Re:and it's completely useless on OS X because...
on
Blender 2.40 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
[QUOTE]The fact that Blender uses OpenGL for it's GUI basically means that unless your video card is relatively new, and your drivers implement the spec perfectly, you will have problems, either with performance or graphical bugs. Of the five Win boxes in my house, Blender runs usably on none of them; it's either too slow, or the interface is corrupted.[/QUOTE]
You can put a software only driver in your blender folder that will fix pretty much any card. For ATIs that are buggy turn off 'full hardware accelleration'. S3 and Intel on board graphics also have issues. Pretty much all other cards in the past 10 years should be okay, but NVidia tends to work best on Windows.
[QUOTEScript a new custom helper node that has a private parameter block to hold run-time specific information and uses the exposed viewport drawing commands to create a custom icon and transform gizmo for the helper object.[/QUOTE]
No problem.
[QUOTE]Create a new material that has a global parameter block to hold settings for.FX (or.HLSL or.GLSL) shaders.[/QUOTE]
Sure.
[QUOTE] Have those shaders work in the viewports.[/QUOTE]
Alas we will need Ogre or CrystalSpace integration for that yet...
[QUOTE]Have the settings be easily accessible both by the scripting language and the C++ SDK so that the data can be easily exported. Create the custom helper node and material in a scripting language, not C or C++ w/ an SDK.[/QUOTE]
Scripting and direct access to the C code no SDK.
[QUOTE]Now create an entire bipedal skeleton with head, neck, clavicles, R/L upper arms, R/L lower arms, R/L hands, 4 spin segments, pelvis, R/L upper legs, R/L lower legs, R/L feet, proper IK and joint constraints. Do that in less than 30 seconds.[/QUOTE]
There are preexisiting skeltons with full constraint setups avialable already. Not automagic - but it is the weighting and morphs that are the big time consumers. We have very good morphs and weighting system now, and the rigging and constraints is quite easy and straight forward.
[QUOTE]Still with me?[/QUOTE]
Yep
[QUOTE]Keyframe animate the new skeleton over 100 frames.[/QUOTE]
Done.
[QUOTE]Create a second skeleton of a totally different scale with a different bone count. Now map the animation from skeleton 1 to skeleton 2, taking into acount the differing bone counts and scale. Do that in less than a minute.[/QUOTE]
Nope can't do this yet - motion retargeting will hopefully come by this summer - that is a pretty recent addition though to 3ds etc.
[QUOTE]Use a cloth simulation to create the animation of a person walking through a curtain. Use an extremely dense mesh for the curtain cloth.[/QUOTE]
Done
[QUOTE]Now skin-wrap that animation on to a low-res version of the curtain with an IK bone setup instead of a cloth simulation (since cloth sim can't be use in a real-time engine). Quickly! The skin wrapping needs to be done in a minute or so.[/QUOTE]
Haven't tried it but pretty sure is doable.
[QUOTE]Blender isn't a bad product at all. It's actually a very nice product. That doesn't mean it's more versatile than Max, though.[/QUOTE]
Absolutely agreed.
[QUOTE]Autodesk has more man hours poured into Max each year than Blender has had for the entire time its been a product. Autodesk has the advantage of a huge customer base and the smarts to talk to those customers and incorporate new features that increase productivity. Max wasn't nearly as versatile 3 years ago as it is now. Except for the biped creation step above it couldn't do any of the things I listed either (except maybe the custom helper node).[/QUOTE]
Well - with Blender you can accomplish most of what you listed now.
[QUOTE]There's nothing wrong with "capitalist" software (eyeroll at the bad melodramatic turn of phrase). If Max provides features and options that fit a current or designed workflow and increases productivity then it is well worth the purchase price.[/QUOTE]
Sorry for the technobabble, UVs are a way to map an image/texture to a 3d model. LSCM is a way to create your mapping to the model in a way that it is of good quality - live means that you can tweak it as you go instead of tweak recalculate, tweak recalculat. A modifier stack - is changes that are modifiers are 'virtual' ie can easily be done and undone at any point in the models life.
LetterRip
Re:one of the few success stories of wikibooks?
on
Blender 2.40 Released
·
· Score: 1
Hi,
the manual on Blenders wiki was indeed developed prior to being put on the wiki but the first version was for 2.33 - It is undergoing heavy development, and in particular all of the translations have happened afterwards. Also, some of the best pages are new additions (ie a superb page done on the hair system, another on the mesh tools etc.).
