Re:A Neat Pixar/Disney Story
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Odd, I picked up Toy Story: The Art and Making of the Animated Film, and it tells an entirely different story. In this version, Pixar's "Black Monday" arrived November 17, 1993 when the creative team got their first look at the assembled story reels. There were serious problems with the story, especially with Woody's character.
"If anybody helped us get back on the wagon most, it was the creative people at Disney," says Stanton. "Con Clements and John Musker [co-directors of Aladding and The Little Mermaid] were terrific. They immediately said, listen guys, you'll get through this. We went through it on Aladdin, and you'll turn it around.
Still, I agree that Disney purchasing Pixar would be a complete disaster, in terms of blending cultures.
Many of the characters you think of as being plasticine are actually foam latex, or a composite (ie: only the face being plasticine). For example, Morph is 100% plasticine, Wat (from "Wat's Pig) is a composite, with a more traditional foam latex body and clay hands.
(This is true with a lot of things you might consider being "clay" animation. For example, Klayman from "The Neverhood" was a foam latex character in most of the shots).
You can get more details in the Aardman book "Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation" (in the US it's labled "Creating 3-D Animation : The Aardman Book of Filmmaking"). You can see some really wonderful sets and minatures there - it's really a pity that it's been lost.
To answer someone else's question, plasticine is an oil-based clay, so it won't dry out. That also means you can't fire (harden) the material as you could with traditional clay.
When Microsoft comes out with a new OS, they have to convince users that they need to switch to it. This can be difficult, since customers have made a hefty investment in the technology, and tend to be pretty happy where they are.
There's a carrot and stick approach. The carrot is that Microsoft touts all the cool new features that will make life so much easier. Features you won't be able to live without.
Then there's the stick. Part of it is to have Office use features of the new OS, so you won't be able to perform some spiffy operation without it.
Another part of the stick is to badmouth the prior version, but explain that all the issues being badmouthed are fixed and gone in the new OS.
So you get stories where Microsoft "finally admits" to various things, (like that DOS really does underly Win9x, despite assurances that it was gone)... You've read them.
There's certainly truth to what Microsoft claims, and it's nice to see real issues being addressed. For example, WinXP's move away from the Win9x base to the more solid WinNT base was a huge win for most users (although gamers complained about a lack of drivers).
But don't be fooled - fundamentally, you're just looking at PR spin designed to created demand for an new OS.
Once, there was a project known as Gnome Basic, which was intended to work as a replacement for VB. Then the project was suddenly abandoned, because the authors decided that VB.Net was the way to go.
Unfortunately, the Mono Basic has thus far failed to materialize. I keep reading about how it's slowly creeping, but all the real focus is on C#. If it's gotten past the "Hello, World" state where it was a couple years ago, I haven't heard about it.
Each time I read how Mono is advancing, and how complete Mono web development is, I have another look at the status of MonoBasic. That means I go to the whopping one (count 'em!) page devoted to Mono Basic. It says (just as it did a year ago):
The above features are fully implemented and are being checked for conformance to MS's implementation.
So what's the status? Is it 10% done? 90% done? Is there a timetable attached to the project? Will the Mono IDE support it?
I can't tell. It's pretty much the way it's always been.
The Visual Basic runtime has been ported over, allowing applications compiled on ASP.NET to run, but that's not the same thing, at all. Note that it was donated by Mainsoft, not developed by the Mono folk themselves.
It's too bad, because we're an ASP.Net shop, and we're not about to jump over to C#. Don't bother with the lecture about how the only difference between the two languages is just syntactic sugar, either.
Can't you people leave us nerds alone and let us have our science the way it's meant to be - hard facts developed from data collected by rigorous experimentation and open, critical peer review.
Scientists, like everyone else except for us chatterbots here on Slashdot, are only human. So things that are theories and possibly flawed observations get treated as facts, and it takes a generation or so for the old guard to retire and for the new theories to get the proper consideration that they deserved in the first place.
I'll use Galileo as a an example. He was right with his "planets going around the sun" bit, but he insisted on sticking with a circular orbit instead of an ellipse, which meant his predictions didn't match up with observations. Deciding to publish his theory in the form of a brilliant scientist (himself) against a dull-witted fundie (a blatant caricature of Urban VIII) didn't help, either.
