved that goal of becoming one of the new industry standard DCC suites, playing a major role in production pipelines throughout the industry. Everywhere you look, there are people out the using Blender - often in places and ways that you'd least expect!   

What a thrilling ride it's been, along with getting to meet some many good lifelong friends along the way! 

 

As you may have noticed, I've been largely absent from active involvement in the Blender world for the past few years. While a return to actively developing and contributing to Blender is not completely off the cards, it is currently highly unlikely. Never say never, but between a fairly heavy workload on a complex + important / critical system in my day-job, some ongoing consulting work on some other projects I've been involved in, and also trying to have a bit more of a life outside of work (I'm trying... old habits die hard), it's unlikely to happen anytime soon.

(Admittedly, it's also been somewhat bittersweet seeing the recent resurgence of interest in Blender's Animation System. Seeing all the active discussion + development of things I would've really loved some feedback on a decade ago when I was actually still actively working on some of these things is fun to see... I just wish it could've happened sooner! Oh well... such is life!)

Happy 30th Birthday Blender!

Code Quest - Weekly Roundup (Weeks 1-4)

Lo and behold, we're almost a month into the Code Quest already! I had originally intended to write this post after the first 2 weeks (already down from my initial target of maybe a single post per week). But... between making the most of my time here to explore Amsterdam/Europe, the day to day activities in the studio, having to deal with all the other "life crap" (e.g. cooking, laundry, groceries, and some ongoing struggles with our apartment's water heating system, etc.), and finally, a broken laptop this past 1-2 weeks (more on this in a moment), the third fourth week has been and gone, and I still haven't gotten around to putting this together finishing this post!

I'm going to keep this brief though, as I'm still running my laptop off its battery after the adapter started playing up (basically last weekend, it suddenly got somewhat fried, and is now only sporadically charging, and taking nearly a day to do so when it works)... just what I needed when development activity was starting to pick up pace here!

For more up to date info as it happens, I'll be mostly posting short updates to my Twitter feed, since that's a bit easier to update using just my phone. Hopefully I haven't already started getting my dates mixed up - I'd been trying to keep notes to help remember, but it's been a challenge even finding the time to get those done!

Shell script to set up Ready-To-Use Blender Git Checkouts on Linux

Recently, I've been setting up quite a few copies/checkouts of Blender Git repositories (approximately 3-4 per machine I'm using - including twice on the same machine after the hard drive failed). Doing this has made me all too aware of all the steps needed to get these things into a nicely working state for development (including how you need to copy out a whole bunch of commands each time).

Today, I can announce that for Linux users, the wait is over! I've successfully put together a script that basically automates the entire procedure listed on the wiki, making it possible to relatively painlessly grab the Blender sources, and then proceed to compile and run them.

Get the script here (brepo_init.sh)

It's actually part of a larger repo of automated configuration-setup scripts/tools I've been putting together over the past few weeks to make it easier to get my computing setup deployed onto new machines faster. For the time being, I'm not quite prepared to release the actual repo where all these are housed publicly, as I still haven't managed to fully vet that no private details have managed to leak/leech into the config files contained. Unfortunately, the final release of that may have to wait until I'm back in NZ (as it seems that I ultimately ended up forgetting to transfer some critical files for a few of the programs).

Knotted - A Short Film Idea (for testing Tools for Animating Hand-Rope/String Interactions)

(This post was split off from my post about a grand vision for the future direction of animation tools, as it was growing a bit too large for that).

For the ultimate test of hand/finger interaction with a length of string, I've dreamed up a little short film, set in a village where everyone (but the main character) is a master knot-tier. In fact, the opening scene is literally a montage of different pairs of hands tying increasingly fancy knots and bows.

The idea is that, we'd produce this short once we have the technology in place to make producing it feasible. That is, we'd have a bunch of awesome new tools that are amazing at helping animators manage such interactions (which are fiendishly hellish now), meaning that doing such shots should be much easier, meaning that we can afford to do quite a few of them to show off a bit :)  Well, at least that's the theory!

Of course, we'd first have to find a solution to that technical hurdle :)  (I'd love to have a chat with some experienced animators about this sometime in the coming months, so get in touch)

Future of Animation Tools - Some WIP Thoughts and Ideas (+ the Role of Pose Sculpting in All This)

As a follow-up on my earlier brief discussion about the general direction for Motion Path editing in Blender, I figured that it's probably time to outline a bit more my longer-term vision for the future of the animation tools (mainly in Blender, but also the wider animation industry at large) to give a bit more context/motivation to my earlier comments.

I had originally intended to release this all a bit later once I had a few more key pieces in place, but, inspired by Raf Anzovin's enlightening blog, Daniel M Lara's Easy Rigging stuff, the exciting developments in the VR-based animation space, and also the 2.8 code quest, I decided to put this out earlier.

In this article, I'm going to try to "throw the ball further" (as Emirates Team NZ would say) and take a more comprehensive view of where we need to going in the medium to long term, as well as what steps we can take now.

(NOTE: I originally started writing this article in NZ, but in between preparing a new laptop for travel, and travelling to/settling in Amsterdam for Code Quest, I've only had time to really work on finishing this in the past day or so).

Blender 2.8 Code Quest - Here I come!

Tomorrow marks the start of my next big adventure - travelling quite literally half a world away (with a 12 hour time inversion to boot)!

