Planet Blender

News about Chaos & Evolutions
Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-03-11 23:47:36

Hello,

My week in the Durian team is almost finished here, and I couldn’t leave the Blender Institute without posting on the blog.

Apart for Sintel , I came to the Blender Institute with the prefinal videos of my DVD “Chaos& Evolutions” . And after some corrections, I decided to release the third video today about Alchemy ( edit : free, multi-platform and open source, download it here ) .

Youtube version above, with high definitions options.

You can also download the OGV Theora file as it will be on the DVD here :
http://download.blender.org/durian/03-alchemy.ogv

I still have some video editing to do with Kdenlive before delivering the final DVD to  the Blender Institute, but I prefer to take time to finish it properly and spend time on Sintel art direction. Thanks for the patience of people that already pre-order it, and thanks for people that will pre-order it. By the way, It shouldn’t be too long to finish, and during this will extend of some weeks the pre-order discount of 10% on the Blender E-shop.

A propos Sintel art direction , I spent my week time here to do paint-over and matte-painting. It was good to connect again with the team, and meet Beorn. But sorry ; no picture of my recent work for Sintel at the moment, 3D artist will show the result soon.

-David

Sequence scripting madness
tube - 2010-03-11 23:16:54

Bassam’s had his nose stuck in the sequence editor, building up and churning out the animatic. He just got his first beach ball on the mac. As we feed him .XCF boards, he opens them up and churns out .PNG’s from the layers. Some are static shots, others require a few animated frames. The .XCF’s are unsequenced and go into the ‘unsequenced’ folder, which has a child folder ‘pngs’ for the static frames, and a subsequent child folder ‘animated’ for the animated frames. The .PNG’s are being used as image strips in the video sequence editor. The use of the file browser as a library to preview and drag the images in is fantastic.

An issue came in with organising the files. As the edit takes shape, more and more images and strips need to be renamed to slot into order with the sequence. So I broke my face on a script to do that, which most people could write in their sleep. The script draws the list of .XCF’s in the properties of the sequence editor and allows you to easily rename them. It’ll then rename all the related .PNG’s in the subsequent folders and re-link them to the image strips.

You may notice that the filename property of an image sequence is currently locked. Martin Poirier was crucial in pointing the following out:

It’s already somewhat possible to edit sequence data through the RNA api, like this for example:
———-
import bpy

sce = bpy.context.scene
nle = sce.sequence_editor
seq = nle.sequences["Image"]

seq.directory = “/home/theeth/bf-blender/stuff/output_green/”

seq.elements[0].filename = “0050.png”
———-

The last line, however, will only work if a small code change is applied:
Commenting out line 403 ( RNA_def_property_clear_flag(prop, PROP_EDITABLE); ) in source/blender/makesrna/intern/rna_sequencer.c

This should be enough to remap an existing sequence.

DISCLAIMER:
The script is probably not useful to anyone else, and is not very friendly as i’m terrible at scripting. However, if anyone wants to learn from it they’re welcome.

BlenderArt Magazine #26 now Available
Blender Newbies 3D Video Tutorials (Learn to Create 3D Graphics with Blender!) - 2010-03-11 22:21:00

The BlenderArt Magazine is a bi-monthly PDF magazine that's free to download or view online. The magazine provides quality learning content for the Blender community, from the efforts of the community itself.

Issue #26: Blender & Gaming


FEATURED CONTENTS

• Articles/Tutorials on Making of Circolino
• Going Retro with the Blender Game Engine
• Blender in 2.5D Games
• Making of Big Pixel
• Making of Infinite Skies
• Making of Pahelika Artwork
• Making of Shootin' Annie
• Making of Mii School
• & more…

You can download the current magazine and access previous issues, here.

technorati tags: Blender3D, 3D, graphics, Blender tutorials

The Ian Report #487 - Beta Fish
Ian Hubert's Posts - Project London - 2010-03-11 21:30:00

So the last few days I've driven over to the edit suite and watched over the movie, making tweaks and throwing in last minute shots. If all goes according to plan then by the time you read this the film will be as close to picture lock as I can get it. At some point—perhaps even later today?—Phil is going to be making a disc for him and Nathan to look over the movie in its entirety, for final comments.

The ability to conceive of an entirely new shot, and then manufacture it from scratch with only the investment of time, is both a blessing and a curse—which I was going to go into more detail about, until I realized you could really basically infer the pros and cons of that one without me blabbin' on.

So let me talk about fish. One of my roommates brought his pet beta fish into the home. And then left. I mean technically he still lives here, but none of us have seen him in weeks. Which is fine, but it means taking care of the fish has been put onto our shoulders. We're all feeding him, which is good, but we're also feeding him way too much.

