Planet Blender

Weekly update March 2-14
Freestyle integration into Blender - 2010-03-14 23:04:40

During the last two weeks, the dev team was working on support for full sample anti-aliasing.  At the moment, full sample anti-aliasing does not work well with Freestyle.  Strokes are drawn only in one of multiple samples, which results in very faint strokes in the final anti-aliased render.  The full sample anti-aliasing issue has been demanding a considerable [...]

Stumbled Upon – Links Experiment #1
Elvis Alistar's Blog - 2010-03-14 21:38:33

A few weeks ago I discovered StumbleUpon. If you wonder what StumbleUpon is or what it does, then read the following description (directly taken from their website): “StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by [...]

Node!!
CG系blog - 2010-03-14 16:36:09

FDです。

コンポジットノードを使ってちょっと遊んでみました。

Indirect Lighting Tests from Durian!
BlenderNation - 2010-03-14 16:21:11

Durian’s newest member, Pablo (venomgfx) has just posted some jaw dropping “tests” on the production blog. Making full use of indirect lighting, we now know exactly what can be achieved with this much anticipated feature. See more amazing renders at the Durian Blog.

Maya, fix right<>left names
digital janitor - 2010-03-14 14:47:00

If you are a good boy and name your rigs as you should, you will have names like

arm_upper_L
arm_lower_L
etc.

If you mirror copy these you will have names as

arm_upper_L1
arm_lower_L1
etc.

Below is a script which will fix those 'issues' and switch a 'L1' to 'R' and 'R1' to 'L'.

With pymel installed:

import pymel.core as pm
oSel = pm.ls(sl=True)
for item in oSel:
    if item.endswith('L1'):
        new_name = item.replace('L1', 'R')
        pm.rename(item, new_name)
    if item.endswith('R1'):
        new_name = item.replace('R1', 'L')
        pm.rename(item, new_name)

Default maya python:

import maya.cmds as c
oSel = c.ls(sl=True)
for item in oSel:
    if item.endswith('L1'):
        new_name = item.replace('L1', 'R')
        c.rename(item, new_name)
    if item.endswith('R1'):
        new_name = item.replace('R1', 'L')
        c.rename(item, new_name)

Stilliskaba #39 – “Sampo”
#blender.fi - 2010-03-14 13:17:28

Wenya voitti skaba #38:n suvereenisti! Onnittelut! Wenyan päätöksestä seuraavan skaban aihe on “Sampo”. Poikkeuksellisesti aikaa on nyt kaksi viikkoa, koska kenelläkään ei tunnu olevan aikaa tehdä entryä viikossa. Jotenka, katsotaan josko nyt onnistaisi paremmin. Eli deadline on siis sunnuntaina 28.3.2010 klo 2400.

Skabathreadi löytyy täältä.

Maya, pymel
digital janitor - 2010-03-14 09:50:00

I really like pymel...

Find parameters that you can animate:

from pymel.core import *
anim = listAnimatable('pCube1')
for anim_item in anim:
    print anim_item

Find out the translation of the object:

from pymel.core import *
print xform('pCube1', translation=True, q=True)

Change the translation of the object:

from pymel.core import *
print xform('pCube1', translation=(5.0, 5.0, 5.0))

Sintel’s Cabin, featuring Indirect Lighting!
Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-03-14 09:41:27

Yo! Pablo (venomgfx) here, on my debut as Durian Blogposter (sounds cool uh? :D )

The past week was awesome!, not only because it was my first one here , but also because David came all the way from Toulouse, to help out, and he was a huge help.

Even though its not finished, blogposting wont hurt (hope so!).

On this scene, my work was supposed to be design-model, then light/compo this shot, but since this was my first week, I’ve been told “No need to be completely productive the first few weeks”, great! relief.. so I took some time to learn the workflow and pipeline here, luckily is really similar to how I use to work before and on my personal projects nowadays.

So, Monday was mostly settling down and playing with the file I found first, which was pure proxies (top-left frame on the screenshot >> ), needed to design! but luckily for me that day David arrived, so I quickly set up basic lighting on a file Soenke worked before (adding the stuff shown at the top-right frame on the screenie), for Tuesday I got a *beautifully* made paint-over my render, even in 2 flavors! sort-of-day, and night.

Then Wednesday went about modeling all the small details everywhere, with such a great reference this task was relatively easy, just a matter of time..

Thursday!, until this day I used Approximate Ambient Occlusion’s Indirect Lighting for this scene, which gave me nice results overall, I felt I was in the right path, probably would need a lot more tweakings for faking stuff (bounces, shadows mostly), until I saw some experiments Soenke was doing with Raytraced IL, “wow! gotta try that!” <- along with a O.O’ face, OK render times went up a bit, but the results (and less work on fine tuning/faking stuff) deserved it.