As most readers of this blog would probably know by now, next week, the Blender 2.8 "Code Quest" begins in Amsterdam. 10+ core developers of Blender will be gathering in the Blender Institute/Animation Studios for several months to get Blender 2.8 ready for public use - finishing off many todo's from the 2.8 project and/or laying the foundations for the next 5-10 years of Blender development!

Early tomorrow morning, I'll be flying out to join the team, spending some 26 hours or so of bone-crunching, butt numbing long haul flying. (Alas, this is one of those times when New Zealand's relative isolation from the rest of the world is a bit of a curse). Sitting here typing this tonight (while wrapping up a few last preparations on the stuff I'll be bringing along), it feels quite surreal to think that soon I'll finally be meeting many good friends and colleagues "in the flesh" for the first time after knowing each other for over a decade, and having spent many years watching the conference/BTS content wanting to visit Blender HQ and hang out with everyone.

Thoughts About Geometry-Editing UX issues - Multi Object Editing, Edit Modes, Selection/Action Split, etc.

Just a little earlier, I spent some time reviewing and commenting on T54242 regarding the design issues behind making Blender be able to have multiple objects in Edit/Sculpt/Paint Modes at the same time. As outlined, there are certainly a few rather prickly issues in that we'd need to resolve to be able to do this.

In this post, I'll go over a few of the key issues we need to contend with here, along with some other general thoughts I've been mulling over for quite a few years now about what IMO makes an effective UI for editing large amounts of geometry (i.e. vertices, control points, etc.)

Grease Pencil Dev - FAQ's, Current Status, etc.

In response to a bug report in the tracker, I ended up posting a long-ish reply that I thought would be good for more people to see, since it probably gives a bit more insight into some of the work that's going on "behind the scenes" atm. So, without further ado, here's a copy of my reply.

(For more of a user-orientated look at what functionality we've been adding, check out Antonio's code.blender.org post)

Production Notes (From 150YOD Video Project) - Things to Fix in Blender

To followup on my earlier #150YOD video post. I had originally intended to release this a lot earlier (e.g. around September 13th), but various things have been taking up my time over the past few months, delaying the release of this.

 

As has become my habit after completing each Blender project, here are some notes about things (bugs, usability quirks, observations, and general todo's) I ran into that need attention. Though it's mainly a list for myself, hopefully these notes may be of use to other people too.

The Dr is In - PhD, BlenderDev, and Upcoming Project Updates

Woah! It's been over 2 months since I last posted anything here again :(

During that time, I've ended up being super busy with various projects/commitments (which I'll outline below). Unfortunately, this has meant that my todo list/postponed-project backlog had to take a back seat again, along with squeezing in time to write stuff here (Note: This post itself has ended up being rescheduled several times already even!). Hopefully I'll finally manage to get enough time to start making some progress on some of the things I've been wanting to do since early March (EDIT: actually, it's been since October June 2016)! Stay tuned...

[Vote for Me] New Video Describing my PhD Research for #150YOD

Blender community batsignal!   

TL,DR: Please help vote for my #150YOD video (deadline is Thursday/Friday midnight, UTC+12)! Every vote counts!


Like, Share, and Vote (link below)

Vote for my video at the following link:

https://www.thinkable.org/submission_entries/k8Way5qO

Voting Instructions (sorry, that it's a bit of a long-winded process):
1. Go to the competition website
2. Click the "Vote" button
3. Register on the site (Facebook or Email + Name + Password)
4. (If using email, check your email/spam folders, and Activate the account)
5. Back on the competition website, click the "Vote" button again.

Note: You haven't voted until the button says "Remove Vote" and your name appears on the list

Oil Column Heater Model

As a little warmup exercise for a video project I'm working on, I went ahead and modelled Mum and Dad's old oil column heater. Why a heater you may ask? Well, a few nights ago, I caught sight of the the heater's light casting a lovely red glow on the wall, nicely complementing the deep blue light coming from the windows in the darkened room, and thought to myself, "Hmm... I wonder if I could replicate this scene in Eevee..."



Of course, what's a story without a little drama ;)  The one snag in all of this is that it turns out I haven't actually modelled anything in over 2-3 years! Sure, there have been Grease Pencil tests/animations and an occasional quick test objects, but models meant to look like something in particular? Zilch  (IIRC, the last time I did a lot of modelling was on Dad's ebook promo video, which was eons ago...)   Furthermore, I've mostly focussed on organic stuff (i.e. characters), so modelling an hard-surface object was a nice little challenge.

Breakdowner/GP Sequence Interpolation Ideas

While working on some recent improvements for the Breakdowner, I started daydreaming (as you do, when in full feature development mode, which is one of the things I love most about this process/work ;) about some ideas for how we could make these things even more awesome than they were already.

In case you haven't kept up with the latest developments in Blender, there are now two sets of tools with Breakdowner-like functionality:
1) The Pose Breakdowner (and the related "Push" and "Relax" tools)
2) The GPencil Interpolate and Interpolate Sequence operators

This post looks into what we could do for both of these - first common features, and then stuff that's more specific to the GPencil case (since it's newer functionality, which also has heaps more room that we can explore).

Oh, and just in case/before any gets confused, THE FOLLOWING CONTENTS OF THIS POST ARE ALL ENTIRELY HYPOTHETICAL/IDEAS ONLY. There's no guarantee than any of this will be implemented, though I'm curious how well they would turn out if I did :)

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.

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...