Finland

March 16th, 2005 . 2 comments

I finally had a chunk of free time today to spend waging war on my todo list, so I took another stab at these photos from my travels in November last year(!). After some quality time with the crop tool, I’ve also shed the shackles of the evil 4:3 compact digicam aspect ratio. Anyway, here’s a brief look at Finland.

Pink Helsinki street corner

Car Paint

March 16th, 2005 . 9 comments

Update 2006.07.04: This faking method has now been made redundant with the material node system in Blender 2.42. Check out my new node-based method, with image, movie, description and .blend file.

Here’s a video tutorial about creating a car paint shader in Blender, in time for the Blender community F1 challenge. I tried to give a thorough explanation of the theory behind it, rather than just posting the .blend file on it’s own.

mpeg4 icon  Car paint (12MB MPEG4)   /  
.blend icon  Featured .blend file

Car paint shader example image

More Processing

March 12th, 2005 . 2 comments

More experimentation and learning – variation on the clock theme.

My second Processing sketch

Clock 03

Processing

March 7th, 2005 . 5 comments

A couple of days ago I downloaded Processing, after discovering it a little while before. It’s “a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities”. Today, I made my first ‘sketch’, and I anticipate doing a lot more experimenting with this – it’s great.

My first Processing sketch

Clock 01

3D Type, worldwide

March 6th, 2005 . 2 comments

Yesterday, Rob ‘phase’ Haarsma committed some code that Mika Saari and he had been working on to Tuhopuu Blender – a first revision of enabling Unicode characters in 3D text objects. Although usability-wise, it’s still a little cumbersome, it’s an excellent improvement that I’ve been hoping for, for a while now, and I bet these guys will be overjoyed, too. Now who can I bug about adding proper kerning and leading? Baseline shift? Would ligatures be too much to ask for? :)

“Hello” in Japanese and Korean

Hello!

Timeline

March 2nd, 2005 . 3 comments

Over the last few days, I’ve committed some code for a time slider to the Tuhopuu Blender testing version, which will hopefully be a big usability boost for animation. I’ve been working on some animation lately myself, so it was a good motivation to polish up this work, which has been sitting around in a partially done state since last year. You can give it a try by picking up a tuhopuu testing build from over at the blender.org forums.

Timeline screenshot

If I could turn back time


Notable features include: (excerpt from the CVS commit logs)

  • Useful controls for start/end/current frame, and
    buttons to rewind, play and fast forward in the active time area.
    The area before the start frame and after the end is now tinted
    out slightly.
  • The auto key recording is now actually useful ;)
    Rather than being a user preference, it’s now a toggle in the
    timeline (red record symbol) which can be flicked on and off
    quickly, which is really how this is meant to be used. The button
    currently works for both object and action keyframes, hopefully it can be extended to other Ipos such as materials in the future.
  • Keyframes of the active object are shown as little lines in the
    timeline. Yellow lines represent object keys, blue lines represent
    action keys
  • Markers! Markers are the little triangles you can see in the
    screenshot above. Video editors should be very familar with this,
    they’re used very often in editing to help time cuts etc, but I don’t
    know of any other 3D apps that have this, which is a little
    surprising.

    Basically, markers are used to mark spots on the timeline, that may
    mean something to you, so you can easily find that point later.
    They’re useful for timing animation, syncing animation to audio,
    and plenty of other things, I’m sure. You can drop a marker on the
    current frame by pressing M while the mouse is over the timeline,
    or also by pressing M during animation playback (Alt A, play
    button, whatever). You can remove a marker from the current frame
    with Alt M. There is currently a limit of 99 markers

  • Support for naming markers. Ctrl M or Frame->Name Marker opens
    a text field where you can give a marker on the current frame a
    name, which displays next to the triangle icon.
  • Previous / Next Keyframe buttons. These should be pretty self
    explanatory – clicking them brings the current frame to the previous
    or next keyframe visible on the timeline.
  • Hotkeys (S and E) for setting the current frame as the start or
    end frame of the animation.
  • Right mouse button now cancels animation playback, just like most
    other ‘temporary modes’ (same functionality as Esc).
  • Timeline now initialises showing frame numbers by default

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