Matt Ebb

Today I celebrate my birthday, hooray! As well as my other present, a hugely swollen injured ankle from last night, I got myself a Netgear WGR614 wireless router to replace my crappy old 10 Mbit hub. It was quite refreshing this morning, eating breakfast in the nice bright kitchen, watching the olympics, reading and writing email with the powerbook sitting there on the table, online. Now all I need is wireless power, wireless external monitor, wireless wacom tablet, wireless mouse and wireless audio, and I’ll be free of cables ;)

And a pic of the router itself

Woops, forgot to post this earlier, now it’s old news already! Well, here’s my entry to last week’s Weekend Challenge at elysiun.com. The topic was ‘Primitives’. (CG in-joke, har har) It was a great contest and fortunately I ended up winning with 37% of the votes! Well done, to all who entered. :)

(clicky clicky)

I bought a copy of the wonderful Snapz Pro X the other day, and wanted to put it through its paces with something practical. I’d been asked about the new inbuilt Glow effect in Blender 2.34 on the elysiun.com forums, so I decided to try my hand at making a couple of tutorial videos.

They’re in QuickTime MPEG4 format, but Linux people should be able to view them with mplayer or videolan too. Feedback would be appreciated, since it’s a first time for me!

  Glow Effect 1: Basics using the glow effect (5MB)
  Glow Effect 2: Isolating individual objects (7MB)

I’ve been using some of the exciting new features in Blender 2.34 at work lately for printed illustrations, mainly the particle force fields and deflection. On the weekend I had a bit of time to play with it, and made a few tests and demo files. All of the source .blend files for these images and animations are available if you’d like to see how they were done.

Yafray raytraced DOF blur (click to enlarge)

It’s been an intense week or so, but R-Day has finally arrived, fire extinguishers have been strategically placed around the web servers, and blender.org has been plunged into B-Con 5 with the brand-spanking new release of Blender version 2.34. In the final throes before the source code was frozen against new changes, I managed to squeeze in a bunch of smaller UI tweaks, the left mouse button selection preference and the long-awaited Python driven Help menu, all of which I’m quite proud of, along with my earlier additions, too.

Everyone involved, from developers, to testers, to doc writers, to web admins, to bug reporters, to demo file producers deserve a big pat on the back and a nice cold beer for their efforts – it’s a hell of a release and if you haven’t done so already, go and check it out now at blender3d.org. Time for some well needed rest and relaxation before starting the vicious cycle again for version 2.35 :)