Below is the render with Raytracing IL and Approximate respectively, not really fair comparison though since the Raytraced one has some minor changes to lights , basically because the bouncing was too strong making everything too bright, this also demanded some changes to the materials.. so I spent most of Thursday on tweaking the shading/lighting, some modeling as well but not as much as was needed.

It’s Friday! (..I’m in love! ♪, recalling The Cure, but actually I had a crush on Indirect Lighting )

Was time for my first weekly! and to show what I’ve been working on the whole week, even when I think I could have done much more this week, I also believe I learned a *lot*, specially on the rendering side, it’s been very productive to me and I’m glad I still have a week more scheduled for this scene, so I can catch up with what I have left to do (more models/cloth!), and also because that scene is not only a bed/wood/medievalish stuff, characters are missing in there!

Before wrapping up I want you to see a small screenshot that shows how much magic goes behind Indirect Lighting, on the left is the setup showing I only used 1 Spot lamp for the “Sun”, then a Halo light for the beam light, and the rest is all bouncing (plus a big blue emitting material plane as sky), at the right is sort of how the light bounces to lit the scene , a whole new world for me at lighting, love it!

Ouch already Sunday morning here :/ gotta get some sleep to kickoff the week tomorrow.

That’s all folks!
Pablo

Twitter: 2010-03-14
mke3.net - Matt Ebb - lighting/shading/td/code - 2010-03-14 03:31:00

• @kat_lu i have a name, you know! in reply to kat_lu #
• crap.. wondering why a b/w scan would have chromatic aberration. Turns out it's my new glasses lenses :/ must keep subject in center of FOV #
• "Cycles" by cyriak http://bit.ly/9oHxfB #
• got back 12 rolls of processed 120 on wednesday, time to kick off a bit of the scanning before work #
• fluid dynamics anyone? // RT @DrRachie: Cyanobacterial bloom in the Baltic Sea, photo taken from space http://bit.ly/akRv8C #
• @yamyam_blender where are you hiding? http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattebb/4420312051/ #
• @SkepticZone A whole aisle of magnetic bracelets in Tokyo Narita airport – nice prices too http://mke3.net/rt/magnet_bracelets_tokyo.jpg #

Working with Blender, Gimp and Inkscape in OSX. Part I
tube - 2010-03-14 01:27:03

Official web: http://www.gimp.org
Unofficial buils for OSX: http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/Download.html

The main issue with Gimp is related with the gtk port which even when it’s very good, still has somethings in development that you have to solve manually. For Example:

Ugly, big and too light gtk theme:

How to solve it? Get this file -> ProApp_Small.tar and unzip it into your personal gimp folder:

OSX: /Users/……/Library/Application Support/Gimp/Themes/
UNIX: /home/……/.gimp-2.x/themes/
WIN: C:\Documents and Settings\……\.gimp-2.x\themes\

This theme came as default in the Gimp Build for OSX, but it has been modified by me to get tiny icons, less space between the elements, less padding, less margin and more tweaks.

If you want to install the theme for all the users just unzip the file into:

OSX: /Applications/Gimp.App/Contents/Resources/share/gimp/2.0/themes/
UNIX: /usr/share/gimp/2.x/themes/
WIN: C:\Program Files\gimp-2.x\bin\share\gimp\2.0\themes\

Basic Brushes and tools presets?

As default gimp doesn’t came with nice brushes so maybe you’ll want the GPS add-on for it, you can get it from here , it “provides an adequate working environment for graphic designers and artists to begin to paint and feel comfortable with GIMP”.

Problem with the window focus.

You will find that you need to click twice on each GIMP window to bring focus to the window first before you can do anything. That’s REALLY annoying. But you can fix that! Just open the OSX Terminal and type this command (Close Gimp and X11 before starting!) :

For MacOS 10.4 Tiger and MacOS 10.5 Leopard:

> defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm -bool false
> defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_click_through -bool true

For MacOS 10.5 Leopard with updates from XQuartz:

> defaults write org.x.x11 FocusFollowsMouse -string YES
> defaults write org.x.X11 wm_ffm -bool false
> defaults write org.x.X11 wm_click_through -bool true

If you are not sure what version you have installed just try both ways.

Is your Gimp Toolbox full of useless icons?! do you need wilber on the top of it? I don’t!

To remove wilber just edit your gimprc file and add this in a new line
(toolbox-wilber no)

You can find the gimprc file in your personal gimp folder (just the same as before!)

To remove useless buttons from your toolbox edit the toolrc file and add change the value from YES to NO for example:

(GimpToolInfo “gimp-iscissors-tool”
(stock-id “gimp-tool-iscissors”)
(visible no))

(GimpToolInfo “gimp-foreground-select-tool”
(stock-id “gimp-tool-foreground-select”)
(visible no))