Planet Blender

v2-beta4 'Turning Pages'

... where Blenderheads live. Aggregate of blogs by Blenderheads
  • Blender Feature: Using the Spin Tool
    Blender Cookie - 2012-01-11 23:48:31

    blender_feature_spin_tool_feature

    In this quick video tutorial for Blender 2.6 we take you through using the mesh modeling Spin tool. This feature makes it very easy to model things like cups, bottles or anything else with a cylindrical profile. It also allows you to duplicate objects in a circular pattern.

  • Cycles Roadmap
    BlenderNation - 2012-01-11 19:53:58

    Brecht van Lommel explains his targets for Cycles development and shares his planning. Brecht writes: Now that Cycles is in a Blender release, the next step is to extend it further and improve...

    [read the full article on blendernation.com]


  • Cycles Roadmap
    Blender CodeBlender Code | Blender Code - 2012-01-11 15:52:22

    cycles_roadmap_featured

    Now that Cycles is in a Blender release, the next step is to extend it further and improve performance. Remember that Cycles is intended to be a render engine for individuals / small studios, aimed primarily at rendering animations, and this goal is what we evaluate priorities of features by.

    For the next few months, the main priorities are:

    • Render layers, passes, full sample, compositing layer, ..
    • Performance improvements / noise reduction for typical two bounce animation scenes
    • Some smaller things for completeness (blender integration stuff, ramps, multi GPU, ..)

    After that, we should get to some more exciting features, which ones are a bit unclear, but this will be influenced by project Mango. Volume rendering and motion blur seem like good candidates, but we’ll see. Performance work will be ongoing during Mango of course, and we see that quite broadly, it’s about low level performance tuning, better algorithms and better user control.

    Beyond that, there is a feature list which contains roughly what we’d like to see added over the next 2 years.

    Contributing

    If you’re a developer and would like to help out, you can look in these places:

    If you need more details about how features should work, how to implement things or just to announce that you’re working on something, contact the bf-cycles mailing list. Another way to help is to improve our documentation in the manual.

    Not Priorities

    There are some things obviously missing that people would like to see added. Bidirectional path tracing, photon mapping, MLT and similar algorithm are not a priority for me, since we do not believe they are the main possible performance improvements for animation frames. Shading language support, resumable rendering, is another one that we do not think should get very high priority.

    GPU Rendering

    Lastly, GPU rendering can be somewhat of a bottleneck to development. It seems that with older cards and current OpenCL support in the drivers, we’d have to considerably complicate the code to get Cycles working fully, to the point where it would be too hard to add new features. This also means we’re dependent on improving driver implementations or language features. We’ll keep track of this, but also can’t justify spending too much time on this, to try to work around issues with every possible card / driver combination.

  • Changes to Python Matrices for Blender 2.62
    BlenderNation - 2012-01-11 14:00:39

    Andrew Hale describes changes that were recently made to the way Python handles matrices. Andrew Hale writes: For quite some time Blender has received complaints from people acquainted with matrix...

    [read the full article on blendernation.com]


  • Twilight...
    Aligorith's Lair - 2012-01-11 12:04:00



    Read more »
  • Suicidal Light Bulbs and Stubborn Bees
    Aligorith's Lair - 2012-01-11 11:40:00

    Wow! Tonight the light bulb over the dining table just popped out of its fitting without any provocation beforehand, shattering just beside a loaf of bread on the table, and spreading shards of glass everywhere.

    Barely minutes earlier, I had just finished having a tasty sandwich (strawberry jam + tasty cheese... mmm...) for a bit of a late night snack (why does everything taste better at this hour?), and had been sitting there at the table, with the light turned on.

    Read more »
  • PyGtk TIp - Spin Buttons and Misbehaving Arrows
    Aligorith's Lair - 2012-01-11 10:57:00

    Just a quick tip for something that I finally found the answer to after searching fruitlessly for for a while.

    If for whatever reason the arrow buttons aren't behaving - as in, they won't do anything when you click on them normally, but will start zooming off increasingly fast when click+holding them - then you need to set "step_increment" on its "adjustment" object (a value of 1.0 for this serves most purposes well).

    For all the failings (IMO) of Gtk, at least the "adjustment" object design is an example of one thing that they did right over other toolkits. I like this, since I've found that it makes it ridiculously easy to simply hook up all the various widgets that may be displaying a numerical value so that they update correctly when the others change, all without the need to write many tedious flushing event callbacks.
  • Blend That Film Episodes 3 & 4 Camera Shake and Green Screen Keying
    BlenderNation - 2012-01-11 10:00:19

    [post introduction here] Tom Jelfs writes: In the latest episodes of Blend That Film we look at creating Camera Shake to add some energy to your shots and we take a look at keying out a green screen. Episode 3: … Continue reading →
  • Demo Reel: Paulo Ricardo
    BlenderNation - 2012-01-11 06:00:36

    Paulo Ricardo S. Ribeiro (Ricardo 3D) writes: My 2011 Demo Reel in Blender 3D. See also my Portfolio and YouTube Channel.

    [read the full article on blendernation.com]


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