Akta's Way – Blog

Hello Blender friends,

today I wanted to try quickly some ideas about using the cloth modfier to give more realism to static meshes. So it’s not a big artwork (I made it in 30 mins more or less), but I’m quite satisfied about the result. Since Halloween will be in few days, what could have been better than the classic ghost?

If you want to know how to achieve this effect just drop me a line and I can post the .blend file or maybe make a quick tutorial.

Halloween ghost

Akta

I wish I had a laptop in my brain from where to share every single thing I saw and learnt in my first BC to share that with you guys, unfortunately I can just write a sort of final report on what this experience has been for me.

If you are Blender fans, you must go there. It’s impressive to see how many people love this open-source tool and how much close you can feel to them even though you met them only few minutes before. It’s like everybody there has been your friend since the childhood, there’s feeling between people, a kind of magic friendship in the air which lives under the same flag, Blender.

Besides the human aspect of the conference, where I had the chance to meet really cool people that I knew just because their tutorials or articles on the web (like Sebastian König, Andrew Price, Anfeo and all the italian Blender community), I must say that the quality of the conference was extremely high. This from several points of view: artistic, scientific, organizational.

Artistically speaking I’ve never seen such a good quality artworks made by Blender users. I was especially impressed by the Durian concept art sketches made by the french artist David Revoy. His epic fantasy style really astonished me. Also the Suzanne Award Festival was great. It took me some time before I could decide for whom I was going to vote.

Blender as a tool for scientific applications was an important aspect of this conference. It really showed the endless possibilities that the software can offer also to the scientific community, beyond the artistic one.

Dolf, Anja and Anna. Three words to express the same concept: organization. Without them all of this wouldn’t have been possible, so thanks!

Personally I feel really satisfied. The feedback I got from the talk was much more than I expected, people were really excited about the idea of having emotions in games and they come up with several interesting possible applications. I thank them for their support and as I promised my aim for the next year is to release a full game which uses biosignals in realtime

If you are interested in paper and abstract, you will find them soon on blender.org, as well as the video of my talk.

If you want another point of view of this conference, I recommend to visit Andrew’s website BlenderGuru , you can find there an article and a lot of cool stuff like tutorials, tips and articles about Blender!

Marco

Update!

I’m actually proceeding really fast with the version 1.2 of Blender++. So far here it is what has been included:

• Queue support. You can now submit as many render as you want. Start and end frame for each blend file is customizable
• Threads used. You can select how many threads you want to use in your rendering process. This is really helpful when you’re using your machine and don’t want it to be stuck on the rendering (of course you need at least a dual core or better )
• Bug fixes

What needs to be done still:

• Pause rendering
• Remote job submission
• Remote machine shutdown (in case you don’t have access to it )

Baked data works fine in your renders as long as you have it baked somewhere and the path is specified in your .blend file. At the moment I’m busy also with the Blender Conference in which I’ll present a new project about games, but I’m quite confident to have 1.2 by the end of this month!

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During my spare time I had the chance to develop this handy software which can be used to run background renders with Blender both for single frames or animations. I know that there was already a software calle Fast F12 from super3boy, however even if his idea was brilliant, I didn’t like several things:

• It’s not opensource
• It’s only for Wndows
• It runs using the .NET Framework 3.5, included in Vista but needed if you have Win XP

Moreover what I wanted from this software was a kind of remote control of it. For example, let’s say I start my animation render at home and then I go to the office. At some point I’d like to know the status of the rendering, so I access to my Blender++ server via mobile phone or desktop client and see how is it going. Maybe I want to stop the render for some reason or start a new one. This was not possible with Fast F12, but now it’s included in Blender++.

Summarizing here what we have in this 1.1 version:

• Background render (single frame/ animation)
• Progress bar and status bar to have an idea on what’s going on and some render infos
• Internal server that can be configured and to which we can access to check the render status and stop the job if needed
• Possibility to set the Blender binary path in case it’s in a different folder than the default
• Multiplatform support (Win, OSX, Linux)

Blender++ running on Ubuntu Jaunty

Blender++ was developed entirely in Python and needs wxPython 2.8.1 or higher in order to run on Linux and OSX. For Windows binaries are available so no need to install python on your machine.

What should be done next:

• Queue support. Now just one job at time can be started
• Remote job submitting. I have to figure out a couple of things, but should be really easy
• Show preview, either on the local machine or remote
• Any suggestion?

Of course the source code is available as well for download. Here on sourceforge you can find all the stuff you need, please if you find any bug leave me a message. Comments and critics are really welcome as well

Right now you can download:

• Blender++ (1.1)
• Blender++ Net Client (1.1). This is a demo client that shows you how you can access to a Blender++ server from a remote machine. Beware that if your network is behind a NAT it won’t work if you try to access from outside the network!
• Blender++ mobile client. It’s made in Python as well, so you need a Nokia S60 2nd edition or higher phone to run it. You need to install Python as well on your phone, google PyS60 for more infos.

That’s all, hope you enjoy it

ps: now there are only Windows binaries on sourceforge, in the evening I’ll put the source code plus OSX and Linux versions. I need to get back home first

pps: I’m back home, Linux and OSX versions are available now! Remember that Python 2.6 and wxPython 2.8.1 or higher is required to run Blender++

Blender++ project page on SourceForge