Matt Ebb

I’d say it’s been a long few days, but my body’s still having trouble deciding what a day really is. The jetlag’s in effect, and although my flu’s still hanging around, it’s getting better every day and I’m alive and well. I’m posting live from the sofa in the foyer of my hostel here near Vondelpark in Amsterdam, surrounded by what looks like a group of Dutch high school students. I spent yesterday afternoon walking around the city in a sleepy daze (not due to any interesting chemicals, mind you), which is surprisingly small compared to what I’m used to in Sydney. I’ve got museums to see, canal rides to take and bicycles to hire, and dinner to have with ex-NaN blenderheads Ton and Bart. No time to write too large an account right now since I’ve still got plenty of preparation work left to do for the Blender Conference, but I will mention that I’m looking at moving to some other places (The Hague, Rotterdam, maybe Brussels?) before I return back here for the conf.

Bicycles in an alleyway



Sitting in vondelpark

Typical, just a few days before I get on a plane, sit in a seat barely big enough for my knees for 22 hours, and end up on the other side of the world in a strange place full of tulips and windmills, I decide to catch a flu. I’m trying my best to fight it off, taking vitamins and throat wash and Chinese herbal medicine, though I guess working from dusk until late Saturday night at our national elections didn’t help much either. To top these miserable days off, our incumbent conservative war-supporting party remained in government, following a successful dirty scare campaign, too. Yuck.

~BH~

Time surely does fly, I can’t believe I’m leaving for the Blender conference as soon as tomorrow afternoon. Yes, I’ll be early, but it was either arrive now or right before the event, which wouldn’t bode well with jetlag. I’ve still got a bit to finish off on my presentations, but there’s plenty of time on the plane and before the conference to polish the final touches. Speaking of which, I’d better get back to the preparations.

Last night, in another display of hardcore coding brilliance, Ton Roosendaal added a feature to bf-blender CVS that we’d been discussing a bit in IRC – an ‘Outliner’ scene management tool. I made a design proposal, from which Ton put this first working version together in the space of a couple of days. In this initial stage, it’s mostly useful for visualising, selecting and activating different Blender data for editing, and hopefully as it develops, we’ll see more interactive functionality being implemented. In particular, I’m really enthusiastic about the proposed Ipo channel editing functionality for setting keyframes etc, which would surely tie in quite nicely with the work on animation tools that Ton’s interested in doing for version 2.36.

Out of liners