Planet Blender

#blender-club on deviantART.com
BlenderNation - 2010-03-13 19:12:58

Dread Knight (founder of Freezing Moon Foundation,) has recently started a group on deviantART that has become quite popular.  And the good news is that the group is dedicated only to our beloved Blender!Dread Knight writes: Feel free to Watch #blender-club or even showcase your best artwork to the rest of the community. Hope to [...]

The Producer’s Report #107 - Oceanic Exploration is a Great Idea!
Phil McCoy's Posts - Project London - 2010-03-13 18:30:00

Today, Ian delivered the movie for Nate and I to review. We are really excited to see this because we know this version of the film is completely head and shoulders above the versions we have looked at to this point. You probably know that the story is found three times through the process of making a film... when the story is written, during production, and then again in post. For the first time we are going to see the entire story, from end to end, with the VFX cut to Ian's vision for Project London. Can't wait.

Also, Bob Forward is one of our favorite people, he created many of the explosion, atmospheric and blood splatter effects that we used in the film.

Marc Studer is another one of our favorite people. He shot the photo of us (above) and many other amazing images that we plan to use to market the film.

---

Priority One: Recruiting a sound design team. Interested? Contact Phil McCoy at phil@projectlondonmovie.com.

The Sound Design Team (so far, we need more help!):
Justin Faylona
Bob Forward

---

This week’s recommendations:

• Ian: "Oceanic Exploration"
• Nate: "Plastic Jesus” cuz, I don't care if it rains or freezes.
  
• Phil: "Spend less than you earn."
  

Cheers,

Phil McCoy, Executive Producer
on behalf of Nathan McCoy (left), also Executive Producer and Phil McCoy (right)

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GIMP Tutorial section gets a makeover
Starbright Illustrations - 2010-03-13 16:11:51

Rigging a Pupil for Dilation
Blender Tutorials Downloads Videos & Education - Blender Cookie - 2010-03-13 14:01:21

In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial we show you how to use driven shape-keys to dilate the pupil of an eye. The tutorial also demonstrates how to use custom bone shapes and limiting the transformation of a bone via constraints. Note: this tutorial uses the official Blender 2.5 Alpha 2 release. Support the site [...]

http://blendercookie.com

Maya, creating your own libs for reuse
digital janitor - 2010-03-13 09:41:00

[edit] problems with the script is now fixed. All I needed to do was to bring the family and we hade a nice day at the swimming pool [/edit]

So you have created thousands of tiny scripts that you use. And finally you decide you need to sort them and figure out how to do that and reuse a lot of the stuff you made.

Step one,

We will create a file which we import everything from. In my case I will call this file "sanders3d_tools.py". And I will place this in my maya script folder.

ex
linux
/home/sanders/maya/2011_x64/scripts/sanders3d_tools.py
osx
/Users/sanders/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/2011-x64/scripts

Since maya will be able to find these files we can use them and import them in other situations. So as a simple test we will add something into the file

#filename: sanders3d_tools.py
import os
import platform

def say_my_name():
    if platform.system == 'Windows':
        print os.environ['USERNAME']
    else:
        print os.environ['USER']

#end file

Save the file and restart maya (I think that is necessary). Now in the maya script editor you can type this

import sanders3d_tools as st
st.say_my_name()

Select the two rows and press CTRL-ENTER, in my case it will report back "sanders".



So now we can perhaps use two two other scripts that I made. But now we also need to make sure we import libs that are required by the other scrips. And we need to create new defenitions for each 'tool'.

#filename: sanders3d_tools.py
import os
import platform
import datetime
import maya.cmds as cmds
import sys

#create a random number


# prints out the username
def say_my_name():
 if platform.system == 'Windows':
  print os.environ['USERNAME']
 else:
  print os.environ['USER']

#rename the parent based on the child name
def rename_parent(oSel):
 if len(oSel) > 1:
  for i in range(len(oSel)):
   print oSel[i]
   parent = cmds.listRelatives( oSel[i], p=True)
   cmds.rename(parent[0], "%s_ZERO" % oSel[i])
 else:
  parent = cmds.listRelatives( oSel[0], p=True)
  cmds.rename(parent[0], "%s_ZERO" % oSel[0])

#create a basic controller
def create_controller():
 rname = str(datetime.datetime.now()).split('.')
 cmds.spaceLocator(n='null_%s_zero' % rname[1])
 cmds.circle(n='circle_%s_ctrl' % rname[1], ch=False)
 cmds.setAttr( "%s.rotateY" % ('circle_%s_ctrl' % rname[1]), 90)
 cmds.makeIdentity('circle_%s_ctrl' % rname[1], apply=True, t=0, r=1, s=0, n=0 )
 cmds.parent('circle_%s_ctrl' % rname[1], 'null_%s_zero' % rname[1])
 return 'null_%s_zero' % rname[1]

# reset the object
def reset_object(obj):
 channels = ['X', 'Y', 'Z']
 for channel in channels:
  cmds.setAttr( "%s.translate%s" % (obj, channel), 0 )
  cmds.setAttr( "%s.rotate%s" % (obj, channel), 0 )
  cmds.setAttr( "%s.scale%s" % (obj, channel), 1 )

# create a basic controller on the selected object
def create_controller_on_object(oSel):
 if len(oSel) == 1:
  parent = oSel[0]
  child = create_controller()
  cmds.parent(child, parent)
  reset_object(child)
  cmds.parent(child, w=True)   
 else:
  print "YOU CAN ONLY HAVE ONE OBJECT SELECTED"

# align objects     
def align_objects(oSel):     
 if len(oSel) == 2:
  child = oSel[0]
  parent = oSel[1]
  cmds.parent(child, parent)
  channels = ['X', 'Y', 'Z']
  reset_object(child)
  cmds.parent(child, w=True)   
 else:
  print "YOU CAN ONLY HAVE TWO OBJECT SELECTED"

so now we have lots of commands we can use.

say_my_name: will print the user name
rename_parent: will rename the parent based on the child name
create_controller: will create a simple controller
create_controller_on_object: will create a simple controller on the object
align_objects: will align two objects.

So now we can create some shelf buttons. (drag each of these to your shelf)

#button one
import sanders3d_tools as st
st.create_controller()

#button two
import sanders3d_tools as st
import maya.cmds as cmds
oSel = cmds.ls(sl=True)
st.create_controller_on_object(oSel)

#button three
import sanders3d_tools as st
import maya.cmds as cmds
oSel = cmds.ls(sl=True)
st.rename_parent(oSel)

#button four
import sanders3d_tools as st
import maya.cmds as cmds
oSel = cmds.ls(sl=True)
st.align_objects(oSel)

I hope this will help some of you on the way to a better organized scripting world.

Video demonstration

Demonstrations of the simple python tools from Stefan Andersson on Vimeo.

Gravity
Reyn's Blog - 2010-03-13 03:44:00

Hi! Here's another quick test I did with Blender 2.49b's particle system.  Hope you all like it.  In my upcoming Blender article at Packt Pub, I'll elaborate  the procedure I did to achieving this (if you haven't figured out yet how). ^_^Here's the video:

Currently no posts
Tony Mullen's Amazon Blog - 2010-03-13 00:00:49

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