Firstly, the object axis is misaligned. When you’re modelling with Blender for realXtend and Naali, you should make sure that object axis is aligned with world axis. This is true for widgets and objects that need to be aligned with the world axis of realXtend and Naali, which happen to be the same as Blender. Secondly, the widgets were scaled in code to be of a different size. Instead I now model them on correct scale right away. Thirdly, the widgets had more complex geometry and lastly, there were a lot of redundant materials lying around, so it was easy to pick out wrong materials instead of using those that should’ve been used.

After addressing all these issues I also could remove and simplify much of the code for initialising and basic handling of the manipulators (high-lighting, axis determination). Work continues in perfecting these for proper usage, with upcoming rulers to guide users with their transforms.

To conclude, here are the current widgets:

As a little extra I decided to create a small widget that I call the sound ruler. This little widget will show you the radius and volume of the attached sound for an object in as simple way. The radius obviously as a circle, and the volume with a few vertical lines distributed evenly along the radius circle.

Watch the video to get an idea:

Hope you liked it.

/Nathan

ps. I played myself the short part of a piece from Bach (Bourree).

I’ll be working on the bug tracker and on documentation (two of the things probably considered least sexy), to get Blender 2.5 finally out of the beta stage. I’m honoured that the Blender Foundation wants focused effort from me in this way.

I hope I can do make a good impact on the bug count in our tracker and supporting other developers in stabilizing the codebase.

Rest assured, with all the current work I have (and for which I’m grateful: realxtend.org and blender.org), I’ll continue to work on and provide Planet Blender and Blenderstorm.

Enjoy your Blender!
/Nathan

We’ve all been waiting for it since the dreadful crash of the servers and the backups: Blenderstorm is finally back and online!

The last 1,5 month I have been working on getting this done. I did some venturing out to alternative implementations – one in Lua (on top of Sputnik, which worked pretty nicely, but getting it to run properly on the host was a different story), and one in Python (using web.py). Both own implementation had the good part that they were light, but that was only the feature request part – no user management, no spam protection, nothing.

So, to save my own nerves, and to give you finally what you deserve, I decided to port Ideatorrent once again. This time though I made sure I had the code from the beginning versioned and in some off-location repository. You can find the code for Blenderstorm over at gitorious.org. Much of the work was about changing the schema to use the Schema API from Drupal for MySQL, and to have the corresponding PHP parts also updated for use on MySQL.

I think I’ve got now all fixed for MySQL – at least the testing I did myself didn’t pose any big problems anymore. If you find any, please report in comments.

Those who were registered with the beta version have been moved to the production site too. None of the requests and solutions from the beta side were moved, we start now with a clean slate.

Blender developers I ask to contact me after they have registered, so I can give them the proper permissions. Also I’ll be needing a few more reviewers and moderators to help managing the content for the site. If you’re interested in helping out in that area, please let me know!

Now, everybody, write your feature requests and proposals. Please be specific and complete – that way we can make sure that both the requests and inferred from that the actual implementation are going to be a success.

Enjoy!
/Nathan

Yesterday and today have been quite busy days here at the stand, and for Renderfarm.fi it has been even harder with the server broken down. Still we have had nice audiences for the different presentations. It was great to see the work from High Five crew of Happy Hour shortfilm and today Snowblind, with it’s use of Blender for effects.

I also briefly went around and I met with Kayak 3d people, who showed a game for which they also used Blender to create the content. It’s just great to see Blender being used in all those places.

Obviously it was also a great time to meet all those Finnish blender users and talk with them. Renderfarm.fi also presented an upcoming Wreck A Movie integration, where I have my own short production The Romuttamo running.

I have recorded a short demonstration in which I show how the light can be set using an external tool that has Verse support, in this case the Connector scene graph editor from Quel Solaar.

Implementationally the Verse integration is done on the level of Primitive class, where Primitive will connect to a verse server when instantiated. Upon accept Naali will then subscribe to object nodes and for each object node it receives it will also subscribe to changes.

When a new object is created in Naali, also a verse node is created, to hold and communicate changes to EC_OgreLight.

To keep track of the different objects on different servers there are three maps, one to map RexUUID to VNodeID, one reverse VNodeID to RexUUID and then an extra RexUUID to entity_id_t to speedup lookups when receiving updates through Verse.

