Some guys mess around with raytracer settings for the whole evening, some guys make a kick arse short. Eeeek.

Yafray is now really nicely integrated into blender. I’m not sure how to increase the number of samples for the DOF though, and my caustics are rather laughable, but I’m pretty impressed by the speed.

Update: The DOF quality is affected by the AA setting. Turn off auto-antialiasing and set the number of passes and samples to a higher number.

Inspired by a friend,
I’ve put down a list of shortcuts and tweaks that make my life with GIMP a lot easier.

Layers

As you may know, the move tool is also used to pick layers (Shift to toggle). You may not know the
super handy shortcut to the move tool by holding spacebar from any other active tool. Releasing the key
will get you back to the previous tool.

You can toggle the active layer
in the layers dock, with the move tool directly on the canvas, or you can
toggle though them using the Ctrl+Tab
shortcut.

Image Windows and Fullscreen

The fullscreen mode (F11 to toggle) is very handy for previewing images, but also for editing work. The advantage of seeing as much of the artwork as possible is lovely. If you have a dualhead system with separate screens, you can put another view of the same image to the second screen using View>Move to Screen and making it fullscreen. Ctrl+E will scale the image to fit the view. You can also try various display filters to mimic target display on one of the heads (View>Display Filters…).

When having many image windows open, navigating to the right one is
sometimes hard. GIMP leaves a lot of this work to a window manager. I’m using
metacity and I must say it plays quite well these days. Alt+Tab will
give a list of windows, with nice previews.

Zoomin’

By default, 1 will get you a 1:1 zoom. I’ve set up additional shortcuts 2 – 2:1, 4 – 4:1, etc. And Alt+2 for 1:2, etc. To pan around the image, use the 3rd mousebutton.

Of course the fastest way to zoom remains the Shift
+ mouse wheel shortcut.

Instead of the canvas background color setting, GIMP 2.1 has a nice zoom
toggle in the upper right corner of the image to lock zooming to the window
size changes. It also supports new controllers such as the Powermate or any MIDI device so
you can assign various actions to their events. At the moment you need to edit
~/.gimp-2.1/controllerrc, but in stable it’s going to be in
preferences.

Painting

GIMP 2.1 now supports some extra shortcut incorporated along with the
controllers support. You can finally change the brush size and opacity without
leaving canvas.

Pressing Ctrl when in one of the paint tools,
will change the tool to color picker temporarily so you can get a color from
the canvas fast.

Once this is all sorted and stable I hope I will be able to bind
alt+powermate to
context-brush-radius-increase and Ctrl+powermate to set hardness.

Neat. If only CDS “exchange rate” wasn’t close to 1USD~=40CZK :/

Tuomas posted a link to the most hilarious animated short I’ve seen in a while. It reminds me of that Ice Age character a lot. Very well animated, the final scene had me crying. Hilarious! The studio appears to have some more on their website.

Which reminds me of this dude, who’s making great progress on character modelling and animation in blender. Very cool stuff.

We went to a big zoo/safari in Dvur Kralove. Although I’m still into wide angle, some animal portraits are fun too.

Been a while since I’ve recorded a GIMP demo, so here’s a little tutorial on boosting shadows using a mask.

Update: The demos were recorded using xvidcap and you can find the older demos here and here.

To ease the pain of materials and texturing for us ever n00bs, sonix made a nice car material library for blender. Thanks sonix.

I have to get the hang of a dcraw and the dcraw GIMP plugin, but I found this little java app very handy.

Jimmac’s got a new toy.