The sad bit, this "Scientist vs. Church" sort of story is played out as "Hack vs. Real Science", where someone with a better theory (more predictive, etc.) gets thrown out of the Church of Science because he's viewed as heretical, too controversial, or just simply too antagonistic against the current establishment.
To use a cliche - Move along, nothing to see here...
I really like the Ubuntu distro, and I'm seriously thinking of going that route with my next upgrade. Ubuntu really shows off the nice things about Gnome. (Except for the Human theme - give me Gorilla, please).
In contrast, the Kubuntu doesn't really show off much of the latest KDE release. I booted it up, had a look, and [i]Zzzzzzz[/i]. Heck, it hasn't even got any games! I rebooted, and wiped the.iso from my disk.
I'm hoping that someone else puts out a nice Live CD distro to show KDE off, but Kubuntu isn't it.
You might want to check out JPatch, a patch modeler implemented in Java. Although it's still in beta, it goes way beyond the capabilities of what sPatch could do. It even handles 5 point patches (ala Animation:Master. It's a great little modeler, and it'll eventually support animation.
RenderMan is very cool, but animation isn't an intrinsic feature. The program that does the animation magic at Pixar is called Marionette, and I've only seen a couple screenshots of it. The interface looks like a spreadsheet, but it's very powerful - there are all sorts of parameters the animators can adjust for pre-determined actions (roughly akin to morphs).
RenderMan itself is an implementation of the Reyes renderer ("Renders Everything You See"). First and foremost, it's a zBuffer rendering engine.
It had lots of really cool features - the ability to render tons of geometry without having to have the entire scene in memory, a very powerful shading language, the brilliant folks at Pixar pushing it to the limits...
Anyone remember "The Road to Point Reyes"? (A link to it would be appreciated; I can't seem to Google it).
These days, it's even got a raytracer built into it. (A moment of silence for ExLuna and BMRT, please).
It also helps to have folk like John Lassiter running the place, who's well grounded in "classical" animation.
The Governor should direct the state Chief Information Officer to obtain copyright and patent protection on the code owned by the state to protect this valuable resource as an intellectual property.
While it might look like a plan to simply create a code library, the real goal is, of course, to license this valuable intellectual property:
Additional income may be generated in later years through copyright and patent license agreements and sales. That revenue cannot be estimated until all state-owned code is identified.
The whole suggestion is mangling of ideas, where the author treats "copyright" and "patents" as if they were the same thing. Here's my favorite paragraph:
Computer application programs over the last few years have evolved into programming languages that are designed to be easily modified to work in various environments. For example, HTML, XML, Java, LINUX and others are written in modular formats that can be connected in different pieces of code to accomplish a variety of functions.In computer terminology, each computer operating system is called a platform and language code that can be used on more than one platform is called "cross platform code."
Where to begin with that? I hadn't realized that applications had "evolved into programming languages". What "cross platform" code has to do with anything is beyond me.
They go on to claim that by using a code library - which will only need four librarians to handle all the code in the State:
The State Chief Information Officer should issue a directive requiring all departments to follow the standards and submit all code developed to the library
we'll be able to code faster, cheaper, and stop using contractors:
The savings will be generated by eliminating the need for the approximately 120 consultants involved in application development throughout the various state departments.
Sigh.
I owe FunkyChild an apology - these features do indeed exist in the current release of Blender. I was irritated because I had spent so much time struggling with the IPO curves, and hadn't seen anything about the sliders posted in the 2.3.3. changelog.
But he's right and I'm wrong about this: 2.3.3 allows IPO curves to be named, and the Action Editor has sliders.
You can't edit the names of the curves in the IPO Curve Editor. Instead, you have to go to the Action Editor and change them their. And yes, the sliders are there exactly as FunkyChild's screenshot shows.
So again, my apologies to FunkyChild and anyone else I've misinformed about the latest 2.3.3 Blender release.
I certainly wasn't posting any disinformation. I had tried this out five days ago, going to the Blender Community Documentation pages and looking for online RVK tutorials. It's not in the latest and greatest version of the Community Documentation, either.
