Planet Blender

Plumiferos in the Tube !
tube - 2010-02-17 21:41:21

Hey this is malefico writing.

Bassam kindly invited me to write something about Plumiferos’ release happening this week. It might sound strange to read something about Plumiferos here but in fact it is not.

Some of us in the team, Bassam, Juan Angel and myself were part of the biggest film project done in Blender so far, and here’s the good news: it is finished. And it is showing in the theaters in Argentina as you read. The first Blender made feature film. Ever.

We are very proud of have been part of it

It was because of Plumiferos that I met Bassam, Juan and other wonderful people like Andy and VenomGFX. And for that I’m certainly grateful and happy.

Here’s Juan Angel writing…

I agree with Malefico, about learning from it… The best part of it, instead the experience, the learning (technical and human), and getting new knowledge and skills…

But the best part, as the Plumifero’s director (Daniel De Felippo) told me… was knowing those couple of amazing people… Malefico, Pico, Ivan, Diego, VenomGFX, Bassam!, Andy!, Daniel… and some others too…

Cheers… and some hugs… and here some pics !

Why I am going to talk at Pycon ...
SPE IDE - Stani's Python Editor - 2010-02-17 20:11:00

I started to develop SPE when I was still using Windows back in 2002. By using Python and wxPython, I hoped SPE would run smoothly on all platforms. That was wishful thinking. Luckily the community stepped in: Linux users started sending me patches and Mac users collected money to buy me a Mac Mini. Many years ago I go I switched to Ubuntu and at that moment I've felt the joy not having chosen a technology which locks you up in one platform.

Later I started developing Phatch (Photo Batch Processor) and used my experience of SPE to polish if for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. I took care of distributing it well on Linux by getting it in the major repositories (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Suse, ...). Unfortunately I lacked the time for proper distribution on Mac OS X and Windows. I am happy to announce that is going to change.

Together with Nadia Alramli (other Phatch developer) we've dived deeper in the subject of developing and distributing cross-platform applications. Our conclusion is that is it takes more time to research than to implement the code. Therefore we are eager to share our knowledge during our talk at Pycon to save you from hair-pulling behaviour. We have learnt that Python solves 90% of the cross-platform problems for you, but that the remaining 10% could be tricky. In our talk we will point the finger on several painful issues and offer solutions, hoping that they will save you time and frustration.

We prepared the talk by writing a paper (outline here), which is far more extensive than the 30 min of talk will allow us. We designed the talk to give you a good overview and to get you started. I have send the paper for review to some people I highly respect. These were some reactions:

• "Great document, I learned new things from it!" Piotr Ożarowski (Debian Python Application Package Team)


• "It's a pity I can not attend PyCon. Anyway, the subjects you are describing in the paper are seldom analyzed in such depth, and I believe the whole community will benefit from your presentation. Most interesting of all, correctly packaging and distributing an app on multiple platforms can be a deep nightmare and what you have on your paper is a beautiful example of how to avoid the most hair-pulling mistakes in doing it." Andrea Gavana (wxPython)

We will use wxPython as an example GUI toolkit, but the principles are valid for other toolkits as well. Our target audience are programmers who have already some experience on one platform but are wondering how things could be implemented on other platforms. Making your application cross-platform is the most efficient way to scale your user base.

Rather than making any bullet point slides, we did our best to make the slides visually entertaining. So even if our voices would suddenly mute, you have at least something nice to look at. As the author of SPE I made sure that all code slides have a pretty syntax highlight. Combining Pygments with Inkscape rocks!

I hope to see you at our talk at Friday 02:55pm @ Centennial II !

graphicall: Topology based mirror (from apricot branch) [26998] Thanks cam!
Twitter / graphicall - 2010-02-17 19:52:39

graphicall: Topology based mirror (from apricot branch) [26998] Thanks cam!

My review on Plumiferos
malefico's spot - 2010-02-17 19:39:14

After watching the movie in a theater, surrounded by my all-time friends, colleagues and family, and close enough to the screen (maybe too close) I could summarize my experience in one sentence: “I thought it was going to be worse”.

