Matt Ebb

It’s a great change from 35mm, and way better than my convenient but ephemeral and bland compact digital. There’s no light meter, so I’ve been attempting to use the digital for the exposure readings. Fingers crossed that it works!

I ran off my first roll of film down in Melbourne over the weekend, and am very eager to see the results. I braved the cold weather to catch up with fellow Blender developers Campbell ‘ideasman‘ Barton, and Canadian import Martin ‘theeth‘ Poirier who’s down here on an internship. Good times were had by all, with hanging around the city, chit-chat, eating, drinking and lots of cool ideas. It reminded me of the fun of the last Blender Conference, but with less people and no 17th century castle. Can’t wait till this year’s!

Update 23 June: A picture from the meetup.

The toolbar is stored in UserData, meaning it is saved in the default .B.blend file so it’s there when you start tuhopuu3 or load a new file. It is context-sensitive, so it contains different items depending on what mode you’re in. This useful, but also a technical constraint since you don’t want to be executing object mode tools while in edit mode, or vice versa.

Working with it is very simple, just right-click on a menu item in the menus system, or in the toolbar itself for a menu of choices. In the menus: Add to Toolbar adds the clicked-on menu item to the toolbar. In the toolbar, Remove from Toolbar removes the clicked-on item from the toolbar. Wow, who would have guessed! Move Up and Move Down let you re-order the items within the list, and Insert Separator inserts a separator after the clicked-on item. You can give the separator a name, as a nice way to group different tools like view tools, selection tools, interactive tools, whatever you like. Otherwise, you can just leave the name blank to use it as a spacer. And of course, the toolbar items align nicely in their rounded groups ;).

There are a few things that I’d like to try, which are on the todo list:

• Options for using icons, or abbreviated item titles like in Silo (i.e. Subdivide Fractal becomes “SF”)
• Option for horizontal layout, like a pseudo second header
• Putting these custom tools in a popup menu if you don’t want it on screen all the time

The back-end code behind it is probably not a good long term solution, and will likely be made redundant whenever Blender’s fabled internal events system refactoring happens. Perhaps you can consider this implementation a proof of concept, but I continued with this project and committed it for a few reasons:

• Regardless of whether a ‘real’ back-end is in place, we can still use this for user testing and experimenting with the interface and interaction design.
• Seeing this in action might ‘inspire’ whoever’s going to be working on a proper events refactor to get moving on it!
• Whether or not programmers consider the code good, or sustainable, this is working here and now and useful for users, so why not put it in tuhopuu anyway.