For a looooong time I’ve been working on different forms of an improved website. I tried Redmine for a while, but it became apparent that it is absolutely not suitable for our needs: lots of users (14k+ registered users), lots of reports (for Blender close to 10k). This is pure suicide for a server running Redmine. Some other things were tried as well (I had even a simple, working bug tracker implemented in Lua on top of Sputnik with all projects and artifacts imported, but maintaining that would’ve been too time consuming).

So after a long time we decided to go for a FusionForge upgrade. This also floated around for a long while, so a few weeks ago I put myself to finally, properly do this. A lot of effort has gone into getting the database upgraded, the software upgraded and customised for our needs. I’m glad that the end is in sight, but before it’s online I give you a short overview of what the upgraded site will look like. Note that I still work style and layout issues, but as a functional tool it shows already what it can (ignore jesterPrincess giving her opinion at some point in the screencast)

But it’s all a great time! It’s great to see so many people in one place, interested all in Blender and presenting their usage of Blender, their ideas they have, their needs, their visions. It’s clear that Blender is pretty widely used in the academic world, and in such a wide variety of disciplines.

The Suzanne Awards Festival was a great watch too. A great many entries in the socalled Selection-section: great entries, that were not eligable for participation, or the maker(s) didn’t want it to participate. And then the actual nominees. All in all high level of quality.

I most not forget to mention the huge 4K-screen that we have in the entrance hall. Scenes from Sintel rendered in the huge resolution, as well as stills from Big Buck Bunny rendered for the occasion. Such a huge resolution is pretty unforgiving though, clearly the bowl from which Sintel is drinking needs at least one more subdiv level added! But it looks impressive on the large screen.

I’m happy that I’ve been able to shortly talk to some people a bit more than the quick moments for help, and I’m looking forward to be in contact with as many of those people as possible. The conference is also just so full of potential for just about anything!

Anyway, enough rambling, I should start on the weekly report before a deserved nights rest. An extra hour of sleep even. Woohoo!

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:

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.

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

As I wrote in my previous short blog, I’d write up a longer post about what’s happening. As you may have noticed, my regular builds came to a halt. This was simply due to me being transferred to a project with the usual hush-hush tag on it. Also, this project was very demanding. I loved to do it: it was (and probably still is) technically challenging, had to do with cool technology and the direct collegues were great to work with. That was January, 2010, at Cybercom Plenware Oy.

Because the project was very intense: high communication demands, lots of code to work with: own code, numerous dependencies, and a constant changing development environment, almost weekly travels, and at some point, being scrummaster, I found it very hard to properly concentrate on anything else but my family after working hours. So unfortunately I let my blog linger, and all other work I had wanted to do.

Then came April. Talks with several people. Talking with the better half of me. And finally on April the 30th I resigned from my job – even though it was a great place and position to work in. With the possibilities offered and all the talking, I felt now was the right moment to do so. The right moment to make the decision to become my own boss.

So, a months worth of resignation time started – with no less work to do. Still so many interesting and more or less exciting things in the pipeline that I just couldn’t leave right away. And to be honest, I think it was the right think to do: to complete the tasks still open, to do My Thing one more time for Cybercom Plenware and the project. And I think that I managed to do so.

Meet Mr. Nathan Letwory, entrepreneur. Or whatever those beasts are called. I’ve now worked for a few weeks already as my own boss, and I must say I like it very much. In the morning I wake and, what do you know, I’m at the office already!

I am now active in a RealXtend, working on the Naali viewer. This will take right now most of my time. But I have also activated again in Blender development – started with updating some overdue libraries in lib/windows and lib/win64 modules. Furthermore I’ve taken some bug reports and patches (like the data and installation paths patch by Matt Ebb) under my looking glass to work on in the coming time. I hope to be useful for the upcoming Blender 2.5 Beta release (right now targetted for the end of this month). I’ve also offered Ton to assist him with Blender Conference 2010 organisation, so I’ll be there too – at last, it has been too long.

Of course, there’s the other projects I’ll be working on, and have been working on and off for the past two weeks: blenderstorm.org, updates to blender-fi.org (working on a competition module for organising contests and tournaments – and integration between the different parts that we have there), some work for Daniel Salazar (you’ll see, you’ll see) and much more.

