Planet Blender

Blender Foundation: Status Update Week 38
Letwory Interactive - 2010-09-26 23:37:00

Just like previous week, I’ve been concentrating on bug fixing. Although we’re doing a lot of work in this area, user keep finding new issues and reporting them! (Which is a good thing of course). I’ve handled over 30 reports to some closed state (duplicate, todo, fixed, rejected), and more I had under my magnifier glass to get backtraces, or more info. Not much exciting info I guess (cool new features), but the numbers show clear progress. Day by day we get closer to the moment that we can say that Blender is stable. Not tomorrow, but who knows, maybe this year

2010.09.20
        2010.09.20: blendix closed 9 issues
        2010.09.20: campbellbarton closed 11 issues
        2010.09.20: jesterking closed 6 issues
        2010.09.20: jhk closed 5 issues
        2010.09.20: broken closed 1 issues
----- total 32 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 12
2010.09.21
        2010.09.21: jesterking closed 6 issues
        2010.09.21: jhk closed 2 issues
        2010.09.21: campbellbarton closed 5 issues
        2010.09.21: zanqdo closed 1 issues
        2010.09.21: blendix closed 3 issues
----- total 17 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 16
2010.09.22
        2010.09.22: campbellbarton closed 12 issues
        2010.09.22: jhk closed 2 issues
        2010.09.22: jesterking closed 15 issues
        2010.09.22: nazgul closed 1 issues
----- total 30 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 18
2010.09.23
        2010.09.23: campbellbarton closed 10 issues
        2010.09.23: jhk closed 2 issues
        2010.09.23: jesterking closed 6 issues
        2010.09.23: blendix closed 9 issues
----- total 27 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 8
2010.09.24
        2010.09.24: jesterking closed 3 issues
        2010.09.24: jhk closed 9 issues
        2010.09.24: campbellbarton closed 4 issues
        2010.09.24: zanqdo closed 1 issues
        2010.09.24: blendix closed 2 issues
----- total 19 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 8
2010.09.25
        2010.09.25: blendix closed 11 issues
        2010.09.25: dingto closed 1 issues
        2010.09.25: campbellbarton closed 1 issues
        2010.09.25: nazgul closed 2 issues
----- total 15 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 14
2010.09.26
        2010.09.26: schlaile closed 1 issues
        2010.09.26: blendix closed 10 issues
        2010.09.26: jesterking closed 1 issues
        2010.09.26: dingto closed 1 issues
----- total 13 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 17

Final TEFL certificate
The lowlander's Weblog - 2010-09-26 15:29:45

Last weekend I went to the Hague, to attend a workshop for the only TEFL module I didn’t have yet, the 20 Hour Classroom TEFL Course AKA weekend TEFL. There were approximately 17 people attending, minus the teacher. It was a fun and creative experience. The people all had very different backgrounds, and different reasons [...]

Yay! The UV Unwrap is Done!
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2010-09-26 11:04:07

OK! I finally got to the end of a UV Unwrap. This is where you take a 3D model and peel it like an orange, so you can paint on the peel (the UV unwrap) and wind it back on. Because my model is a spaceship my UV unwrap doesn’t look much like an orange peel, it looks more like a paper pattern that you could glue together to make a model. In fact if I added tabs to the cut-out sections you could probably do just that, but it’d be a bit fiddly.

So when I open this image in GIMP (GIMP turns it from SVG to JPEG but that seems to be expected) I can paint pretty colours on it and then wrap it back round the model in Blender. This gives the 3D model colours much more controllably than is possible in Blender itself. [I might be wrong about that part, I just found out that Blender has an integrated paint program too - integrated paint program, integrated video editor and of course all the 3D tools, is there anything this amazing open-source application can't do?]

OK so after fooling around in GIMP for a couple of minutes I had a very basic coloured image, just as a test.

I’ve left the lines indicating the shape of the cut-out areas of the spaceship as ghostly shadows so it’s a little more obvious what’s going on in this image. I just turned down the layer they are on in GIMP to achieve this, normally I would turn this layer off entirely before getting GIMP to make a JPEG of course.

And here’s what it looks like if I wrap these simple colours round the spaceship.

And this technique isn’t just useful for colours, I can add shadows, bumps and grooves and lots of other stuff this way. So the next task is to see how good I can get this relatively simple model to look using these techniques, before transferring them to my much more complex 3D spaceship model.

Springtime photos from around town
Aligorith's Lair - 2010-09-26 10:56:00

Tangled
Virgilio Vasconcelos - Animation - 2010-09-26 08:31:08

Amazing character animation in this new Disney's Tangled UK trailer.

[read the full article]