LetterRip
Re:There's Blender meeting in March (also for gimp
on
Blender 2.40 Released
·
· Score: 1
No disrespect meant, but your meeting hasn't recieved any exposure at all among Blender developers - I've seen a few posts at GIMP and other mailing lists, but not a single email on any of the Blender lists.
Mr Criminal leaves the Cell phone at home, or turns it off, or blocks the signal. Hmmm there went your ability to track him. This will at best catch the extraordinarily stupid or crimes of passion. Both of which are pretty easy to catch right now.
I'd guess (haven't read the article - doh) that is socialization and authoritarian behavior not problem solving - the human is exhibiting socialization behavior and listening to authority - I was told to do it this way, so I'll do it how I was told.
There is no evidence that it is the usage of Tivo or other services that are 'causing' the rise in product placement. For instance it has been pretty prominent in movies and long before tivo gained any traction - instead advertisers figure they can get more eyeballs and more revenue this way. If Tivo had never been invented chances are we would still be seeing this increase.
Try the new release in about a week or two - we will have a quickstart guide. Also if you haven't tried blender since 2.36 or 2.37a they have a 3d manipulator so are much easier to use for newbies. Also the manual is being updated and other things that will make life easier for a new user.
I would think that Blender would be an ideal match for this, since they need a way for potential users to create content - models and animations, cheaply and easily.
[QUOTE]$100,000 per rootkit'd CD times 20,000,000 million CDs = $2,000,000,000,000 (2 trillion dollars)[/QUOTE]
Someone at Arstechnica pointed out that 'per incidence' meant the creation of the master CD, so however many different master CDs had been created with it installed would be the liability number. I think it 16 or so CDs. So 1.6 million.
[QUOTE]These were time-consuming, frustrating annoyances for me, but for someone who's not a computer geek, they'd be total showstoppers. The average person simply is not going to go looking for help on usenet or IRC (and my experience with posting on the Ubuntu forums has been that I don't get any useful replies, either). The average person will give up.[/QUOTE]
For the average computer user any small difficulty with windows hardware or software configuration is also a 'total showstopper' - but on Windows there are more people that they can turn to for help.
[QUOTE]Without Roche.... There'd be now patent. And no vaccine...[/QUOTE]
Tamilflu (Oseltamivir) was developed by Gilead Sciences, who licensed it to Roche. Thus Roche is the marketer and distributor, not the creator. I haven't been able to find yet whether Oseltamivir was actually a University developement yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were. The majority of novel drugs research is funded by governments, developed by universities, then commercialized by pharmaceutical companys. The majority of pharma R&D is 'me too' drugs to get around patents, not novel drugs.
I think this could wake up the public to the need for patent reform in a way that other things would not.
Everyone uses wireless, pay as you go is a fairly obvious idea to pretty much anyone. A sudden skyrocketing price for cell phone calls will piss people off quite a bit.
I'd suggest a discussion of collaboration tools (source management, wikis, mailing lists, irc, message boards), organization structures (Foundation based, business based, person based), distribution models (distros, install packages, source only), cross platform development, funding models (support, documentation, packaging, donations, none) and cross cultural issues (language tools and internationalization, different legal environments for patents and copyright).
wait till we do a release in about a month (or if you can compile code, just use CVS) the animation tools have been completely overhauld in CVS, and the interface improvements will be ported over from our experimental tree.
[QUOTE]Even Ton himself admits that a lot of it is horrible accumulated spaghetti or just legacy from Blender's hectic commercial days. It's a lot of C and C++ with Python scripting here and there, and overarching consistency is still firmly on the To Do list...[/QUOTE]
Depends on what area they need to look at - the Python API does have some inconsistencies still but is undergoing a major cleanup which is eliminating most of them. There are a few areas that are still pretty ugly, but the animation system, the object system, the transform system, and the simulation systems are all rewritten to nice new clean code and APIs - thus the code that an animation house would mostly need to touch is in good shape with some exceptions that are mostly targeted for rewrite over the next 6 months.
[QUOTE]Dunno. If I had a few competent coders to throw at a project like that, I'd have it rewritten it in Psyco'ed Python, with inlined C binary borrowed from the original for the clearly "atomic" base functions. The required customizability and hopefully sufficient speed...[/QUOTE]
Psyco isn't nearly fast enough:) - you can get even better performance by using a new summer of code project that turns python into C++ code with 10-100 fold speedups, or wait a bit and pypy should be complete.
