Letwory Interactive » documentation http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b blender | open source | development Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:19:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Blender Foundation: Status Update Week 9 http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2011/02/blender-foundation-status-update-week-9/ http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2011/02/blender-foundation-status-update-week-9/#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2011 09:30:10 +0000 jesterKing http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/?p=623 It’s been way too long since my previous update, so here finally a new update. So, what have I been doing all this time?

Well, mostly I’ve been working on developer documentation. It’s been quite a boring task, and as some sort of poor excuse, it’s been uninviting enough to “forget” about the status reports. Anyway, I’ve been shuffling content on the wiki to some extent, creating for the development contents section a new and clearer start page that should help decide and point viewers to the correct place. Three big links which go to building blender, developing blender and contacting the developers. Further some content got reorganised from different places into the wiki (from the www.blender.org typo site). There are still some redirect issues left with some of the links, but these Typo3 issues will hopefully addressed when we get an upgrade to Typo4; at least my attempts to fix those redirects haven’t been very successful. An extra reload in the browser by the user is needed to have the redirect work OK. A similar link collection I’ve created on projects.blender.org to help visitors (potential bug reporters and developers) quickly find our patch and bug trackers.

Apart from wiki work, which will continue of course, I’ve been doing the past few weeks lots of doxygen work. After testing in a few modules I worked on a script to get all our code files tagged and grouped in a structure that resembles our source base. All in all around 2400 files have now been tagged and verified and committed for doxygen usage. Even with a script to help me out with modifying the codefiles it took a long time to go through all the code and have them checked. Anyway, for those who would like to have a nice, browsable introduction to our source code can check out doxygenified blendercode on my site. The current size of this all is 455MB, and that while not all possible doxygenifications have been done! If you don’t want to browse the code through my site you can download a 84MB CHM file: blender.chm. There are CHM viewers for Linux and OSX.

The plan is to write a blog post about the doxygenification on the Blender developer blog, outlining the plans for it in the (near) future.

During the last few weeks 2010 and begin of 2011 I also worked a while on COLLADA, setting up a 2-pass mechanism that I’ll continue working on now that this step doxygenification has been completed. I wrote code for both OpenCOLLADA and Blender to handle stride settings specified in the <accessor> tag for geometry data. The patch works very well for vertices, but needs to be improved a little so it can be used easily also for all other geometry reading (normals, texture coordinates, etc.). On windows this is already secretly built into the OpenCOLLADA lib, but I’ll finalize the code and submit it as a patch to the OpenCOLLADA trackers. For normal export I also received a small library by Morten Mikkelson to help with welding geometry and normal info before doing the actual writing to a COLLADA file.

I managed to do a few bug fixes during this period too, but my coding input has been low due to the documentation effort. I’m poised to get back to coding and bugfixing again! Tomorrow the first day of the last month of my contract with Blender Foundation starts, so we’ll set some nice targets to achieve during this month. Stay tuned.

]]> http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2011/02/blender-foundation-status-update-week-9/feed/ 1 Blender Foundation: Status Update Week 47 http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/11/blender-foundation-status-update-week-47/ http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/11/blender-foundation-status-update-week-47/#comments Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:13:19 +0000 jesterKing http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/?p=590 My time on the bug tracker has been pretty minimal, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been active! I’ve started tagging pages on the wiki that I’m going to work on, or am already working on with the newly created {{Warning/Working/Development}} template. With this I can communicate to people that I’m working on those pages. I try to include a smart message about why I’m working on it. In the coming time you’ll see more updates on the wiki, with a steady convergance on a better structured content and less duplication. There are some wildly old pages on the wiki, that can be merged with newer documents, and so on.

Further I’ve been working on the upgrade for our beloved/infamous projects site https://projects.blender.org. This week I’ve been looking into getting the database into shape. Most of it now works, and after some cleanup I even managed to get the search time down from around 10 minutes to 1 second. A pretty cool speed-up if I may say. Next week I’ll continue with this work. There are still some issues with the upgrade that I need to weed out, before we have a properly working upgrade. Things that still go wrong are: activity_vw table not recreated, workflow not working, reporting seems to be non-functional and partly the bug tracker browsing does weird things. When the database upgrade is done we will have to check SVN integration and move the existing repositories to the new system.

