Duckling

Today I found this duckling wandering by itself quite close to a car parking area - quite a sizable distance, especially for such a young one who can't even really walk steadily. It's perhaps the closest I've managed to get to one (the mother duck usually intervenes, if the flock don't run away first).

Breaking the feature freeze - Animation goodies post 2.64

Wooo! It feels good getting back to hacking some cool new features for Blender again after months of protracted feature freeze and being busy with coursework. Though I'm not exactly out of the woods yet with all that, this evening I got around to committing a few things I've been working on or have been planning on working on for a while now.

Blender 2.64 Released

After several months of delays, Blender 2.64 has finally been released.

In many ways, this is really the "VFX" release, featuring many of the tools developed for/as part of the Mango such as masking, color grading, and compositor improvements.

However, for animators, there have also been a few small goodies included in this release (though you won't find them listed quite so clearly in the bug lists on the wiki). Wondering what these are? Read on for more...

September Recap

Phew! September has been some fairly hard slog... just another month before I can hopefully put attending classes (+ sitting exams) behind me for good  :)

Happy "Mid-Autumn Festival"

Today is the "Mid-Autumn Festival" day. That is, when we have mooncake and gaze idly skywards at the brightly glowing orb we call the moon...

Manual: 1/640s f7.1 ISO 100

The above is one of my best shots of the moon to date where we can actually see "some" detail (though shooting through a window handheld still resulted in a bit too much blurring). Yay!

WIP - Auto Keying Warning Mockup

Recently on the bf-funboard mailing list, there has been a bit of a discussion about how we may reduce mode errors with the Auto Keyframing functionality. Specifically, how can we warn/remind animators that autokeying is on when they go to start doing stuff?

Here is a first-pass attempt:

Video 1, Video 2

And here is the patch that you can have a play with.

I'm Feeling Lucky...

This evening, I took a short break from the powering through the tedium of getting through a mountain of course work, and implemented a little fun feature in the experimental file browser I've been building as part of one of my ongoing projects this year (more will be revealed about this later, possibly towards the end of November after I recover from thesis writing crunch related to this ;)

In a partial homage to Google's famous button (but really born out frustration during a few late-night procrastination sessions), there is now a file browser that will pick and navigate to random locations within your file system upon your command!

Almost there...

Just a few more tweaks and I'll have completed a 10 page report in just over half that many hours in a marathon writing sprint... sheesh...

Thoughts on the progression of UI designs...

Following on from the Traces video, this week I've ended up seeing a number of videos and screenshots demonstrating the progression of computer interfaces over time. Having spent quite some time over the past few months thinking over issues about UI design and how we could/should try to redesign them so that they are easier and faster to use while encouraging discoverability, some of the things I've come across recently have been a bit eye opening.

While reading research papers as part of my honours thesis/project work (but also through videos and articles like these), I've also found that many approaches that came to mind had been tried - some successfully, some not so, and others that I wouldn't have thought of but which end up becoming "all roads lead to Rome" designs.

However, at the same time, there have been times when I've been struck with the immediate thought: "Wow! They had that back then? But gee... have our designs regressed?"

Traces - The precursor of Blender

In case you haven't see it already:


Amazing. Remember, this was software from some 20 years ago, when most computers could only do crappy line art GUI's (without AA, barely any shading other than dotty-dithering stuff) that sometimes even had update problems.

Now, "Traces" was the precursor to Blender that was developed an used at NeoGeo back in the early 1990's (Blender was started around September/October 1992-1994 according to comments that used to be, and probably still lurk, in some source files). To see where some of the concepts have evolved from is quite amazing.

September 4th

I almost didn't realise it, but today is 2 years since that first quake rocked Canterbury early in the morning, forever changing our lives and the face of the city. And on the anniversary of such a momentous day, it seems that nature still had some plans for us...

The sunset this afternoon was quite spectacular, bathing everything in a strong pinky-yellowish glow. Eventually, I decided to grab the camera and poke my head out the door, upon which I was greeted by the following skies:

On Matters of Productivity...

It's been a while since I've read an article which I agree with on so many levels (other than some of Bret Victor's stuff which I've been meaning to finish a write up about for a while). Before reading any further, take a look at the following article:

http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html

Firstly, thanks Lukas T (Blender Nodes dev) for the link.