[QUOTE]But even he admits that compared to just about any of the commercial packages its mostly lame.[/QUOTE]
Have a look at current CVS or the release in about a month, then offer up your opinion, I think you will be pretty impressed.
[QUOTE] Until very recently Blender didn't even support N-sided polygons.[/QUOTE]
And it still doesn't - Blender has 'fgons' which don't allow internal vertices or holes in the polygon, which are allowed by true 'ngons'.
[QUOTE]Competition in the 3d package world is extremely fierce (especially in the top 3), people develop preferences on packages based on extremely small differences. Its like a 911 Porsche showing up to a NASCAR race... it might be fast, but its just not ready for competition. [/QUOTE]
It isn't ready to be adopted by the big studios for most tasks. There are also still some tasks that it doesn't even have limited capability for (high quality fire and some simulation). However for any studio that is just starting, or any studio in a non OECD country (ie where the price of the software would be a significant portion of total) Blender deserves strong consideration, since the cost of developing the missing features will be cheaper than getting a few seats of a high end software.
[QUOTE]Beyond specialized pipeline integration, I see no commercial application for Blender at this time.[/QUOTE]
Depends on the animation work - non photo real work, and any animation work for TV should be fine. Also you completely ignore the non-OECD market where Blender should become the dominant player.
[QUOTE]Maya (even though it does have a simulator in the base product) can handle it as a plug-in, and the circular dependency is no problem at all. [...]This is a much harder problem than it sounds.[/QUOTE]
With Blender you have complete access to the source code so the problems you have with other software of being limited to how they expose things in their API is nonexistent. Or you could do it as a module and use the built in python scripting.
[QUOTE]You can even implement your own "things" which the Maya core has no concept of (e.g. it's not a shader, it's not geometry, it's not a user control), and everything will just work. Try doing that with Blender.[/QuOTE]
You can do that in Blender too - Blenders internal structure is extremely flexible, adding new types is very easy and everything 'just works'.
Slashdot Mirror
[QUOTE]The fact that Blender uses OpenGL for it's GUI basically means that unless your video card is relatively new, and your drivers implement the spec perfectly, you will have problems, either with performance or graphical bugs. Of the five Win boxes in my house, Blender runs usably on none of them; it's either too slow, or the interface is corrupted.[/QUOTE]
You can put a software only driver in your blender folder that will fix pretty much any card. For ATIs that are buggy turn off 'full hardware accelleration'. S3 and Intel on board graphics also have issues. Pretty much all other cards in the past 10 years should be okay, but NVidia tends to work best on Windows.
LetterRip
Here are mirrors please use them
e /Blender2.40/
http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/blender/releas
[QUOTEScript a new custom helper node that has a private parameter block to hold run-time specific information and uses the exposed viewport drawing commands to create a custom icon and transform gizmo for the helper object.[/QUOTE]
.FX (or .HLSL or .GLSL) shaders.[/QUOTE]
No problem.
[QUOTE]Create a new material that has a global parameter block to hold settings for
Sure.
[QUOTE] Have those shaders work in the viewports.[/QUOTE]
Alas we will need Ogre or CrystalSpace integration for that yet...
[QUOTE]Have the settings be easily accessible both by the scripting language and the C++ SDK so that the data can be easily exported. Create the custom helper node and material in a scripting language, not C or C++ w/ an SDK.[/QUOTE]
Scripting and direct access to the C code no SDK.
[QUOTE]Now create an entire bipedal skeleton with head, neck, clavicles, R/L upper arms, R/L lower arms, R/L hands, 4 spin segments, pelvis, R/L upper legs, R/L lower legs, R/L feet, proper IK and joint constraints. Do that in less than 30 seconds.[/QUOTE]
There are preexisiting skeltons with full constraint setups avialable already. Not automagic - but it is the weighting and morphs that are the big time consumers. We have very good morphs and weighting system now, and the rigging and constraints is quite easy and straight forward.
[QUOTE]Still with me?[/QUOTE]
Yep
[QUOTE]Keyframe animate the new skeleton over 100 frames.[/QUOTE]
Done.
[QUOTE]Create a second skeleton of a totally different scale with a different bone count. Now map the animation from skeleton 1 to skeleton 2, taking into acount the differing bone counts and scale. Do that in less than a minute.[/QUOTE]
Nope can't do this yet - motion retargeting will hopefully come by this summer - that is a pretty recent addition though to 3ds etc.