Original story after all these comings and goings changed a lot but still the movie is quite entertaining. Sound work had many highlights and just a few downsides (to my liking anyway). It highlights the image and reinforces comedy punch lines. Music is painfully missing in a couple shots, which turns down a bit the rhythm, but generally speaking is OK, specially the couple songs performed by argentine rock band Smitten. The band choice was one good decision from producers.

About the image… well. Here I’m going to elaborate further as you might expect. 80% or so is acceptable, there is only around a 20% of it that has technical issues which ironically enough, could have been easily fixed… if they had allowed the right people to do what it had to be done.

Unexplainable (well I can think of a couple good explanations) a few shots seem to have been rendered in a GameBoy resolution and then stretched up to cover the screen.
This is particularly painful to me since I had already watched those shots in much better quality in the past !

The traditional problem of high frequency textures, something in animation translates to an annoying “frying noise” or flickering of pixels, shows up recurrently during the movie. This problem would have been easily fixed by turning off the offending texture or pressing the “Full OSA” (the Fat Fullosa as we used to call it at the studio) button in material settings.

Characters’ eyes passes were badly composited in many shots. These characters had a rather complex setup to composite reflections, shadows and other passes, and this task was overlooked creating an unpleasant “cataract” effect in the eyes of many characters. Once again, this could have been fixed by editing the composite or calling one of us for help.

Mesh interferences here and there, sometimes barely noticeable some other blatantly obvious. Also easy to fix by changing a pose.

Render Layer compositing problems like the typical object that should have been behind another, being composited in front of it instead.
Too small shadow buffers which produced pixelated shadows or banding noticeable in those shots that were lighted in the very end of the production when no Director, nor Director of Photography were working any longer.

All these technical mistakes (which do not show up all the time thank God) are distracting and “break the illusion” but, also true, might go unnoticed by regular viewers (non-3D-expert) .

In the end, and in spite of all the glitches, the image and quality of the film is far superior to that of other comparable budget competitors produced with commercial software even and has many chances to become a blockbuster at least here in Argentina.

Frustration and anger I experimented when noticing those errors, came from knowing that they could have been easily fixed if it wasn’t because of the negligence, stubbornness and pride of producers Giannini and Alvarez that prevented them to call for help to the people that could have helped.

In the funny anecdotes department, the producers that have shown a prodigious untidiness have even misspelled the names of Ton Roosendaal (”Ton Rossendall”), Bassam Kurdali (”Basam Kurdali”) and Andy Goralczyk (”Andy Goralsyk”) in the film credits .

Having seen the previous versions, which were rather worse by the way, I had the pleasure to see that in the end, the movie is pretty decent. My daughter enjoyed it big time, fascinated by the characters, and my wife and I had a couple laughs even (which is remarkable considering my increasing anger).

After the premiere, we talked about all these with the crew, we were all happy anyway, and those who could (it was tuesday and the next day people had to get up early in the morning) we did a traditional celebration for this occasions which is having a pizza at Corrientes Avenue

Since this humble place, all I have is a big bag of congratulations for all the gang of friends that worked with me during so long. It is a great joy to finally see this on the screen. First Blender feature movie ever !. We have learned a lot since those times we shared and we keep on learning.

So folks, I strongly recommend you to watch it and let me know YOUR impressions !

Synfig Studio packages update
Morevna Project - 2010-02-17 15:49:31

It’s been a long time since Synfig Studio 0.62.00 came out. But because of our absence this significant event didn’t get mentioned here. It’s time to “redress an injustice”. We’re on 0.62.00 now. The packages page is updated.

Major reasons to upgrade:

• Hey, it’s release!

Introduction to Smoke Simulation
BlenderNation - 2010-02-17 15:31:12

Andrew Price (BlenderGuru) has turned the presentation he gave at the Blender Conference into a 30-minute videotutorial. Andrew Price wrote: The tutorial will teach you everything you need to know about the smoke simulator from a beginners perspective. During the 27-minute video you will learn: The Old System Vs New – What’s changed? How the Smoke Simulator works How to bake [...]

