Planet Blender

Working with Blender, Gimp and Inkscape in OSX. Part II
tube - 2010-03-16 16:50:35

Official website: http://www.inkscape.org

The main issue with Inkscape is the ugly theme that came by default. There’s no too much tweaks needed for Inkscape but at least we can get almost the same look and feel of gimp — a dark and tiny theme which is Very Fine and don’t make you feel uncomfortable to use it on OSX. As in the Gimp post, all these things also work in Linux and Windows so maybe you should give a try to these kind of hacks!

Ugly, big and too light gtk theme:

Well, as I said recently, you cannot install a theme in Inkscape, But if you do the following you can get a nice and dark theme! Get this file -> Clearlooks-Quicksilver-OSX and unzip it, into a new folder called themes, into the Inkscape App folder:

OSX: /Applications/inkscape.App/Contents/Resources/themes/

Tired of old school icons? Let’s Tango-fy Inkscape!

I don’t know why new releases of Inkscape still coming with that oId school icons. I don’t know what do you think, but I don’t like it :/ So there are good news! You can change the icon theme. It’s very simple, and I found 2 themes to install, both based on Tango guidelines. Just get the file, unzip it into the icons folder of the Inkscape App Folder, and rename the file to “icons.svg” . If you don’t want to lose your old scheme of icons, just rename the original to something like “old_icons.svg”!

icons_original.svg – Original set
icons_tango.svg – Tango Style
icons_tango_colors.svg – Tango Color style

Change the shortcuts

Inkscape came with a lot of presets for shortcuts keys based on the most popular vector editing software like Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator or Freehand so you can set as default just changing the file to “default.xml”. You can find the folder here:

One more for gimp!

Is very easy in gimp to change the shortcuts to make your work more fast and dinamic. But what if you came from Photoshop and you want to switch to Gimp without suffer too much? Well , one thing that you can do is look at for the ps-menurc file and rename to menurc (remember: if you dont want to lose the original settings please rename the original menurc to something like menurc-gimp) You can find the file in this path:

Well i hope this kind of things will helpfull for you! Thanks for the comments, and stay in touch for more post!

Maintaining bone volume, a new constraint
harkyman.com - 2010-03-16 13:14:18

Under the Transform section of the Add Constraint menu is a new one called Maintain Volume.

I developed the constraint (which is extremely simple) to help with adding squash and stretch to characters. There are a number of ways to do this already, but as I’m not the world’s greatest rigger and don’t have a lot of patience for layering several tiers of controls on top of each other, I wanted an easier way. First, I tried doing it with Drivers. I figured that if I could drive the X and Z scale of a bone as a function of its Y scale that would do the trick (the equation btw is: X (or Z) scale equals the square root of the constant volume divided by the Y scale). Unfortunately, Blender didn’t like this and considered it a cyclic dependency. So, I moved on to using the Transform constraint.

Another user (mtracer) said that he’d done just such a thing with the Transform constraint, and it seems like that’s the case. I just couldn’t get it to work. I find those types of value-mapping interfaces horrible to deal with. I could have tried to do this with a PyConstraint, and in fact something like this was done by Cessen in Big Buck Bunny. Unfortunately, I’ve never done a PyConstraint before and didn’t feel like learning the new API for what should be a relatively simple effect.

So, I was at the point where most users find themselves. Yes, I could have brute-forced any of the previous four solutions (complex rig, drivers, transform constraint, py constraint). However, that doesn’t solve the problem for everyone else. We can’t expect people to be programmers just to use the software. So, I did the easiest thing for me, which was to add a constraint. You can see the effect below:

Blender 2.5 “Maintain Volume” constraint from Roland Hess on Vimeo.

It’s in trunk, so update, compile and have fun!

Blender on the BBC
BlenderNation - 2010-03-16 12:00:53

Producer/Director Nathan Williams informs us that his latest BBC documentary, Battle for North America, used Blender for all it’s graphics! Nathan writes: I’m a producer director who also uses Blender. I’ve recently made a history documentary about the Battle of Quebec [...]; all of the graphics in the programme were created with Blender – half by me and half by [...]

Mercator Project en un libro !
malefico's spot - 2010-03-16 11:33:55

Dentro de unos pocos meses saldrá a la venta “Digital Movie Making” un libro que hemos escrito junto con Tony Mullen, el reconocido autor de “Introducing Character Animation with Blender“. El libro en inglés, estará disponible en Mayo de 2010 aproximadamente, pero ya puede reservarse en Amazon. Luego del lanzamiento nos pondremos a la caza [...]

Two Blender Workshops. Barcelona, spring 2010
BlenderNation - 2010-03-16 06:00:32

Two new Blender workshops in Barcelona! Raimon wrote: I’m happy to notify that this spring is plenty of Blender Workshops in Barcelona, at least the ones with myself as the teacher ;-) Specific information is in my blog and there is a translation engine, so even if you don’t know catalan, you can have some idea about [...]

Tip: Using Multiple Background Images in 2.5
Blender Tutorials Downloads Videos & Education - Blender Cookie - 2010-03-16 04:09:57

In this quick Blender 2.5 video tip tutorial we demonstrate how to use multiple background images. This feature is very useful and allows for layering images in the viewport and assigning separate images to specific viewing angles. Without the need for multiple viewports.

http://blendercookie.com

The day Durian/Sintel reaches 1 million youtube/vimeo viewer
Oenvoyage's Blender Blog - 2010-03-16 01:12:00

While trying to sleep in the bus and having so many things going through mind I started asking myself: is Durian going to be successfull ( i do believe it) and so when is it going to reach the million viewer