19-09-2007
Tim Formica, reporter for blendernation at siggraph 2007 just posted his interview with me- the latest in a series of cool interviews he did during the show. He also posted my preview of the Mancandy FAQ animations- this is missing final sound/music, and is recorded from a screen- and even has a spoiler at the end… so don’t say I didn’t warn you.
While at the blender institute, Andy and I would often have the following conversation at our computers :
me : w_key keyboard click, menu mouse-click/frantically repeated 10 or so times
andy: smoothing, huh?
me: yup.
so I thought I really needed a hotkey for smoothing. Though blender (until 2.5 comes) lacks user defined hotkeys, it’s open source, so with a “how hard could it be?” I started opening files in my text editor. It took less time than writing this blog post. All/most hotkeys seem to be in source/blender/src/space.c , and it looked like the t-key (without a modifier) was unused. I really just copy pasted (well, I may have typed “if” and a couple of parens ), compiled, and voila! now I have a t-key smooth hotkey in mesh edit mode, ready to blow out my undo stack )
you can have it too, or add your own special keys.
I’m lazy, but alive! I’m at the new Blender Institute (woohoo!) recording video tutorials for the Mancandy FAQ. After a bit of editing and mastering it’ll be in the Blender E-shop, along with another DVD by Andy.
The Blender Institute is a nice large studio in Amsterdam, Intended for blender artist and coder projects ( the tutorials, but also the Peach Open Movie , Apricot Open Game, Physics coding sprint and more.)
The DVDs started bump-ily - Linux capturing wasn’t reliable or smooth enough at 1024×768. (Could be an X11 or software limitation, but some programs such as istanbul show promise), so we ended up using iShowU on the Mac. We plan on editing with OSS/Linux if possible- we had some difficulty both with Cinelerra and Blender- Mac Quicktime codec related, or due to non-standard resolution/FPS (1024×768 at 24 fps), but also because Linux video editors are not mature enough for all uses. We’ll scrape by somehow, probably using blender- Peter Schlaille ( Blender Sequencer Developer) has been squashing bugs and making enhancements to make things work- the sequencer is already good considering it was never supposed to be a full fledged NLE, just a way to quickly edit/treat blender scenes- but it’s already matured beyond that point.
We also had audio problems: the Samson C01 USB mic we started with was totally inadequate, and resulted in hours of tutorials I will either have to re-record or de-noise, normalize and tweak. We swapped it with a Studio Projects B1 mic and a Tascam USB mixer thingie (US 122 L) and things are going much better. (Sadly we found the Tascam is not Linux compatible- but there are alternatives that are- the Samson works fine in Linux, though)