[QUOTE]Use a cloth simulation to create the animation of a person walking through a curtain. Use an extremely dense mesh for the curtain cloth.[/QUOTE]
Done
[QUOTE]Now skin-wrap that animation on to a low-res version of the curtain with an IK bone setup instead of a cloth simulation (since cloth sim can't be use in a real-time engine). Quickly! The skin wrapping needs to be done in a minute or so.[/QUOTE]
Haven't tried it but pretty sure is doable.
[QUOTE]Blender isn't a bad product at all. It's actually a very nice product. That doesn't mean it's more versatile than Max, though.[/QUOTE]
Absolutely agreed.
[QUOTE]Autodesk has more man hours poured into Max each year than Blender has had for the entire time its been a product. Autodesk has the advantage of a huge customer base and the smarts to talk to those customers and incorporate new features that increase productivity. Max wasn't nearly as versatile 3 years ago as it is now. Except for the biped creation step above it couldn't do any of the things I listed either (except maybe the custom helper node).[/QUOTE]
Well - with Blender you can accomplish most of what you listed now.
[QUOTE]There's nothing wrong with "capitalist" software (eyeroll at the bad melodramatic turn of phrase). If Max provides features and options that fit a current or designed workflow and increases productivity then it is well worth the purchase price.[/QUOTE]
Absolutely agreed.
LetterRip
Sorry for the technobabble, UVs are a way to map an image/texture to a 3d model. LSCM is a way to create your mapping to the model in a way that it is of good quality - live means that you can tweak it as you go instead of tweak recalculate, tweak recalculat. A modifier stack - is changes that are modifiers are 'virtual' ie can easily be done and undone at any point in the models life.
LetterRip
Hi,
the manual on Blenders wiki was indeed developed prior to being put on the wiki but the first version was for 2.33 - It is undergoing heavy development, and in particular all of the translations have happened afterwards. Also, some of the best pages are new additions (ie a superb page done on the hair system, another on the mesh tools etc.).
LetterRip
No disrespect meant, but your meeting hasn't recieved any exposure at all among Blender developers - I've seen a few posts at GIMP and other mailing lists, but not a single email on any of the Blender lists.
LetterRip
Also forgot to mention the release notes that have some nice pics showing off the new features
l
http://www.blender.org/cms/Blender_2_40.598.0.htm
There were interface improvements, a quickstart guide, and 3d manipulator - so yes interface improvements.
LetterRIp
There is also a way cool zbrush like sculpting available as an add on script, see this post for details.
1
http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5610
LetterRip
[QUOTE]..or a criminal's worst nightmare.[/QUOTE]
Mr Criminal leaves the Cell phone at home, or turns it off, or blocks the signal. Hmmm there went your ability to track him. This will at best catch the extraordinarily stupid or crimes of passion. Both of which are pretty easy to catch right now.
LetterRip
mobile market, opera dominates there - google would love to be on every mobile platform.
LetterRip
I'd guess (haven't read the article - doh) that is socialization and authoritarian behavior not problem solving - the human is exhibiting socialization behavior and listening to authority - I was told to do it this way, so I'll do it how I was told.
LetterRip
There is no evidence that it is the usage of Tivo or other services that are 'causing' the rise in product placement. For instance it has been pretty prominent in movies and long before tivo gained any traction - instead advertisers figure they can get more eyeballs and more revenue this way. If Tivo had never been invented chances are we would still be seeing this increase.
LetterRip
Try the new release in about a week or two - we will have a quickstart guide. Also if you haven't tried blender since 2.36 or 2.37a they have a 3d manipulator so are much easier to use for newbies. Also the manual is being updated and other things that will make life easier for a new user.
LetterRip
I would think that Blender would be an ideal match for this, since they need a way for potential users to create content - models and animations, cheaply and easily.
LetterRip
[QUOTE]$100,000 per rootkit'd CD times 20,000,000 million CDs = $2,000,000,000,000 (2 trillion dollars)[/QUOTE]
Someone at Arstechnica pointed out that 'per incidence' meant the creation of the master CD, so however many different master CDs had been created with it installed would be the liability number. I think it 16 or so CDs. So 1.6 million.
I wonder how much could be gained via compiler improvements, anyone know what compiler they use?
[QUOTE]These were time-consuming, frustrating annoyances for me, but for someone who's not a computer geek, they'd be total showstoppers. The average person simply is not going to go looking for help on usenet or IRC (and my experience with posting on the Ubuntu forums has been that I don't get any useful replies, either). The average person will give up.[/QUOTE]
For the average computer user any small difficulty with windows hardware or software configuration is also a 'total showstopper' - but on Windows there are more people that they can turn to for help.
