Letwory Interactive » screencasts

Naali: Align Tools

jesterKing — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 14:59:27 +0000

A short message about the alignment tools I’ve created for Naali. I let the screencast on YouTube speak for itself I hope you enjoy it!

Upgrade of projects.blender.org

jesterKing — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 20:26:35 +0000

I’ve been busy with getting the upgrade of our Projects website (http://projects.blender.org) working properly. As you may know, our current site is severely limited in its usefulness for user, especially when it comes to searching for and reporting of bugs. A combination of old software and a bad database forced us to close down some of the areas, put them behind login. This is not very nice for the user (neither for the developer), and one of the symptoms is a lot of duplicate reports.

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)

Blender Foundation: Status Update Week 46

jesterKing — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 20:17:23 +0000

This week I’ve fixed 4 bugs and closed several more reports. Most of the time went into checking the tracker and commenting. I’ve applied two COLLADA patches, one by Martijn Berger and one from Wenzel Jakob.

I uploaded my SVN+Git tutorial to YouTube, the text for the tutorial will be in our wiki soon. I’ve made a start with changing wiki pages and reorganising the Development section of the main website, moving content to our wiki for easier maintenance by not only me, but others as well.

I’ve taken some time to work on the GForge migration too, which is going pretty nicely. Still some database issues that I’m figuring out, hopefully next week I’ll have some more time to put into this.

Next monday I’ll most likely be not much active, as I’ll be on a trip to Helsinki for some pretty exciting stuff. I hope I can blog about that before the end of the year. If I have a properly working mobile connection, I’ll work from the train, otherwise I’ll do the hours over the course of the entire week.

Manipulator Rulers in Naali

jesterKing — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:49:33 +0000

I’ve finally managed to integrate the Ruler code into the editing tools. I already worked on this during the summer, but other tasks were necessary to do, too.

The rulers are far from completed, but having this functional integration ready I can start working on the really cool looking features for these rulers.

There are obviously already the manipulators, and they do help a lot in visualising what and how to edit objects. The rulers will greatly enhance that experience, giving nice anchors and direction for the transforms.

Think of grids, pies and ladders.

Animation Control in Naali

jesterKing — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:04:23 +0000

Tonight I pushed some code that enables the user to set animations to entities. Although not final, it already helps the user in picking a specific animation that is provided in an animation asset. This way the user doesn’t have to guess the names of the animations, just picking from a dropbox is so much easier!

See this short screencast what this is all about.

Sound ruler for Naali viewer

jesterKing — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:25:24 +0000

One task for me was to enable allow the user to attach sounds to objects in simulations using the Naali viewer Object Edit module. For the user this simply means a way to copy the asset reference to a field, set volume and radius and accept this. After that the object will start emitting sound (or the entire simulation will have that sound if radius is set to 0.0).

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).

Building Blender 2.5 on Windows 7 with MSVC and SCons

jesterKing — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:49:01 +0000

I have created a 30-minute screencast in which I briefly show how Blender 2.5 can be compiled using the SCons/msvc toolset. This screencast is as a quick gap-fill until I have written out more detailed notes.

Interactive UI while rendering – Blender 2.5

jesterKing — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:50:12 +0000

One of the potentials of the new event system that is being
worked on for Blender 2.5 is better threading and event handling. In
this short screencast you see a render being started and still the UI
in action! No more blocking.

Check out the screencast on YouTube at:

Interactive UI during render – Blender 2.5