Matt Ebb

Just a brief update, I’m sitting in the side room of De Waag in Amsterdam on the third and final day of the 2006 Blender Conference, waiting to give my next artist tutorial session. Having a great time as usual amidst the late nights and jetlag. Most of the presentations I’ve seen have been interesting, and they should be appearing as video downloads soon, for those who couldn’t be here.

Bart and the others from Blendernation are here, doing a great job covering the event with video reports and interviews already online, and there’s also an excellent live video stream coming straight from the main theatre floor. I wonder what sort of nonsense has been recorded coming out of my mouth, for the world to see…

I’ve had several people contact me about my radial menus design and proof of concept for Blender that I showed here a couple of months ago. Progress on it had come to a standstill, while I was waiting for a limitation in Blender’s input system to be overcome. Previously, it wasn’t possible to detect in Blender if a key other than Ctrl Shift or Alt was held down, which meant that the fast menu selection method of holding down a key temporarily could only work when bound to combinations of those keys, and not most other hotkeys used in Blender.

Jean-Luc ‘lukep’ plans to work on improving this area of Blender when he works on refactoring the low-level input events system in Blender, and I’d put the menus on hold until this happened. However Jean-Luc’s project is large, progress is slow and it will take some time until it is completed.

So for my own sake and for those curious people who would like to give it a whirl, I wrote some temporary code to work around that problem, and now the radial menus are working on any hotkey, as they should. I also found a way to allow more than 8 items per menu, which was missing before. This is still a bit sketchy on enormous menus like the mesh specials menu, but that’s really a usability fault in Blender more than the radial menus – the specials menu is a badly organised dumping ground for tools that’s clunky to use and getting messier each release. This particular problem should be solved at its root.

Anyway, having said that, I’ve finally made a patch for you all to try, sitting in the patch tracker. Keep in mind it’s still a little rough around the edges, but hopefully you should find it interesting. If you make a testing build, I’d appreciate it if you could post a link to it in the comments here, so others can try too. Cheers!

I spent a long time deliberating over whether I would go to the 2006 Blender Conference or not. My bank balance has been pretty unhealthy recently, and as great as it would be to see everyone and be a part of the excitement again, I wasn’t sure if I could afford to travel halfway around the world or not. I came to the last-minute conclusion that it’s going to be pretty tight and not really affordable, and that even so, I would go anyway! :)

Apart from the real reason for the conference, being around all the others, eating, drinking, discussing, brainstorming, I’m going to be giving a couple of pretty informal talks on the Friday – ‘Making Elephants Dream’ with the others from Orange who can make it, and also a lighting and compositing workshop with Andy Goralczyk. I’d like the keep both of them pretty informal and fun, the latter more about nifty tips and tricks, like in my previous curves session.

Straight after the conference, Bassam Kurdali and I will shoot over to Belgium for a week, to teach a four day 3D course using Blender at the Flanders Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp. This should be very interesting and challenging, though not new – we held a series of one day courses during our time at Montevideo in Amsterdam. The students are a group of fine artists who are looking for ways to integrate 3D technology into their work. I’m very happy to be able to help them with this, and curious to see what they come up with.