]]> http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/11/blender-foundation-status-update-week-47/feed/ 2 Blender Foundation: Status Update Week 45 http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/11/blender-foundation-status-update-week-45/ http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/11/blender-foundation-status-update-week-45/#comments Sun, 14 Nov 2010 20:22:04 +0000 jesterKing http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/?p=575 Last week has been mostly about going over existing documentation and figuring out what to do with the organisation of the different places where we provide documentation. Currently we have a section on main www.blender.org, and a section under wiki.blender.org. This will be consolidated, having most of the content moved to the wiki, where it can be maintained better by all active developers.

For the developer documentation I’ve been writing a SVN+Git tutorial, recording a 20+ minute session explaining a simple workflow with this. More developer documentation on the codebase, development pipeline and so on will follow.

Tracker work has been on the slow side from my part, mostly commenting on reports and assigning to active developers; actually closing reports a grand total of 3.

From next week on I’ll be concentrating again more on the tracker, but also put in time for the documentation. The time division will be 50%-50% for the tasks.

Concluding with some stats:

    2010.11.08
        2010.11.08: campbellbarton closed 6 issues
        2010.11.08: jhk closed 3 issues
        2010.11.08: jesterking closed 1 issues
        2010.11.08: nazgul closed 1 issues
    ----- total 11 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 15
    2010.11.09
        2010.11.09: jhk closed 4 issues
        2010.11.09: nazgul closed 1 issues
        2010.11.09: theeth closed 2 issues
        2010.11.09: ton closed 4 issues
        2010.11.09: campbellbarton closed 12 issues
        2010.11.09: blendix closed 1 issues
    ----- total 24 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 13
    2010.11.10
        2010.11.10: ton closed 24 issues
        2010.11.10: jhk closed 2 issues
        2010.11.10: campbellbarton closed 8 issues
        2010.11.10: nazgul closed 1 issues
    ----- total 35 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 16
    2010.11.11
        2010.11.11: aligorith closed 2 issues
        2010.11.11: campbellbarton closed 1 issues
        2010.11.11: jhk closed 3 issues
        2010.11.11: nazgul closed 1 issues
        2010.11.11: ton closed 17 issues
        2010.11.11: blendix closed 1 issues
    ----- total 25 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 17
    2010.11.12
        2010.11.12: elubie closed 1 issues
        2010.11.12: aligorith closed 1 issues
        2010.11.12: jhk closed 2 issues
        2010.11.12: jesterking closed 2 issues
        2010.11.12: nazgul closed 1 issues
        2010.11.12: campbellbarton closed 4 issues
        2010.11.12: blendix closed 1 issues
        2010.11.12: ton closed 15 issues
        2010.11.12: gsrb3d closed 1 issues
    ----- total 28 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 19
    2010.11.13
        2010.11.13: blendix closed 1 issues
        2010.11.13: jhk closed 1 issues
        2010.11.13: aligorith closed 1 issues
        2010.11.13: nexyon closed 1 issues
    ----- total 4 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 9
    2010.11.14
        2010.11.14: campbellbarton closed 6 issues
        2010.11.14: theeth closed 1 issues
        2010.11.14: ton closed 5 issues
        2010.11.14: mindrones closed 1 issues
        2010.11.14: dfelinto closed 1 issues
    ----- total 14 bugs closed. New bugs for this day: 12
During last 14 days we had 9 days where we closed more than there were new reports opened
153 days when we closed more than there were opened (438 days with open activity, 399 days with close activity)
260 opened and 280 closed since 2.55 beta
116 fixed since 2.55 beta, 2229 since tracker birth

Already a huge amount of reports since 2.55 beta was released (and fortunately even more closed), but it is obvious that users do want to participate in improving Blender. It’s good to see Ton being in business again, too.

I’ll be adding some more stats, like amount of duplicate reports and rejected reports.

I still need to update the scripts to properly do axis for the graphs, otherwise they don’t make that much sense (although they do give some sense of the progress).