LetterRip
[QUOTE]Without Roche.... There'd be now patent. And no vaccine...[/QUOTE]
Tamilflu (Oseltamivir) was developed by Gilead Sciences, who licensed it to Roche. Thus Roche is the marketer and distributor, not the creator. I haven't been able to find yet whether Oseltamivir was actually a University developement yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were. The majority of novel drugs research is funded by governments, developed by universities, then commercialized by pharmaceutical companys. The majority of pharma R&D is 'me too' drugs to get around patents, not novel drugs.
LetterRip
I think this could wake up the public to the need for patent reform in a way that other things would not.
Everyone uses wireless, pay as you go is a fairly obvious idea to pretty much anyone. A sudden skyrocketing price for cell phone calls will piss people off quite a bit.
LetterRip
I'd suggest a discussion of collaboration tools (source management, wikis, mailing lists, irc, message boards), organization structures (Foundation based, business based, person based), distribution models (distros, install packages, source only), cross platform development, funding models (support, documentation, packaging, donations, none) and cross cultural issues (language tools and internationalization, different legal environments for patents and copyright).
LetterRip
iota,
wait till we do a release in about a month (or if you can compile code, just use CVS) the animation tools have been completely overhauld in CVS, and the interface improvements will be ported over from our experimental tree.
LetterRip
[QUOTE]Even Ton himself admits that a lot of it is horrible accumulated spaghetti or just legacy from Blender's hectic commercial days. It's a lot of C and C++ with Python scripting here and there, and overarching consistency is still firmly on the To Do list...[/QUOTE]
:) - you can get even better performance by using a new summer of code project that turns python into C++ code with 10-100 fold speedups, or wait a bit and pypy should be complete.
Depends on what area they need to look at - the Python API does have some inconsistencies still but is undergoing a major cleanup which is eliminating most of them. There are a few areas that are still pretty ugly, but the animation system, the object system, the transform system, and the simulation systems are all rewritten to nice new clean code and APIs - thus the code that an animation house would mostly need to touch is in good shape with some exceptions that are mostly targeted for rewrite over the next 6 months.
[QUOTE]Dunno. If I had a few competent coders to throw at a project like that, I'd have it rewritten it in Psyco'ed Python, with inlined C binary borrowed from the original for the clearly "atomic" base functions. The required customizability and hopefully sufficient speed...[/QUOTE]
Psyco isn't nearly fast enough
LetterRip
[QUOTE]But even he admits that compared to just about any of the commercial packages its mostly lame.[/QUOTE]
Have a look at current CVS or the release in about a month, then offer up your opinion, I think you will be pretty impressed.
[QUOTE] Until very recently Blender didn't even support N-sided polygons.[/QUOTE]
And it still doesn't - Blender has 'fgons' which don't allow internal vertices or holes in the polygon, which are allowed by true 'ngons'.
[QUOTE]Competition in the 3d package world is extremely fierce (especially in the top 3), people develop preferences on packages based on extremely small differences. Its like a 911 Porsche showing up to a NASCAR race... it might be fast, but its just not ready for competition. [/QUOTE]
It isn't ready to be adopted by the big studios for most tasks. There are also still some tasks that it doesn't even have limited capability for (high quality fire and some simulation). However for any studio that is just starting, or any studio in a non OECD country (ie where the price of the software would be a significant portion of total) Blender deserves strong consideration, since the cost of developing the missing features will be cheaper than getting a few seats of a high end software.
[QUOTE]Beyond specialized pipeline integration, I see no commercial application for Blender at this time.[/QUOTE]
Depends on the animation work - non photo real work, and any animation work for TV should be fine. Also you completely ignore the non-OECD market where Blender should become the dominant player.
LetterRip
[QUOTE]Maya (even though it does have a simulator in the base product) can handle it as a plug-in, and the circular dependency is no problem at all. [...]This is a much harder problem than it sounds.[/QUOTE]
With Blender you have complete access to the source code so the problems you have with other software of being limited to how they expose things in their API is nonexistent. Or you could do it as a module and use the built in python scripting.
[QUOTE]You can even implement your own "things" which the Maya core has no concept of (e.g. it's not a shader, it's not geometry, it's not a user control), and everything will just work. Try doing that with Blender.[/QuOTE]
You can do that in Blender too - Blenders internal structure is extremely flexible, adding new types is very easy and everything 'just works'.
LetterRip