As you can see, enough to do for this year: both paid work and volunteering work. I hope to be in touch with more people who need contracted work to be done, so please contact me if you read this and you think you might need me I’ll be looking as much as possible for work related to Blender and Open Source.

Looking at my previous posts with testing builds published on Graphicall.org, I see that during my 4 month inactivity there have been a whopping 3100+ commits! Way to go! When I’ve got more of the libs updated I’ll be posting again a newer testing build.

Now I’ll have to get back to work. I hope readers now know more about what has happened and what will happen in the (near) future.

/Nathan

[NOTE] The uploads seem to be stuck, so please keep checking the links to see if the uploads when through properly.

Just a quick post that I have updated since a looong time my builds on Graphicall.org. See the links in the navigation section for the new builds.

I’ll write up later today a larger post about my Blender development and other exciting news.

Stay tuned!

/Nathan

It’s been only a few weeks since my previous builds, but between that post and this there have been over 300 commits. Please refer to the commit logs to see what has been changed, added, removed.

As always, the packages are self-extracting 7z-archives (you can still use your locally installed 7z if you are so inclined – just right-click on the archive and choose the proper action from the 7z context menu), and scanned for viruses with AVG Anti-Virus 9.0.725.

• Blender 2.5 r25772, Windows, 32bit
• Blender 2.5 r25772, Windows, 64bit

As interesting extra information: I have now bought Windows 7 Ultimate retail, and the install went smooth. At least my Blender development and build environment is up and running! Although I’ve got this covered now, you are still free to donate (I’d like to be able to get the next Visual Studio when it comes out, for instance). Check the Blender Development page elsewhere on my blog.

At any rate, enjoy these new builds!

/Nathan

Anyway, I’ve uploaded 32bit and 64bit builds to Graphicall.org again, so grab them, test them, and keep the reports coming in!

• 32bit Blender 2.5 for Windows
• 64bit Blender 2.5 for Windows

Note, I have also links to my builds on Graphicall on the right of my blog ->

Make sure you follow them

Incomplete/gray GUI

Some users reported that the GUI would look incomplete. This turned out to be a problem with paths that contained non-ASCII characters. Although it should be fixed in recent builds (as of this writing), if you still experience that, move Blender to a location that contains only ASCII characters in the path. So no accented or non-latin characters like ë, é, µ and so on.

Incomplete GUI

If you want to see for yourself how broken this looks like, go into the .blender/ directory and rename scripts/ to something like xripts/ and run Blender. You’ll see something like the above image. Rename back to scripts/ to get your nice Blender 2.5 back.

Crash while starting Blender

In some situations Blender would not even start. This would happen where the user had PYTHONPATH in the environment variables, pointing to an older Python version, most often Python 2.6. This could’ve happened either manually, to get Blender 2.49(b) working, where in some cases it could get confused or not find the proper Python installation. Or another program might have added the PYTHONPATH variable and set it to some older, pre-Python 3.1 installation.

The net result of this would be an instant crash? The reason for it is pretty simple: Python 3.1 is incompatible with previous Python versions. If you start Blender 2.5 from a command-line and have that PYTHONPATH pointing to Python 2.6 (or even older, if you have it installed), then you’ll see from the error output in the console that it tries to load Python 2.6 modules, and fails miserably.

To easily work around this, and without touching your environment, create a new file called blender.bat next to the blender.exe and add:

set PYTHONPATH=
blender

Next time you want to start Blender 2.5, start blender.bat instead. It will ensure that Blender 2.5 will run properly. For now you’ll have to do it for each Blender 2.5 installation you do to a separate directory (if you install over your existing Blender 2.5 that already has the above created blender.bat you don’t have to bother, otherwise just copy the file to the new installation, too).

GUI going gray after a while

This is most likely a problem with your driver. Make sure you have the latest for your videocard. If that really doesn’t seem to help, and you have played with the OpenGL buffer drawing type in the Blender user preferences for the system (triple buffer or any of the others) to no avail, try turning of hardware acceleration. Often using Windows Classic theme will turn of those effects and Aero (on Vista and Windows 7 at least). If that helps the drivers are your problem – waiting for a better driver version is then your only option, unfortunately.