As for your screenshot, what version of Blender are you running? These features aren't noted in the 2.3.3 changelog - heck, I can't find them documentated anywhere. So either:
You're running a custom build, in which case it's not really a Blender feature yet, is it?
Not being documented anywhere, they don't really exist?
So which is it? How can we mere mortals enjoy this wonderful feature?
I ran across it cruising through Freshmeat to see if there were any good 3D animation programs that I had missed.
Really, there's not much out there. Blender is the best and most capable, but (despite many advances) it's UI has a steep learing curve. But if you stick with it, you can do amazing stuff, and to be fair, the UI is way better than it used to be, and promises to only get better.
Anim8or is an Windows program by Steven Glanville. (It works fine under WINE.) It's free, but closed source, because Steve doesn't want to deal with people bugging him about unofficial releases - I understand the sentiment! It's a great modeller, and I think the scanline renderer is underrated, but the animation features are a weak - for example, it doesn't yet have IK. However, the next release promises to include it, so it's definately something worth watching.
Art of Illusion is an open source Java program by Peter Eastman, and I suspect that most people - if they've heard of it at all - know that it's a full-featured raytracer, but don't realize that it supports animation. The bones based animation uses a 'pin and drag' interface based on Animanium, and it's very cool. Unfortunately, you can only do animation via pose morphs in the current release, but the next version promises support bones animation on a seperate IK track. By the time 2.0 comes out, I think it'll be an excellent program for doing character animation.
There have been rumors that some day Björn Gustavsson's Wings3D would support animation, but so far, that's only rumor. Wings3D started out as an open source version of IzWare's Nendo modeller, but has in many ways surpassed Nendo since then, so it's possible...
Finally, there's Sascha Ledinsky's Java based JPatch program, a successor to Mike Clifton's now abandoned sPatch program. Although it's currently only a modeller (the beta should be ready by the end of the month), it has designs to support animation - sort of an open source version of Animation:Master. It may not look like there's much going on at the site, but I've had a chance to play with some of the development versions - it's worth keeping an eye on.
If anyone knows of any open source/non-commercial programs capable of producing character animation, I'd love to know about them!
The problem isn't that there are hotkeys. Hotkeys are a great thing, and are a necessity. For example, g to grab an object, and then x to constrain it to the x axis. Nice and fast.
The problem is that for many critical features in Blender, the UI offers no clue that a particular option might exist, or what hotkey/mouse combination you need to press if you knew it existed, but forgot which hotkey it was. Given Blender's roots - an in-house production tool - this sort of interface isn't unusual. But now that Blender's gone "open source", there's been agreement from Ton and others that the UI is broken and needs to be fixed.
Take a look at Art of Illusion or JPatch for examples of open source applications that are "user friendly" - they support hotkeys, but any important functionality can be reached through the UI. When you are in a particular mode, the status bar at the bottom of the window displays hotkey modifiers and mouse options that are available. (I don't include Wings3D because it's pretty much specialized for modelling).
I'll readily that the example programs are currently less capable than Blender (and Art of Illusion is due for a UI overhaul in a few releases), but they show how these sorts of things can be added to the UI, even for complex processes.
And while Blender's made a lot of progress in making the UI better, but it's stalled in the last couple months - especially in critical areas like RVKs. Hopefully, people will get back on track with overhauling the UI.
If you want to implement Sims-esque life, you might have a look at breve. But you might need a Beowolf cluster:
"In the aptly named Creature Evolver I attempted to reproduce a project originally conceived by Karl Sims, but which at the time that Sims implemented it required an expensive super computer. My goal was not necessarily to improve on Sims' work, at least not in the first iteration, but merely to demonstrate that it is possible to evolve novel physical morphologies and accompanying neural control in a three dimensional world with an accurate underlying physics. Ideally, I would like to explore the possibility of entire ecosystems of physically simulated organisms. At present it is only barely possible to evolve a single organism in a reasonable period of time however."
I agree. However, there's been a lot of work to redo the Blender interface, and that work is continuing. For example, the Blender Funboard newsgroup was put together for this purpose.
Unfortunately, this newsgroup hasn't proved entirely successful. One problem is that long-time users are loathe to have their beloved interface changed, since they feel that it's just "dumbing it down", and any changes will also slow them down.