]]> http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/11/blender-foundation-status-update-week-45/feed/ 2 Wiki PDF updated http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/06/wiki-pdf-updated/ http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/06/wiki-pdf-updated/#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:22:57 +0000 jesterKing http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/?p=348 A little late, but still good to know: Marco Ardito has again updated the PDF version of the Blender Wiki. You can download it here: http://pdf.letworyinteractive.com

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

]]> http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/06/wiki-pdf-updated/feed/ 2 Blender 2.5, r29153 http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/06/blender-2-5-r29153/ http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/06/blender-2-5-r29153/#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:07:46 +0000 jesterKing http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/?p=338 [NOTE II] The uploads are now there. Sorry for the wait :)

[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

]]> http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/06/blender-2-5-r29153/feed/ 2 Common Blender 2.5 Problems And How To Fix Them http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2009/12/common-blender-2-5-problems-and-how-to-fix-them/ http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2009/12/common-blender-2-5-problems-and-how-to-fix-them/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:40:23 +0000 jesterKing http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/?p=300 With Blender 2.5 alpha 0 we’ve seen the first release in the 2.5 series, boasting a great many new features on top of the all-new event system – a major overhaul of one of the most central parts of Blender. As one can expect, many problems were readily found during the first few moments after the release. I’ve tried to summarize most of the problems that users may run into that are easy to fix or work around.

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

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!

]]> http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2009/12/common-blender-2-5-problems-and-how-to-fix-them/feed/ 127 Blender Wiki PDF – Manual from January 29th, 2009 http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2009/02/blender-wiki-pdf-manual-from-january-29th-2009-2/ http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2009/02/blender-wiki-pdf-manual-from-january-29th-2009-2/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 09:33:40 +0000 jesterKing http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2009/02/blender-wiki-pdf-manual-from-january-29th-2009-2/ Marco Ardito has sent me a new version of the Manual PDF, which is based on the wiki. This version brings Blender Manual PDF up-to-date with 2009.01.29.

Again a big thanks to Marco Ardito for his efforts.

]]> http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2009/02/blender-wiki-pdf-manual-from-january-29th-2009-2/feed/ 23 Blender Wiki PDFs – December 2008 http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2008/12/blender-wiki-pdfs-december-2008/ http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2008/12/blender-wiki-pdfs-december-2008/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:27:03 +0000 jesterKing http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/?p=99 The PDF updates seem to become a nice monthly deal! Marco has uploaded new versions of 4 PDF files:

Again a big thanks to Marco Ardito for his efforts.

]]> http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2008/12/blender-wiki-pdfs-december-2008/feed/ 5 Updated Wiki PDFs by Marco Ardito for Blender 2.48a http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2008/11/updated-wiki-pdfs-by-marco-ardito-for-blender-248a/ http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2008/11/updated-wiki-pdfs-by-marco-ardito-for-blender-248a/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:06:47 +0000 jesterKing http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/?p=85 Again Marco Ardito has been working hard on getting new versions of his Wiki PDFs. After more tweaking, he has managed to drop the size of the manual pdf to 25MB. Compare that to the size of the first PDF he created, which was a whopping 86MB! Enjoy reading the new PDFs!

Again a big thanks to Marco Ardito for his efforts.

]]> http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2008/11/updated-wiki-pdfs-by-marco-ardito-for-blender-248a/feed/ 11 Wiki PDFs: Manual, Reference, Scripts Catalog, Release Log http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2008/10/wiki-pdfs-manual-reference-scripts-catalog-release-log/ http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2008/10/wiki-pdfs-manual-reference-scripts-catalog-release-log/#comments Sun, 05 Oct 2008 08:20:41 +0000 jesterKing http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/?p=49 Marco Ardito has been working hard on getting improved versions of his Wiki PDFs, along with a few extra. He managed to drop the size and page number of the manual pdf to 51MB over almost 1300 pages:

 

Enjoy the PDFs! And again a big thanks to Marco Arditos for his efforts.

]]> http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2008/10/wiki-pdfs-manual-reference-scripts-catalog-release-log/feed/ 7