Planet Blender

Image Re-Projection
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-03-06 23:41:54

Its been a while since we had a development post and while we’re always busy with blender much of it is work in progress.
Most of my time is spent on physics and bug fixes at the moment but seeing as it was my birthday on Friday, I took some time to work on something more fun . Enjoy!
- Campbell

Update:

• Image editor can be selected in the user preferences ‘File’ section.
• Save as PNG rather then TARGA to workaround reported problem with adobe photoshop not saving alpha.
• Render to an off-screen buffer rather then grabbing the view, removes view text and allows images editing images bigger then the view.
• Added option to capture high resolution images rather then using the viewport size.

Fixed, I got my new Wacom Bamboo Pen, 056a 00d4, CTL 460 working, in Ubuntu.
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2010-03-06 22:00:03

It has been a long, terrible and unhappy time with my beautiful friendly little graphics tablet refusing to work, and it’s great to have it back.

My problems all started when my Windows machine died.
My graphics tablet, of course, has a Windows driver that came with it on a disk. It wasn’t perfect and I would have to hunt out the CD Rom to reinstall the driver every single time I switched off the computer, but it worked, mostly. But with that computer dead, that wasn’t an option.
I was saved, and reconnected to the information super-highway by a very kind friend. They gave me a laptop that had had its insides wiped after a virus attack, all that was left on it was the Bios, the short program that lives on a chip inside somewhere and tells it how to boot up.
But unfortunately I couldn’t just put XP on this new machine without paying a lot of money.

I did know that there was an alternative that wouldn’t cost any money though, drum roll… Linux… screams of terror.
Linux has a reputation of being a bit tricky, a reputation that you have to be an absolute nerd to get anywhere with it, and as far as my experiences went, this reputation seems to be absolutely deserved.

I installed Puppy Linux, that makes it sound too easy though, what I actually did was trash my computer’s long-suffering hard disk about twenty times trying to make the right partitions before Puppy Linux finally installed.

I installed Puppy Linux, but my cool little Bamboo graphics tablet wouldn’t work, it’s a new one and the drivers have only just been written. I moved from one version of Linux to another, Linux people call the different versions distros, looking for one that contained the drivers that would get my graphics pad working. In the end I tried Puppy Linux, Open Suse, Slitaz, Slax and Mandriva without any luck. Yesterday I installed Ubuntu and everything clicked into place. I found a forum thread where a giant team of people were working on getting these new Wacom Graphics tablets working with Linux, and after following the instructions in this great and easy to follow post my Bamboo Pen tablet simply sprung to life.

I’m so happy I can hardly even think straight.

The Producer’s Report #106 Reel 10 Rocks!
Phil McCoy's Posts - Project London - 2010-03-06 18:30:00

Today we watched the whole ending reel again with everything laid in there including the new animated closing scene (see frame above). It was beautiful. Then we talked about our plans for picture lock. Ian is going to go through the entire film on Monday and prepare it for the producer review. From there we plan to show it to a select group to confirm that the story works and that this is the film we are going to release for sound design. It's very exciting.

The new voice-over work for the animated open and close has been laid in and it is epic fun. Wayne Bastrup (Mr. Richards) is working out the details to send his lines to us from LA soon.

---

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

---

This week’s recommendations:

• Ian: "Cover it with duct tape."
• Jen: "Big Bang Theory" Where else can you see "rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock" explained?
  
• Nate: "Branson Anderson” for awesomeness.
  
• Phil: "Keep a tissue handy when your nose is runny."
  

Cheers,

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

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My New Portfolio
Reyn's Blog - 2010-03-06 16:58:00

Just finished setting up my online portfolio. Thanks, DA! ^_^ http://www.reynante.daportfolio.com

Things I've been doing lately
DustyCloud Brainstorms - 2010-03-06 14:23:00

I've actually been writing quite a lot and doing some rather interesting things. Unfortunately, I haven't really found much time to update here, so here's a brief recap of stuff:

• I've done some blogging over on the Creative Commons Labs blog. I plan to do more soon, but for now there's a post called Understanding the State of Sanity via Whiteboards and Ascii Art and CC.Engine and Web Non-Frameworks.

• I've participated in the PyCon video recording crew again.

• I've given a number of talks at ChiPy, but the only one I am going to bother linking to is this this talk on Git and GitPython.

• I suggested that the Durian Project should run a sprint (I'm credited as "cwebb" in that post). They did, and it was a stellar success, by their own words. Sadly, I was recording video at PyCon and was thus unable to participate. I'd like to write more about why this is significant soon beyond what is immediately obvious... hopefully I'll find some time.

• I've been coding a whole bunch of things. One of the things maybe that I'll get up soon is a simple cgit-like git web interface called wsgit. Although, Will has been working on that more recently than I have, because he's awesome. (He's also been working on curating Python Miro Community... have you seen that?) I've been working on a number of other smaller wsgi applications that hopefully I can better announce (and get to a publicly usable state) soon.

• I've been hanging out at Pumping Station One, local Chicago hackerspace.

• I won a weekend challenge on the BlenderArtists forums.

As for that last one, there's no "real" prize for winning a Blender weekend challenge other than suggesting the title of the next contest, but this may be one of the thing I am most proud of anyway, because I think the final product came out really well. It is the first piece I've finished in Blender that I feel really happy with. More importantly, I redid the piece a bit after the contest. We got it printed and Morgan framed it, and we gave it to my father for Christmas. This was important to me, as my father is the one who got me interested in cartooning and animation at an early age in the first place.

There's an even much bigger thing I've been working on that's almost ready for public viewing and consumption, but it's not ready for viewing yet. But I promise I'll blog here when it is instead of waiting for an overwhelming blogpost. :)

In the meanwhile, my identi.ca account is where it's at.

Applying a Decal in Blender 2.5 Alpha 1
BlenderNation - 2010-03-06 12:27:20

I had a question yesterday about adding a decal to a mesh for my project, and David Ward came to my rescue by recording this excellent little tutorial on UV mapping an image onto a Suzanne in Blender 2.51!