Another issue is that coders would rather add new features (ambiant occlusion, new texture models, etc.) than work on the UI. Ton (the primary architect) has been working on the Blender Book, and the other major coder has been off on vacation.
I recently tried to learn RVKs. What's an RVK you might ask? They are Relative Vertex Keys, but the rest of the world calls them Morph Targets. And where the rest of the world allows you to actually select a named morph target and drag a slider, Blender insists that you create IPO curves (interpolation, not initial price offering) - somehow remembering that RVK curve #7 was a left blink, and RVK curve #8 was the phoneme "o" - and then ctrl+click on the IPO curve and drag to create a spline for the RVK...
It's a freaking UI nightmare!
The refusal to use common nomenclature and standard UI tools here pretty wells sums up the problems with the Blender UI.
Still, William Reynish (aka Monkeyboi) has put together a great set of proposals to fix the UI, and many of his prior suggestions have been incorporated. So I'm hoping that Ton and others concentrate on getting the remainder of Blender UI out of the "dark ages" so the rest of us can use it.
Re:Qt is almost a like a language
on
A Taste of Qt 4
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· Score: 5, Informative
What people don't realize is that Qt is actually a massive foundational library...
Thank goodness I wasn't the only one who read it that way. But I blame poor kerning . One of these days my Linux distro will get a real set of fonts that pays attention to type hints.
When I was a kid, there was nothing better than candied yams. Couldn't get enough of them. Then one day, I either overdosed on 'em, or my tastebuds changed. Now I can't stand them.
It's a pity; it's one of the few foods where it's considered acceptable to cook with mini-marshmallows.
I can relate. I used to have a Kawai K1 and a Emu Proteus 1. Things were going just swimmingly until one day the Proteus decided to freak out and played a bunch of random notes, really fast, and really high in pitch.
I think it was the fault of the K1 throwing random MIDI data at the Proteus, but since it had proved itself to be unreliable in performance, I (quite sadly) had to sell the Proteus - I couldn't afford to replace the K1.
These days, I pretty much stick to playing the piano - I know it's not going to fail me, even if the power completely shuts down.
Hrm... I just noticed this blurb on the page for the OrchEXTRA, apparently the budget version of the Sinfonia (emphasis added):
With OrchEXTRA in the pit, actors on stage feel fully supported while the pit musicians experience the thrill of playing with a full orchestra.
Wow! The thrill of being able to play with a full orchestra! I know it's the kind of thing that thrilled me when I started playing in the orchestra in school - the chance to actually play along with a real, live OrchEXTRA! (Iknow - the fact that my school actually had an orchestra makes me really, really old.)
For me, the most interesting thing happening in Wine has been the ReactOS project. Basically, it's an attempt to clone the Windows NT operating system.
There have been a number of attempts to clone the Windows OS in the past (i.e. Freedows and the Alliance OS), but most of them have self-destructed with no real product.
The ReactOS, on the other hand, has managed to get the core NT working, and has been added the Wine libraries to supply much of the functionality. Earlier last month they released a version with a functioning Windows Explorer clone, and they seem well on the way of reaching the goal of running OpenOffice and Mozilla by October, 2004. The target of a fully functional Windows OS replacement is only about a year away.
Correction - the audio detection does work on my machine, it just was set to a volume level of zero. KPPP works, but I had to tweak some of the settings to get it to work (it connected, but none of the applictions initially "saw" the connection).
In contrast, Knoppix "just works" out of the box. It just doesn't look as slick.
I'm a Mandrake user, and regularly use Knoppix to access my email (in fact, I'm using it right now since I'd forgotten my Slashdot password).
I'd taken a look at MandrakeMove, and was very unimpressed - it's basically stripped of anything useful except for a few office tools, and doesn't come with enough codecs to handle multimedia in a useful manner. In contrast, I've already burned several copies of PCLinuxOS for my coworkers - it's quite good.
Knoppix still seems to have better hardware detection. For example, on my home machine PCLinuxOS didn't seem to properly initialize the sound card, or find my second CD ROM - both of which Knoppix does properly. And it doesn't seem to have as many developer tools, although I didn't get a chance to fully explore it. For a "normal" user, the selection seems complete, though.
I also didn't see any way of setting up a permanent data store (like Knoppix's Persistant Home Directory). But this is a preview release, and I may have simply missed it.