Mi impresión sobre Plumíferos
malefico's spot - 2010-02-17 13:43:21

Después de ver la película en un cine, rodeado de mi familia y mis viejos camaradas-colegas-compinches de siempre y bastante cerca de la pantalla (quizás demasiado) podría resumir mi experiencia en una frase: “Pensé que iba a ser peor”. La historia original, con tantas idas y venidas, cambió mucho pero aún así terminó siendo entretenida. El [...]

Blender 2.5 Alpha 1 and more info on the sprint!
Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-02-17 13:06:21

Hey everyone! JS speaking.

Just wanted to give you guys a small update for the sprint for Saturday. Here’s how it will work!

1.  You’ll have to log on to #Blenderdurian on the Freenode server in IRC

2. You’ll have to read CAREFULLY the topic of the channel in which there will be information about how to look at the list of asset we need. The wiki where the list is will also contain a F.A.Q. and references images for the list.

3. The rules in the channel are simple. The channel is there so you can ask questions and show your progress, nothing else. If you want to chat of other things, we suggest going to #Blenderchat. Everyone chatting about something other than questions regarding the sprint are going to be kicked out of #blenderdurian. We don’t want to play dictator, but this sprint is to make us gain time, not lose time. And for that reason, we’ll need to keep the channel well structured and clean. We’ll have a great time together on Saturday, so just let try to stay civilized

4. After you looked through the list and decided to work on an asset, you need to first contact ME in private in the channel to ‘register’, so that we can keep track of what people are working on. I go by the name of ‘Ecks’ on the channel. Basically, you just need to start a private chat with me and give me the name of the asset and in which category it is in the list (so I can locate it easily).  I will then inform you if someone else is already working on it, or if you’re good to go and start. Wait for me to answer you, I might be slightly busy with other people so give me a few minutes. I will also give you some basic information like maximum polycount, how long you have to work on it (don’t worry, this is just for your own personal motivation! the deadline should be realistic), etc.  If I get too busy (i.e. too many people joining in), I will redirect you to another member of team in our private chat.

5. We encourage all of you to post the progress of your work in the #Blenderdurian channel as you go along. So you can receive critiques. We suggest you to use free image hosting website such a imageshack to post your pogress.

6. When you’re done. Upload to http://www.blendswap.com/

7. When it’s uploaded, send me the direct link to your model page on Blenderswap in our private chat on IRC.  I will reply to you once I downloaded the file and I will thank you for your help

8. Start the whole process again if you want to!

If you have any other question, this is a good time to reply to this post. I’ll do my best to answer all of them.

And on another note, Blender 2.5 Alpha 1 is coming to your pc! Here’s the splash screen we did for it:

Blender Magazine Italia #7 Released
BlenderNation - 2010-02-17 11:00:16

New reading material for our Italian Blenderheads. Luca Pinciani wrote: It’s been released the seventh issue of Blender Magazine Italia, the italian magazine about Blender. It can be downloaded from http://www.BlenderMagazineItalia.it. Interesting articles, making ofs and much more are waiting for you… Happy blendering!

Watch Blender 2.5 Development Happen
BlenderNation - 2010-02-17 08:01:18

Bob Holcomb created a video of the Blender 2.5 SVN commits: Bob wrote: I created a video of all the SVN commits from the time Blender 2.5 was a branch through today using a neat visualisation program called Gource. I actually did very little work other than pull the SVN logs, but I thought it looked cool [...]

Tech wonders never cease to amaze me
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2010-02-17 06:12:02

So here recently I got a Kindle (ebook reader). I have been having all kinds of fun with it. Not only can I read a mind boggling number of books, I can even get online with a rather basic browser. Which lets me keep up with my favorite Blender blogs, check my email, browse Facebook [...]

graphicall: Blender commit activity since November! Thanks Bobalicious for the vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAGe_M5Kh5o
Twitter / graphicall - 2010-02-17 03:48:50

graphicall: Blender commit activity since November! Thanks Bobalicious for the vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAGe_M5Kh5o

Weekly update February 8-16
Freestyle integration into Blender - 2010-02-17 01:34:24

Since the last blog update, the Freestyle branch has been improved in several directions as described below. First, further consolidation of the view map creation was carried out to address “2D intersection out of range” warnings.  These warnings lead to “3D intersection out of range” warnings, which are in fact a sign of a possible crash.  The [...]