Planet Blender

Ogg Theora vid of 3D spaceship model development
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2010-08-31 16:21:03

My enthusiasm for all things open source and free is now expanding to include video codecs. Whenever I have generated a video of my 3D work in the past I have saved it as a mov file to be played by a Quicktime plugin, but now I’ve gone ogg instead.

Making my ogg file proved pretty easy, but embedding it into this web page was a beast. Wordpress uploaded my file but then insisted it was an audio file and refused to play it! I did get my video embedded of course but this nice informative article explains why the video codec situation is so confused making what should be a simple task such a pain. And this page has a great explanation and example of an ogg Theora player for embed. ogg video embed
Embedding it was actually easy once I had found this link.

It seems the whole problem is that the giant mega-corps behind the two proprietary browsers that most people have heard of, Explorer and Safari, are not keen on using a video standard that anyone can play with and use for free, with no restrictions. They would prefer people to carry on using avi, mp4 and mov instead for their films.
Luckily Mozilla, the people behind Firefox, are more enlightened. Using ogg exclusively on my site means that someone surfing with Explorer or Safari is going to get an annoying little “your browser can not handle HTML5″ message, but I don’t see a way round this. I’m no longer going to prop up this crazy system of video standards where people are forced to pay royalties to write players that can actually play these ring-fenced video standards, and don’t get me started about flash. The sooner that dead end shrivels up and blows away the better.

Anyway the video I’ve made is just a series of slides showing the evolution of the model to date. As you can see it’s gone through a lot of changes. You can read more at the dedicated 3D spaceship model page with the latest renders and the latest blend file to download.

TRICKLE n.3 Il mio primo post
Trickle Project - 2010-08-31 16:07:49

Ciao mi chiamo Guido, sono un giovane 3D artist che da grande vorrebbe fare l’animatore. Da un paio di mesi sono entrato a far parte della SparkDE con l’obiettivo di trasformare la mia passione in un lavoro vero e proprio! Francesco mi ha proposto di entrare nel team della terza edizione del trickle project come [...]

Conquering the wobbles - cosc atrium after dark
Aligorith's Lair - 2010-08-31 12:33:00

Blender Foundations follow up…
harkyman.com - 2010-08-31 12:22:21

The book has been very well received, and I want to thank those of you who contacted me personally about it. Much appreciated. I see this morning that Amazon only has two left in stock (more on the way). Wow! Never thought I’d do something that would “sell out.”

On a down note, it seems that the Focal editorial team (who are generally superb) missed one edit I had given them. If you run across it (and you will), here’s the fix:

In Chapter 4, when we work through modeling a chair, I had indicated to them to remove the instructions on using the Bridge Faces tool and provided new instructions for doing it “by hand.” They added the “by hand” section, but didn’t remove the other. So, when you come to the bit about “bridge faces,” just skip the rest of that paragraph and move onto the next one. Sorry about that. Hope you didn’t give up on Blender in frustration when you hit that part.

And please remember, if you’re stuck, have a question, etc., you can email me at the address found in the book. I almost always respond the same day, and really do love hearing from people who are using the book.

Cheers!

Getting started: Python scripting in Blender 2.5 on Linux
goplexian.com - 2010-08-31 11:39:00

First, on Linux for Blender to launch properly it must be set to launch from a terminal or console window.

The reason for this is because the output from Blender scripts is displayed in the console window which Blender was launched from, so if you just click an icon to launch Blender then you need to right click that icon and change it so that it launches blender from a terminal. In Gnome this is easy just right click the icon and go to properties, this will open up the "Launcher Properties" window and then set the Type to "Application in Terminal" instead of the default which is just "Application".

Here is a screenshot of the the Gnome Launcher Properties window and how things need to look to launch Blender properly on Linux.



Second, if you want to do Blender scripting you should really get your head wrapped around the Python language itself first. You don't need to be a Python master, but you need to at least understand the basics.

So if you don't know any Python or just don't feel confident about what you do know, then my advice is stop reading this and go do some Python lessons first. A good place to start is Zed Shaw's Python primer entitled "Learning Python the Hard Way" it is short and well written and will probably make you a bit uncomfortable but in the end you will come away with a good understanding of what Python is and how it works.