PCLinuxOS is basically everything that MandrakeMove should have been, but wasn't. Where MandrakeMove feels like crippleware, PCLinuxOS feels like a full version of Mandrake on CD - with all the eyecandy. The look and feel is awesome. I'm looking forward to the full release.
Blender's user interface used to be a shining example of a hostile user interface.
However, the Blender UI has gotten a major overhaul with the 2.3 release. It's now possible for me to use Blender, where before I'd just become frustrated and give up (and yes, I read the documentation).
There's a lot that remains to be done, but from the mockups I've seen (for example, those by William Reynish), using Blender in the future promises to be a joy rather than a case of "Rage Against the Machine".
Actually, the beta that Ton posted is a hybrid renderer. It's still primarily a scanline renderer, but you now have the option of using raytracing for shadows and reflections.
Ton's had the raytracer written for some time now, but it never got incorporated into Blender. The preview is the first to incorporate the code.
You could already do shadows and reflections in Blender, but they were simulated with shadowmaps and reflection maps, the same way that Pixar's Renderman renderer had done it.
Worthless trivia: Renderman only recently acquired raytracing - for the few times that it was actually used, they used the BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Toolkit), a raytracer developed by Larry Gritz. Larry quit Pixar and formed ExLuna, which marketed another Renderman compliant renderer. Pixar sued ExLuna for IP infringement (the exact details are hazy, since they came to an out of court agreement), ExLuna was bought out and all the renderers (including BMRT) disappeared. Soon thereafter, Pixar's Renderman added raytracing support.
Still, full raytracing is used in Renderman quite sparingly.
The Yafray (Yet Another Free Raytracer) is a stand-alone full raytracer with a lot of features that has nice integration (thanks to Python scripting) in Blender. Future versions of Blender promise to integrate it more tightly, and seems more likely that's where a 'full raytrace' option for Blender will come from.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, I agree that Disney purchasing Pixar would be a complete disaster, in terms of blending cultures.
Many of the characters you think of as being plasticine are actually foam latex, or a composite (ie: only the face being plasticine). For example, Morph is 100% plasticine, Wat (from "Wat's Pig) is a composite, with a more traditional foam latex body and clay hands.
(This is true with a lot of things you might consider being "clay" animation. For example, Klayman from "The Neverhood" was a foam latex character in most of the shots).
You can get more details in the Aardman book "Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation" (in the US it's labled "Creating 3-D Animation : The Aardman Book of Filmmaking"). You can see some really wonderful sets and minatures there - it's really a pity that it's been lost.
To answer someone else's question, plasticine is an oil-based clay, so it won't dry out. That also means you can't fire (harden) the material as you could with traditional clay.
There's a carrot and stick approach. The carrot is that Microsoft touts all the cool new features that will make life so much easier. Features you won't be able to live without.
Then there's the stick. Part of it is to have Office use features of the new OS, so you won't be able to perform some spiffy operation without it.
Another part of the stick is to badmouth the prior version, but explain that all the issues being badmouthed are fixed and gone in the new OS.
So you get stories where Microsoft "finally admits" to various things, (like that DOS really does underly Win9x, despite assurances that it was gone)... You've read them.
There's certainly truth to what Microsoft claims, and it's nice to see real issues being addressed. For example, WinXP's move away from the Win9x base to the more solid WinNT base was a huge win for most users (although gamers complained about a lack of drivers).
But don't be fooled - fundamentally, you're just looking at PR spin designed to created demand for an new OS.
Unfortunately, the Mono Basic has thus far failed to materialize. I keep reading about how it's slowly creeping, but all the real focus is on C#. If it's gotten past the "Hello, World" state where it was a couple years ago, I haven't heard about it.
Each time I read how Mono is advancing, and how complete Mono web development is, I have another look at the status of MonoBasic. That means I go to the whopping one (count 'em!) page devoted to Mono Basic. It says (just as it did a year ago):
So what's the status? Is it 10% done? 90% done? Is there a timetable attached to the project? Will the Mono IDE support it?
I can't tell. It's pretty much the way it's always been.