When Blender gets again proper Verse integration this will be especially interesting when thinking from perspective of content authoring using external tools. Blender is already a great modelling and content creation suite, and with Verse it’s easy to write simple, small tools to do a number of tasks (texturing, scene decoration, mesh changing, audio attaching, etc.)

Next to bug hunting the single biggest task is still ahead: themeing of Blenderstorm. I ask readers to propose designs (maybe even propose patches that implement those designs!) for Blenderstorm. If you are familiar with Drupal, then get the Blenderstorm code from http://gitorious.org/blendersites/blenderstorm. It contains all necessary code to install a blenderstorm instance locally, so you can work on the theme.

After you’ve installed Drupal and enabled first the Blenderstorm-QA module, then the Blenderstorm module, you still have to run the queries that are in modules/blenderstorm/initial_data.sql – these are permission setups for Blenderstorm. After that you need to create roles that have those permissions. Also make sure you have clean urls enabled – currently Blenderstorm won’t function properly if you don’t have it enabled. Further I think installing it should be pretty straight forward.

I hope to have Blenderstorm online soon, so it would be nice to have a new theme by the end of next week (then will be Assembly 2010!), although I won’t mind opening up the site before a final theme is done.

I look forward to see what you all can come up with!

/Nathan

For the win32 builds FFTW3 support (used in Smoke simulation) is now enabled too, whereas for the 64bit builds it already was there.

This build has now the merged GSoC Sculpt branch work, as well as the latest changes for the filepath patch.

Please give these a good spin again. Thanks and enjoy!
/Nathan

I added the frontend part for session managent of users, so after upload you can follow your session progress through Blender using the uploader script (Renderfarm.fi in the Renderer dropdown).

Also a set of UI improvements were done, as well as improvements to the communication with the backend server handling the submissions.

Renderfarm.fi now thus supports Blender 2.5a2, and I’m sure we’ll be supporting the imminent Blender 2.5 beta too.

All in all I think the service has been improved a lot, and you should find it a very useful way to get those long renders done much faster

Enjoy!

/Nathan

I think that the Renderfarm.fi project is a very interesting project for Blender users (and during summer another renderer should be integrated – more on that in due time), since it allows users to send in their scenes that may take a long time to finish on their own machine(s). Having the growing group of rendering clients from Renderfarm.fi is just what you need then.

I also like to put my idle CPU cycles to use for the project. I have a very own team of crunchers called jesterKing Crunchers who like to run the Renderfarm.fi BOINC client.

If you’re interested in donating your free CPU cycles for others to use, please consider joining my team jesterKing Crunchers! The aim is to become one of the largest and best teams on Renderfarm.fi!

• Blender 2.5 r30109 win32
• Blender 2.5 r30109 win64

As always, you can find the links to these download pages on the right side of my blog.

Update: I’ve now also updated the installer builds:

• Blender 2.5 r30109 win32 installer
• Blender 2.5 r30109 win64 installer

• Blender installer for Windows 32
• Blender installer for Windows 64

The fixes in these binaries are:

• win64 version had default install path pointing to C:\Program Files (x86)
• links from start menu weren’t properly removed
• update to later vcredist, so there won’t be temp files hanging around after install

I’ve also enabled the blenderplayer, so you should be able to find that too!

Again, please test drive them and report back.

Enjoy!
/Nathan

• Blender installer for Windows 32
• Blender installer for Windows 64

Please post results (both positive and negative) in the comments. Thanks!

Enjoy,

/Nathan

I still need to check out on Jack, libsamplerate and sndfile -support, as those are still disabled in my builds.

Other than that, enjoy as usual!

/Nathan

One reason to work on this again is the possibility of having Verse used in RealXtend, and it was a good way to ensure I am familiar enough with how Verse works. Alongside I’ve been trying to work out how it can be used. The idea is to have EC attribute syncing done over the Verse protocol to ensure minimal traffic and package overhead between Naali viewers and the EC attribute server (which thus will be a verse server). How this exactly will work out is something to investigate during the next month.

The PDF version is a very nice way to have offline access to the Wiki. It has great bookmarks and it looks very good too. If you’re up to it, you could even get yourself a paper copy of it, but then you’ll have to be ready to put 1500 or so pages into your printer

As always, enjoy!

/Nathan