Zed is a bit of a genius slash screwball but he takes the right approach more often than not and "Learning Python the Hard Way" is as a result a great book for beginners.  For any who might be Zeds' fan's, the screwball remark was just a joke, I've met Zed and he is a very nice fellow, over nine feet tall, shoots fireballs out of his arse. ;)

Now you may hear some people say that you don't need to know Python to start scripting in Blender, and I suppose to a certain extent that might be somewhat true, but it really depends upon how limited your goals are. If you just want to figure out how to copy and paste a script which someone else wrote then I suppose you don't need to understand Python, but if you want to understand how a script works and possibly modify it, or improve it, then you will need to know Python and that is all there is to it.

So go learn some Python, it's good for you.

Now in line with Zeds recommended practice of writing scripts out by hand and then figuring out what they do by running them head on over to the Blender Artists Forum and check out this thread by Crouch he goes over 15 different Blender 2.5 scripts, write out each one of them by hand and then run them yourself in Blender.

If you get stuck, or you are unsure of what a particular method does then just look it up in the Blender 2.5 Python API Documentation, if you still can't figure out how it works then maybe just skip it and move on to the next script, but make a note to come back and look at it again in a few weeks and see if it makes more sense.

You should also look at the Blender 2.5 Python API Introduction it briefly goes over all the basics of how the API works and what each of the major components does.

I hope you find this to be a useful introduction to scripting in Blender and I hope you take my advice about studying Python. Blender and Python are a powerful combination, and the only thing holding you back from harnessing that power is yourself.

Getting started: Python scripting in Blender 2.5 on Linux
goplexian.com - 2010-08-31 11:39:00

First, on Linux for Blender to launch properly it must be set to launch from a terminal or console window. The reason for this is because the output from Blender scripts is displayed in the console window which Blender was launched from, so if you just click an icon to launch Blender then you need to right click that icon and change it so that it launches blender from a terminal. In Gnome this is easy just right click the icon and go to properties, this will open up the...

Go Blogger!
Aligorith's Lair - 2010-08-31 11:08:00

Remake – Version 0.2
Morevna Project - 2010-08-31 10:12:58

I am proud to announce new version of “Remake” – unified build system for animation projects. It’s purpose to automatically track changes in your project files and update rendered footage.

Download remake-0.2.tar.gz

What’s new:

• Support for the Blender 2.5x.
• New “-t” option to run multiple jobs in parallel when rendering footage.
• New “snapshot” feature – you can save the current rendering as video file to track your “work in progress” changes. This feature is especially useful when your project is under version control. See manual page for more information.

See also:

• About Remake
• Tutorial

New transform widgets for Naali
Letwory Interactive - 2010-08-31 08:31:09

In my work on the manipulators of Naali I found the code doing weird reorientations and scalings to have them look ok on screen. This made the code needlessly complex. I looked at the original .blend file and found a number of issues with the models.

Firstly, the object axis is misaligned. When you’re modelling with Blender for realXtend and Naali, you should make sure that object axis is aligned with world axis. This is true for widgets and objects that need to be aligned with the world axis of realXtend and Naali, which happen to be the same as Blender. Secondly, the widgets were scaled in code to be of a different size. Instead I now model them on correct scale right away. Thirdly, the widgets had more complex geometry and lastly, there were a lot of redundant materials lying around, so it was easy to pick out wrong materials instead of using those that should’ve been used.

After addressing all these issues I also could remove and simplify much of the code for initialising and basic handling of the manipulators (high-lighting, axis determination). Work continues in perfecting these for proper usage, with upcoming rulers to guide users with their transforms.

To conclude, here are the current widgets:

Blendm3, StarCraft 2 models importer
BlenderNation - 2010-08-31 08:12:42

Blendm3 is a Blender plugin to work with StarCraft 2′s m3 files being developed by Alexander Stante. While animation and exporting aren’t yet supported, they are already in their...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Creature Head Retopology and Normal Mapping
Blender Cookie - 2010-08-31 00:42:11

In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial we retopologize a high-resolution, sculpted creature head to create a low-resolution version suitable for rendering and/or a realtime envrionment. We also go on to bake out a normal map from the high-resolution model to the low-resolution. Support the site – Download includes: High resolution .mov Video .blend file

http://blendercookie.com