The Visual Basic runtime has been ported over, allowing applications compiled on ASP.NET to run, but that's not the same thing, at all. Note that it was donated by Mainsoft, not developed by the Mono folk themselves.
It's too bad, because we're an ASP.Net shop, and we're not about to jump over to C#. Don't bother with the lecture about how the only difference between the two languages is just syntactic sugar, either.
Scientists, like everyone else except for us chatterbots here on Slashdot, are only human. So things that are theories and possibly flawed observations get treated as facts, and it takes a generation or so for the old guard to retire and for the new theories to get the proper consideration that they deserved in the first place.
I'll use Galileo as a an example. He was right with his "planets going around the sun" bit, but he insisted on sticking with a circular orbit instead of an ellipse, which meant his predictions didn't match up with observations. Deciding to publish his theory in the form of a brilliant scientist (himself) against a dull-witted fundie (a blatant caricature of Urban VIII) didn't help, either.
The sad bit, this "Scientist vs. Church" sort of story is played out as "Hack vs. Real Science", where someone with a better theory (more predictive, etc.) gets thrown out of the Church of Science because he's viewed as heretical, too controversial, or just simply too antagonistic against the current establishment.
I really like the Ubuntu distro, and I'm seriously thinking of going that route with my next upgrade. Ubuntu really shows off the nice things about Gnome. (Except for the Human theme - give me Gorilla, please).
In contrast, the Kubuntu doesn't really show off much of the latest KDE release. I booted it up, had a look, and [i]Zzzzzzz[/i]. Heck, it hasn't even got any games! I rebooted, and wiped the .iso from my disk.
I'm hoping that someone else puts out a nice Live CD distro to show KDE off, but Kubuntu isn't it.
The price of a newly released CD runs about $18 at my local Tower Records. That's a hell of a sticker shock, with our without inflation.
The price of an re-released album runs around $12 for a "super saver" that's been out for over 20 years.
The only way I can figure that you get an "average" price of $13 is to include CD singles in your price.
And yes, it exports to POV-Ray.
People are working on adding distributed raytracing and photon mapping, so I expect that the internal renderer will be very cool in a few releases.
RenderMan itself is an implementation of the Reyes renderer ("Renders Everything You See"). First and foremost, it's a zBuffer rendering engine.
It had lots of really cool features - the ability to render tons of geometry without having to have the entire scene in memory, a very powerful shading language, the brilliant folks at Pixar pushing it to the limits...
Anyone remember "The Road to Point Reyes"? (A link to it would be appreciated; I can't seem to Google it).
These days, it's even got a raytracer built into it. (A moment of silence for ExLuna and BMRT, please).
It also helps to have folk like John Lassiter running the place, who's well grounded in "classical" animation.
- The Governor should direct the state Chief Information Officer to obtain copyright and patent protection on the code owned by the state to protect this valuable resource as an intellectual property.
While it might look like a plan to simply create a code library, the real goal is, of course, to license this valuable intellectual property:The whole suggestion is mangling of ideas, where the author treats "copyright" and "patents" as if they were the same thing. Here's my favorite paragraph:
- Computer application programs over the last few years have evolved into programming languages that are designed to be easily modified to work in various environments. For example, HTML, XML, Java, LINUX and others are written in modular formats that can be connected in different pieces of code to accomplish a variety of functions.In computer terminology, each computer operating system is called a platform and language code that can be used on more than one platform is called "cross platform code."
Where to begin with that? I hadn't realized that applications had "evolved into programming languages". What "cross platform" code has to do with anything is beyond me.They go on to claim that by using a code library - which will only need four librarians to handle all the code in the State:
- The State Chief Information Officer should issue a directive requiring all departments to follow the standards and submit all code developed to the library
we'll be able to code faster, cheaper, and stop using contractors:Fortunately, we've got a 30 day period for public comment, so folk from California might want to chime in here!
But he's right and I'm wrong about this: 2.3.3 allows IPO curves to be named, and the Action Editor has sliders.
You can't edit the names of the curves in the IPO Curve Editor. Instead, you have to go to the Action Editor and change them their. And yes, the sliders are there exactly as FunkyChild's screenshot shows.
So again, my apologies to FunkyChild and anyone else I've misinformed about the latest 2.3.3 Blender release.