Other problems?

If you know of other problems and work-arounds, please don’t hesitate to tell so in the comments!

To use any of the optimisations, check the Performance panel in render settings. The Auto setting tries to select the best optimisation strategy, but you can choose any of the other ones too. Octree is what we know from the previous Blender series, all the new names are from the GSoC work done by André Susano Pinto (jaguarandi).

• win32 build
• win64 build

Build configuration:


CCFLAGS = ['/Ob1', '/J', '/W3', '/Gd', '/wd4244', '/wd4305', '/wd4800', '/wd4065', '/wd4267', '/MT', '/openmp']
WITH_BF_FFMPEG = False
WITH_BF_OPENAL = True
WITH_BF_JACK = False
WITH_BF_SNDFILE = False
WITH_BF_PLAYER = False
WITH_BF_GAMEENGINE = True
WITH_BF_VERSE = False
WITH_BF_YAFRAY = False
WITH_BF_QUICKTIME = False
WITH_BF_COLLADA = True

BF_DEBUG=False
BF_BSC=False

BF_NUMJOBS=5

BF_MSVS = False

BF_BUILDDIR = ‘..\\build\\blender25-win64-vc’
BF_INSTALLDIR=’..\\install\\blender25-win64-vc’

1. svn co https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/blender c:\dev\blender
2. svn co https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/windows c:\dev\lib\windows
3. start Visual Studio 2008 command prompt
4. set PATH=C:\Python26;%PATH%
5. cd c:\dev\blender
6. python scons\scons.py WITH_BF_COLLADA=1 WITH_BF_QUICKTIME=0

PS. I’m still writing the detailed tutorial

Today, I managed to create working 64-bit builds of OpenCOLLADA. The libraries I have committed to our repository, along with the necessary changes in trunk source to get proper win64 builds done with Blender.

I have uploaded the build based on r24264 to Graphicall.org: my 64-bit build for Windows.

If people want to know how to create 64-bit builds for Windows, please leave a comment. If there’s enough interest, I’ll write up an article explaining my development and build environment, and how I create my builds (and official releases).

First, many days were wasted in figuring out why during linking of the first library of OpenCOLLADA the build process would go in an eternal loop, issueing linking commands for the same library over and over again. After having tried different SCons versions, and several futile hacks of the SCons-files of the project, I took a harder look at my own environment.

We have had some talk about having ie. gstreamer as a replacement for FFMPEG. This means some new dependencies that traditionally are pretty hard to build on Windows (ignore FFMPEG here, it’s even harder). I found the OAH project. I decided to give it a spin – after some fiddling around, no good luck. I forgot about it. So yesterday I finally looked at my environment and noticed that the OAH linker would always somehow be used. After uninstalling the thing, I finally got through to linking and beyond! Then it was just a matter of doing some small fixes and picking the right settings for the libraries.

Last night I uploaded all libraries and their headers, necessary for Blender 2.5 to build with COLLADA support on Windows (32bit). I have uploaded the binary release of my build on Graphicall.org as build 1159.

Give the build a spin and report any problems with it to our bug tracker.

At least it now imports Sketchup-files (note: get the COLLADA format, not .skp)! For instance, below a model from Google 3D Warehouse:

New Compound model from Google 3D Warehouse

/Nathan

• Wiki Manual PDF (26MB), updated 2009.01.29
  • This is the PDF version of the Manual from the http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual

Again a big thanks to Marco Ardito for his efforts.

Check out the screencast on YouTube at:

Interactive UI during render – Blender 2.5

• Wiki Manual PDF (26MB), updated 2008.12.01
  • This is the PDF version of the Manual from the http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual
• Script Catalog PDF (6.9MB), updated 2008.12.01
  • This is the PDF version of the Script Catalog from http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Scripts/Catalog
• Reference PDF (6.6MB), updated 2008.12.01
  • This is the PDF version of the Blender Reference from http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Reference
• Release Logs PDF (3.8MB), updated 2008.12.01
  • The release logs all the way to 2.48a from http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs

Again a big thanks to Marco Ardito for his efforts.