Audi Shooting Brake Concept
Friday, June 26th, 2009It’s bitrotting here again! Quick, some fillup!
Archive for the 'Blender' Category
SUSE Studio Posters
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009Linuxtag is happening in Berlin later this month and SUSE Studio is going to be there.
As a byproduct of revamping the website I’ve created a set of posters for the show. Come see us and feel free to decorate your office 
While it is noteworthy how much the PDF export improved in Inkscape, Evince chokes a bit on the embedded bitmaps and doesn’t handle masks. Have to suggest Acrobat reader this time :/
Dropbox Renderer
Thursday, April 16th, 2009I’ve raved about Dropbox a couple of times in the past.
I’ve recently needed to create some new poses of Dister, our project mascot. I also needed to add a glass full of juice into the scene and suddenly my PC wasn’t beefy enough to do render iterations fast enough to get the materials right in a reasonable time. I have a Macbook Pro that’s mostly just idling so I looked at the renderfarm scripts that people have written for Blender, but all of them just require too much configuration that’s not worth it unless you need to render a long animation. People are probably not lazy enough.
I ended up writing this horrible script that watches a folder for blender project files, and as soon as one shows up, it unleashes blender on it, renders a still and deletes the project file. So the workflow is simply to copy a .blend over to a local directory. As Dropbox syncs this folder across all my machines, I immediately have the render available on all my boxes. Of course those machines don’t have to belong to you if you can convince your friends to run the script. Loop’s 8core Mac Pro really screams I must add 
The script is really a joke, but it may inspire someone to create something as easy to use.
Peach Project
Thursday, August 2nd, 2007Oops, the Blender guys are doin’ it again.
Peach is the working title of a second open movie project. A handful of talented artist from the community will be sharing some office space in Amsterdam to produce an animated short film. While that alone is great, the best comes from the fact that blender developers will have some lab rats, err, target audience with very specific needs and tight deadlines.
So much new functionality made its way into blender last time that it’s almost irrelevant they actually made the premiere and a dual DVD of a great short not only full of behind the scenes bonuses, HD version of the movie but also the complete library of all the assets, scenes, textures, to study and modify under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike.
If you want to support the already insane pace of blender development, go and preorder the DVD. Out of all the ways money has been tried to be injected into free software project, this seems to have been a 100% success. Some things are worth repeating.
LGM
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007I haven’t been able to attend the first LGM due to the most beautiful reasons, but am very happy to have made it to LGM2. Louis Desjardins and all who helped him deserve a lot of applause for the organisation. The rooms next to each other, printed program, wireless, food… Really an example of how to
organize an event. I wish I had at least a fraction of such abilities.
I enjoyed Bassam‘s talk on Elephants Dream production process as well as the Inkscape talk hurricane. Just like with Elephants dream, it’s a pleasure to see tools developed for a particular scenario (paintbucket for comic book coloring in Inkscape, another good presentation btw). Peter & Kamila had a cool presentation on the GIMP UI redesign. Much more confident with the team driving this now.
Boudewijn’s overview of Krita sparked my interest in the project. While the way Krita is developed very much resembles GIMP’s lack of design (“…you can have spreadsheet objects in a drawing”), the featureset looks impressive. I will have to look if there’s a sane workflow to doing the stuff I do. Too bad for all the walls preventing us to freely choose apps by their functionality and not by the platform they were developed for.
The talks will be available as video streams/downloads, so I recommend not missing these.
Just like I always do, I demoed the hard work of other people . I think both demos went alright. Based on the feedback I got, F-spot seems to be quite underestimated. Happy to have sparked up interest.
Blender
Sunday, February 18th, 2007The features. The new site. The demo videos. The unparalelled presentation of the release log (at least among free software).
Grab it while it’s hot.
Scaling Nodes
Friday, February 10th, 2006Inkscape has an extensive keyboard control. One thing I thought is impossible and I love in blender is being able to use the same transform functions in different contexts (on nodes as well as objects for example). As Cornelius pointed out today on #inkscape (freenode), you can for example scale selections of nodes with Ctrl+, (down) or Ctrl+. (up). Nifty!