As for your screenshot, what version of Blender are you running? These features aren't noted in the 2.3.3 changelog - heck, I can't find them documentated anywhere. So either:
So which is it? How can we mere mortals enjoy this wonderful feature?
I ran across it cruising through Freshmeat to see if there were any good 3D animation programs that I had missed.
Really, there's not much out there. Blender is the best and most capable, but (despite many advances) it's UI has a steep learing curve. But if you stick with it, you can do amazing stuff, and to be fair, the UI is way better than it used to be, and promises to only get better.
Anim8or is an Windows program by Steven Glanville. (It works fine under WINE.) It's free, but closed source, because Steve doesn't want to deal with people bugging him about unofficial releases - I understand the sentiment! It's a great modeller, and I think the scanline renderer is underrated, but the animation features are a weak - for example, it doesn't yet have IK. However, the next release promises to include it, so it's definately something worth watching.
Art of Illusion is an open source Java program by Peter Eastman, and I suspect that most people - if they've heard of it at all - know that it's a full-featured raytracer, but don't realize that it supports animation. The bones based animation uses a 'pin and drag' interface based on Animanium, and it's very cool. Unfortunately, you can only do animation via pose morphs in the current release, but the next version promises support bones animation on a seperate IK track. By the time 2.0 comes out, I think it'll be an excellent program for doing character animation.
There have been rumors that some day Björn Gustavsson's Wings3D would support animation, but so far, that's only rumor. Wings3D started out as an open source version of IzWare's Nendo modeller, but has in many ways surpassed Nendo since then, so it's possible...
Finally, there's Sascha Ledinsky's Java based JPatch program, a successor to Mike Clifton's now abandoned sPatch program. Although it's currently only a modeller (the beta should be ready by the end of the month), it has designs to support animation - sort of an open source version of Animation:Master. It may not look like there's much going on at the site, but I've had a chance to play with some of the development versions - it's worth keeping an eye on.
If anyone knows of any open source/non-commercial programs capable of producing character animation, I'd love to know about them!
The problem is that for many critical features in Blender, the UI offers no clue that a particular option might exist, or what hotkey/mouse combination you need to press if you knew it existed, but forgot which hotkey it was. Given Blender's roots - an in-house production tool - this sort of interface isn't unusual. But now that Blender's gone "open source", there's been agreement from Ton and others that the UI is broken and needs to be fixed.
Take a look at Art of Illusion or JPatch for examples of open source applications that are "user friendly" - they support hotkeys, but any important functionality can be reached through the UI. When you are in a particular mode, the status bar at the bottom of the window displays hotkey modifiers and mouse options that are available. (I don't include Wings3D because it's pretty much specialized for modelling).
I'll readily that the example programs are currently less capable than Blender (and Art of Illusion is due for a UI overhaul in a few releases), but they show how these sorts of things can be added to the UI, even for complex processes.
And while Blender's made a lot of progress in making the UI better, but it's stalled in the last couple months - especially in critical areas like RVKs. Hopefully, people will get back on track with overhauling the UI.
- "In the aptly named Creature Evolver I attempted to reproduce a project originally conceived by Karl Sims, but which at the time that Sims implemented it required an expensive super computer. My goal was not necessarily to improve on Sims' work, at least not in the first iteration, but merely to demonstrate that it is possible to evolve novel physical morphologies and accompanying neural control in a three dimensional world with an accurate underlying physics. Ideally, I would like to explore the possibility of entire ecosystems of physically simulated organisms. At present it is only barely possible to evolve a single organism in a reasonable period of time however."
Still, it looks to be a very cool project.Unfortunately, this newsgroup hasn't proved entirely successful. One problem is that long-time users are loathe to have their beloved interface changed, since they feel that it's just "dumbing it down", and any changes will also slow them down.
Another issue is that coders would rather add new features (ambiant occlusion, new texture models, etc.) than work on the UI. Ton (the primary architect) has been working on the Blender Book, and the other major coder has been off on vacation.
I recently tried to learn RVKs. What's an RVK you might ask? They are Relative Vertex Keys, but the rest of the world calls them Morph Targets. And where the rest of the world allows you to actually select a named morph target and drag a slider, Blender insists that you create IPO curves (interpolation, not initial price offering) - somehow remembering that RVK curve #7 was a left blink, and RVK curve #8 was the phoneme "o" - and then ctrl+click on the IPO curve and drag to create a spline for the RVK ...
