Planet Blender

pipeline changes
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2012-07-03 22:45:20

This is a slightly technical detail kind of post- the kind of geekery you’d be interested in if you’ve heard of revision control systems, GIT, Subversion, etc. It doesn’t seem to have to do a whole lot with 3D graphics, but managing files is always going to be an issue in a project of any size.

Since the tube kickstarter campaign ended our team has swelled to 25, and most of them are not located at Hampshire. (Iincidentally why I haven’t blogged for so long- keeping the project running with an expanded team was a greater than full time job) Even a while ago, it was clear that SVN (aka subversion) was not a great fit for most people, for a bunch of reasons:

1. You have to download the entire project (roughly 8 Gigabytes!) the first time you use it. Slow internet connections and bandwidth caps make this impractical for some.
2. Not everybody is ‘technical’ – updating and committing is several, potentially error-prone steps, sometimes involving the dreaded command line
3. GUI front ends are platform specific – different docs for different people.

Animators previously used what we called ‘production packages’ : we used blenderaid to pull out dependencies and make a zipped bundle of all the file the animator needed, this was:

1. impractical to do updates on rigs/etc. while an animator was working
2. hardcoded to anim files (though I could have fixed this)
3. needed to ask the animator to send back work in progress for lighting tests.

So we found sparkleshare ! Sparkleshare can be best thought of as a dropbox clone with a git backend. A while ago I looked at it, but it only had a linux client; now that it gained windows and mac clients, we migrated from the production package way to sparkleshare, and away from blenderaid to the blender python api. Now we have the following advantages:

1. one click (on my end) to create a package for *any file* in the production tree – with a choice of including or excluding image files, and the possibility of adding more files easily to the same package.
2. user on the end has to click twice, and enter two bits of information.
3. end user experience after that resembles dropbox. updating rigs means just dropping them into the share, and we can get wip files at any time without having to ask.

Is it perfect? we found some issues (where else) on Windows, where there was no SSH client available (luckily one of our interns- Arindam Mondal) figured out how to use Putty and wrote an extensive Howto , and we also found that Windows XP is not supported. I’m frankly stunned that anyone is still using XP though

Razorback Concept Sculpt
Vimeo / Blender 3D - 2012-07-03 19:54:06

First rough sculpt and paint test, retopo with BSurfaces and second paint test.
(CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Concept Art Katarzyna Zalecka kasia88.deviantart.com
Ancient Beast AncientBeast.com

Cast: Roberto Roch

Tags: Blender 2.63, Blender, Remseh modifier, Sculpt, Sculpting, Painting, Retopo and Bsurfaces

Model: Paper Bridge
BlenderNation - 2012-07-03 18:00:47

By TheDuckCow. TheDuckCow writes: This was a mini project that I used to kick off my entry for Andrew Price’s Photorealism Contest. The idea was to force myself to pay attention to details of a model by drawing it out … Continue reading →

How to break things
Tears of Steel - 2012-07-03 17:04:24

Because this is a vfx film, the animation workload is a little less stressful than it would be if everything was animated. Which lets me get in with a fine tooth comb and really polish the c**p outa these shots.
Other things it lets me do it to add in little bits that’d make it look a lot more awesome (because we love that word here at Mango!)

So here’s a very brief tutorial on how to break things.

Step one
Take your bike.

Step two
Mesh deform your bike!

Step three
Rig your mesh deform.

Step four
Get a 3 tonne robot to stand on it.

Should all go well, you should end up with something that looks a little like this:

Happy smashing!!

-note: Please do not try this in real life. Here in Amsterdam, we’re rather fond of bikes and don’t support the smashing of perfectly good bikes.
-Unless you film it.
-Then it would be awesome.

Convoy Short Film
BlenderNation - 2012-07-03 12:00:02

By Rajiv Jayant. Rajiv writes: A short Film I just completed, done completely on Blender 2.63. Blender 2.63 Modelling, Texturing, Lighting, Rigging, Sound, Video Editing and Animation Gimp for Image...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

Blender Presentation + Workshop at Libre Software Meeting – Geneva 10-11 July
Oenvoyage's Blender Blog - 2012-07-03 11:19:02

The Libre Software Meetings (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre) is a worldwide gathering of enthusiastic FOSS users that usually takes place in France. But this year the organizers decided to change a bit and it will take place in Switzerland, in Geneva to be precise. Although still in a french speaking territory, most of the […]

graphicall: Amazing progress on Bullet integration by GSoCer Sergej Reich! http://t.co/0O5alv5i
Twitter / graphicall - 2012-07-03 09:05:00

graphicall: Amazing progress on Bullet integration by GSoCer Sergej Reich! http://t.co/0O5alv5i

Kalayaan
Reyn's Blog - 2012-07-03 07:00:00

(click to enlarge) Before you is the object often regarded as the resistance weapon during the 1898 Philippine revolution, called 'Itak' or the bolo knife. To freedom. Created with: Blender 2.63 and GIMP Screenshots: (click to enlarge) (click to enlarge)

25 Blender Modifiers Explained
BlenderNation - 2012-07-03 06:38:58

BlenderDiplom presents 25 short videos on Blender modifiers. Gottfried Hofmann writes: Frederik Steinmetz explaines all 25 generate and deform modifiers that are currently available in Blender 2.63a....

[read the full article on blendernation.com]