Spikey

Seen on the trees bordering the access road to visit grandma...

In autumn, this same road will once again be lined with scores of mid-aged/elderly Chinese beating the living daylights out of the trees to get these fluffy tennis balls down. Down, off the trees, down into waiting buckets and baskets, down into makeshift bags and carriers.

Meanwhile, down at the local grocery stores, abundant supplies of chestnuts at rock bottom prices appear on the shelves... I never did get to find out what granny thought of kids taking fruit off her fruit trees ;)

Windows Command-Line tips (and UI ramblings)

Just a little quick tip I stumbled across which I thought would be of interest to Windows users out there.

From Windows Vista onwards (?  I'm not sure about Win7 though...), you can bring up a command-line prompt with its current directory set to be any folder on your computer by simply:

Shift-RMB on a folder, and choosing "Open Command Window Here"

Finally I might not need to create command-prompt shortcuts all around the place (though with my mouse's dodgy RMB, which is probably on its way out, with its frequent accidental double-clicks, I might still keep them for some rainy-days), or try and look for an alternative to the old Powertool for WinXP.

Fly

I don't usually take photos of insects (and especially flies, which are best left for my fly swat), but this guy was just sitting on a leaf waiting to be photographed yesterday morning while I took a walk around the garden.

This is quite a tight crop of the original shot, although not as much as for the silvereye shots. After taking this one, I did manage to take a few more shots at half the distance or closer, though those all turned out blurry as the leaf was starting to get bumped around by a light breeze moving through.

BlenderDev - Clearing the todo's...

Just a little update on what I've been up to lately: clearing out some Blender todo's I've had lurking around for ages.

Some Highlights:

1. Markers can now be edited from the various animation editors again
2. Added Grease Pencil "Sketching Sessions" Functionality
3. Partially Restored "Grease Pencil" mode in DopeSheet
4. Driver creation tweaks and hacks

On the matters of code quality...

I don't usually link-dump, but this following sketch sums up software engineering quite nicely...

http://xkcd.com/844/

Talk about there being a "software crisis"! :P

Photo Collages...

A picture says a thousand words... A collection of photos tells a story.

Recently between coding work on two different projects and an ongoing home renovation project, I've been busy taking photos for fun. While browsing through each day's "takings", I found that some of them looked quite good in combination with each other more so than if they were just standalone.

So, while playing around with ways of combining them, I stumbled across Picasa's Collage tool, which does a surprisingly good job of getting an eye-pleasing arrangement without much work a lot of the time. Without further ado, here are the pics!

SVN Rant - Why is there no global "don't expand keywords" setting

After getting fed up with SVN's disgusting "merge" facilities, I ended up coding (and am still working on) Duality SVN which will eventually work around having to use them. But today, I'm getting fed up with the lack of a way to disable the "keyword expansion" facilities...

[Rigging FAQ] Addedum Info on Drivers System

Re-reading my earlier post on the Drivers system, I realised that I overlooked mentioning a few things that I had intended to mention. Also, there have been a few small changes since then which I thought should be mentioned.

(Sometimes it's all too easy to forget which aspects I've mentioned and which I haven't, and where I might've or mightn't have mentioned them... such is the nature of answering these questions countless times on forum posts before trying to write blog-posts to act as a somewhat-definitive source of reference)

End of year ramblings...

It's that time of the year again... the end of another year! And what an eventful year it has been.

In many ways, it could be described as the year of the disasters:
- Christchurch September 4th Earthquake (whose aftereffects are still being felt today - quite literally) and Haiti's January earthquake
- Worldwide air traffic brought to a standstill twice (the Finnish volcanic eruption and now heavy snow)
- Miners being trapped in mines around the world, including the 33 Chilean Miners who were successfully rescued after several months underground, and the 29 Pike River Miners here in Greymouth whose bodies sadly still lie within the mine

But, this has also been a year of great new heights:
- Sintel, the third Open Movie Project was finally completed and released
- Blender 2.5 moves ever closer towards being a stable release (including a little bugsquash sprint effort by yours truly this afternoon to bring the bugcount back down towards 50)
- Bullet Rigid Body physics can now be set up within Blender's viewport and run in realtime, with control using "effector" force fields - at least in a branch, thanks to my GSoC work this year
- The birth of several new open source projects, including Duality SVN (which you'll hear about a bit more in the new year!)
- Me learning a bit more about photography, culminating in buying a DSLR, and thus spelling the start of the end for all the neighbourhood birds!

Well, that was 2010. Now bring on 2011!

Happy New Year all!

Playful Silvereyes...

Wow how time flies. And if time were a bird, then it would be playtime!

The poses here are very similar to some I've seen in other people's collections, though I personally prefer the ones in my previous posts more.

[Animating in 2.5] Getting to grips with Keying Sets

Over the past few months, I've been observing quite a bit of confusion over some aspects of the animation system in 2.5 that's all related to "Keying Sets". These are a rather important new feature aimed at improving the animation workflow, but which many people don't seem to be aware of. So, if you're wondering why you're getting a "weird" error message when trying to insert keyframes, or if you'd just like to learn some new workflow tricks to make animating easier, read on :)

[Rigging FAQ] Constraint Spaces Explained

While working on a bug report today, I remembered that the "space conversions" stuff for constraints (added during my 2.45/2.46 Constraints Refactor) often seems to be a point of contention for some (many?) riggers.
This will be a brief guide to the various spaces and how they relate to each other to hopefully act as a starting point for further investigations by yourselves.

[Side note: I'm trying to get this out between aftershocks here, so apologies in advance for anything that isn't clear]