It's a freaking UI nightmare!
The refusal to use common nomenclature and standard UI tools here pretty wells sums up the problems with the Blender UI.
Still, William Reynish (aka Monkeyboi) has put together a great set of proposals to fix the UI, and many of his prior suggestions have been incorporated. So I'm hoping that Ton and others concentrate on getting the remainder of Blender UI out of the "dark ages" so the rest of us can use it.
Yes, a lot like wxWidgets.
When I was a kid, there was nothing better than candied yams. Couldn't get enough of them. Then one day, I either overdosed on 'em, or my tastebuds changed. Now I can't stand them.
It's a pity; it's one of the few foods where it's considered acceptable to cook with mini-marshmallows.
I yam what I yam. - Popeye
I think it was the fault of the K1 throwing random MIDI data at the Proteus, but since it had proved itself to be unreliable in performance, I (quite sadly) had to sell the Proteus - I couldn't afford to replace the K1.
Of course, you can now get all five Proteus modules on CD for about $100US.
These days, I pretty much stick to playing the piano - I know it's not going to fail me, even if the power completely shuts down.
Hrm... I just noticed this blurb on the page for the OrchEXTRA, apparently the budget version of the Sinfonia (emphasis added):
Wow! The thrill of being able to play with a full orchestra! I know it's the kind of thing that thrilled me when I started playing in the orchestra in school - the chance to actually play along with a real, live OrchEXTRA! (Iknow - the fact that my school actually had an orchestra makes me really, really old.)
So it's not a substitute, it's the real thing.
There have been a number of attempts to clone the Windows OS in the past (i.e. Freedows and the Alliance OS), but most of them have self-destructed with no real product.
The ReactOS, on the other hand, has managed to get the core NT working, and has been added the Wine libraries to supply much of the functionality. Earlier last month they released a version with a functioning Windows Explorer clone, and they seem well on the way of reaching the goal of running OpenOffice and Mozilla by October, 2004. The target of a fully functional Windows OS replacement is only about a year away.
In contrast, Knoppix "just works" out of the box. It just doesn't look as slick.
I'm a Mandrake user, and regularly use Knoppix to access my email (in fact, I'm using it right now since I'd forgotten my Slashdot password).
I'd taken a look at MandrakeMove, and was very unimpressed - it's basically stripped of anything useful except for a few office tools, and doesn't come with enough codecs to handle multimedia in a useful manner. In contrast, I've already burned several copies of PCLinuxOS for my coworkers - it's quite good.
Knoppix still seems to have better hardware detection. For example, on my home machine PCLinuxOS didn't seem to properly initialize the sound card, or find my second CD ROM - both of which Knoppix does properly. And it doesn't seem to have as many developer tools, although I didn't get a chance to fully explore it. For a "normal" user, the selection seems complete, though.
I also didn't see any way of setting up a permanent data store (like Knoppix's Persistant Home Directory). But this is a preview release, and I may have simply missed it.
PCLinuxOS is basically everything that MandrakeMove should have been, but wasn't. Where MandrakeMove feels like crippleware, PCLinuxOS feels like a full version of Mandrake on CD - with all the eyecandy. The look and feel is awesome. I'm looking forward to the full release.
However, the Blender UI has gotten a major overhaul with the 2.3 release. It's now possible for me to use Blender, where before I'd just become frustrated and give up (and yes, I read the documentation).
There's a lot that remains to be done, but from the mockups I've seen (for example, those by William Reynish), using Blender in the future promises to be a joy rather than a case of "Rage Against the Machine".
Ton's had the raytracer written for some time now, but it never got incorporated into Blender. The preview is the first to incorporate the code.
You could already do shadows and reflections in Blender, but they were simulated with shadowmaps and reflection maps, the same way that Pixar's Renderman renderer had done it.
The Yafray (Yet Another Free Raytracer) is a stand-alone full raytracer with a lot of features that has nice integration (thanks to Python scripting) in Blender. Future versions of Blender promise to integrate it more tightly, and seems more likely that's where a 'full raytrace' option for Blender will come from.