As I watch, he's trying to eat some food, but he can't find it amidst the soggy layer of filth that coats the surface. I try to scoop it out with a spoon but the surface tension makes it keep sliding off. The only answer is to significantly change his water, but I can't do that till the water reaches room temperature and distills a bit.

In my view, the total life experience of a fish is, "Sit around and die".

I understand now why my dad never really wanted pets.

I could probably swing this all around and try to force an analogy at the last minute, but dang if that wouldn't be a depressing analogy!

Ian Hubert
Writer Director

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Quick update
Tinker Code - 2010-03-11 19:10:15

Hi all Just a quick update: I’m working with Jahka refining the final patch, thanks to its feedback abd the users feedback I will modify several things in the final patch, like default values and remove some small things that are in future particle system design roadmap. Next week when Blendiac and WhifeofBlendiac return home [...]

Blenderart Mag Issue #26 now available
ThruDreamsgate's Blog - 2010-03-11 19:01:41

Welcome to Issue #25, “Blender & Gaming.” This issue we not only take a look at how Blender is used in various game production pipelines, but we see two very creative uses for Blender’s internal game engine and how those uses have helped children. So grab your copy today. Also be sure to check out [...]

Blenderart Mag Issue #26 now available
BlenderArt Magazine - 2010-03-11 19:01:39

Update: Due to some layout errors, we have uploaded a corrected issue for download.
This issue we not only take a look at how Blender is used in various game production pipelines, but we see two very creative uses for Blender’s internal game engine and how those uses have helped children.

So grab your copy today.
Also be sure to check out our gallery of wonderful images submitted by very talented members of our community.

Table of Contents:

• Making of – Circolino
• Making of – Going Retro With the BGE
• Making of – Blender in 2.5D Games
• Making of – Big Pixel
• Making of – Infinite Skies
• Making of – Pahelika Artwork
• Making of – Shootin’ Annie
• Making of – Mii School

And Lot More…

ramenhdr exploration..
KICHAVADI - 2010-03-11 18:39:00

just trying NPR with Ramenhdr..

Photographs are from my favourite village in karnataka..

Hibernation
Virgilio Vasconcelos - Animation - 2010-03-11 15:47:10

Dear God! This blog was in hibernation mode!

[read the full article]

Shapeways switches to Blender for on-line rendering
BlenderNation - 2010-03-11 11:43:57

3D printing community Shapeways allows their members to upload 3D models, preview them on the website and have them 3D printed in a variety of materials. Until recently, the previews were rendered in OpenGL and were rather bland looking. I was involved in the implementation of Blender on their webservers, in order to generate better [...]

graphicall: Sequencer Improvements: Scene strips show OpenGL camera view straight from the 3DView! no need to render OGLs anymore! [27340] by Campbell
Twitter / graphicall - 2010-03-11 09:32:34

graphicall: Sequencer Improvements: Scene strips show OpenGL camera view straight from the 3DView! no need to render OGLs anymore! [27340] by Campbell

graphicall: EnvMaps are back in Trunk!, with extra features: 32bit float support http://mke3.net/blender/devel/2.5/env_hdr.jpg by Matt Ebb [27405]
Twitter / graphicall - 2010-03-11 08:48:36

graphicall: EnvMaps are back in Trunk!, with extra features: 32bit float support http://mke3.net/blender/devel/2.5/env_hdr.jpg by Matt Ebb [27405]

Working with Shapekey Drivers
Blender Tutorials Downloads Videos & Education - Blender Cookie - 2010-03-11 04:35:11

In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial we will be going over creating shape keys, and then talk on how to apply drivers to the shapekeys so that the armature can control the them. Homework: After completing the video, I noticed that if you rotate the arm beyond a certain point, the shapkeys disappear. I spent a [...]

http://blendercookie.com

ご無沙汰(BlogPet)
CG系blog - 2010-03-11 02:44:09

きのうはご無沙汰するつもりだった？
それでFDTKでエントリは使用♪

*このエントリは、ブログペットの「輪ゴム」が書きました。

Resuming development
OpenFilmmaking - 2010-03-11 02:32:25

Over the past year or so, I have put filmmaking on hold. Part of the reason was a busy life, and part was a badly behaving computer which would overheat and shut down every time I tried to do any sort of CPU-intensive work on it (such as rendering video). I recently built myself a new computer (4 TB of hard drive space baby!) and am starting up again. With Blender 2.5 nearing beta, I will be switching to Python 3 and probably doing a significant rewrite of the entire project. I won’t be focusing as much on using .avs scripts within Blender, since that will be limited to 32-bit Windows.

I will probably start BAAM over from scratch, since the Blender Python API has changed significantly. (This probably affects somewhere near zero people in the entire world.)