Unless I’m mistaken and you, my readers, are extremely interested in selling me viagra and car insurance, I’ve been suffering from an increasingly bad blog comment spam problem, and it’s been getting a lot worse lately. Most of this is due to being stuck on an old version of Movable Type, which has very poor spam prevention. I’d been planning for a while to move over to Wordpress, which I like a lot more and have set up many times before (including on elephantsdream.org) but had been procrastinating for a while, worried about the changeover process.

Today, I finally cracked and exported this blog over to the new system, which went surprisingly smoothly. Most of the work took very little time at all, while tweaking the template to get it working just right took a little bit longer. Luckily Wordpress isn’t written in Perl, like Movable Type is, so when I ran into a limitation in the templating system, I could actually understand it enough to hack together a simple plugin to do the job. Hopefully everything should be working smoothly and you won’t even notice a difference, though I’m still working on a solution to keep old links pointing to the right pages. If you notice something that’s obviously messed up, please let me know! cheers.

I’m back in Sydney again, after arriving yesterday with surprisingly little jetlag. Previous times I’d been to Europe, I’d been a total zombie for the week after, but I suppose thanks to a fortuitous combination of travel times and aeroplane seating arrangements, I’m feeling pretty good. My time away was rushed and brief, but still very interesting.

After only arriving in Europe the night before, Blender conference came and went very quickly, it was great to catch up again, with the general Blender crew and of course the others from the Orange team (except for poor Basse, who was stranded in Finland after an airline strike :/ ). Some very well produced videos of the proceedings, including our Making Elephants Dream presentation, are available on Google Video and BitTorrent, with hopefully more to come soon.

Just a brief update, I’m sitting in the side room of De Waag in Amsterdam on the third and final day of the 2006 Blender Conference, waiting to give my next artist tutorial session. Having a great time as usual amidst the late nights and jetlag. Most of the presentations I’ve seen have been interesting, and they should be appearing as video downloads soon, for those who couldn’t be here.

Bart and the others from Blendernation are here, doing a great job covering the event with video reports and interviews already online, and there’s also an excellent live video stream coming straight from the main theatre floor. I wonder what sort of nonsense has been recorded coming out of my mouth, for the world to see…

I’ve had several people contact me about my radial menus design and proof of concept for Blender that I showed here a couple of months ago. Progress on it had come to a standstill, while I was waiting for a limitation in Blender’s input system to be overcome. Previously, it wasn’t possible to detect in Blender if a key other than Ctrl Shift or Alt was held down, which meant that the fast menu selection method of holding down a key temporarily could only work when bound to combinations of those keys, and not most other hotkeys used in Blender.

Jean-Luc ‘lukep’ plans to work on improving this area of Blender when he works on refactoring the low-level input events system in Blender, and I’d put the menus on hold until this happened. However Jean-Luc’s project is large, progress is slow and it will take some time until it is completed.

So for my own sake and for those curious people who would like to give it a whirl, I wrote some temporary code to work around that problem, and now the radial menus are working on any hotkey, as they should. I also found a way to allow more than 8 items per menu, which was missing before. This is still a bit sketchy on enormous menus like the mesh specials menu, but that’s really a usability fault in Blender more than the radial menus - the specials menu is a badly organised dumping ground for tools that’s clunky to use and getting messier each release. This particular problem should be solved at its root.

Anyway, having said that, I’ve finally made a patch for you all to try, sitting in the patch tracker. Keep in mind it’s still a little rough around the edges, but hopefully you should find it interesting. If you make a testing build, I’d appreciate it if you could post a link to it in the comments here, so others can try too. Cheers!

I spent a long time deliberating over whether I would go to the 2006 Blender Conference or not. My bank balance has been pretty unhealthy recently, and as great as it would be to see everyone and be a part of the excitement again, I wasn’t sure if I could afford to travel halfway around the world or not. I came to the last-minute conclusion that it’s going to be pretty tight and not really affordable, and that even so, I would go anyway! :)

Apart from the real reason for the conference, being around all the others, eating, drinking, discussing, brainstorming, I’m going to be giving a couple of pretty informal talks on the Friday - ‘Making Elephants Dream’ with the others from Orange who can make it, and also a lighting and compositing workshop with Andy Goralczyk. I’d like the keep both of them pretty informal and fun, the latter more about nifty tips and tricks, like in my previous curves session.

Straight after the conference, Bassam Kurdali and I will shoot over to Belgium for a week, to teach a four day 3D course using Blender at the Flanders Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp. This should be very interesting and challenging, though not new - we held a series of one day courses during our time at Montevideo in Amsterdam. The students are a group of fine artists who are looking for ways to integrate 3D technology into their work. I’m very happy to be able to help them with this, and curious to see what they come up with.

During the last disconnected weeks, I finished cleaning up and putting together some footage for my demo reel. Now, it’s online here at mke3.net/reel. Do go and check it out, I hope you’ll like it.

And yes, I am looking for work :)

It’s interesting how productive one can be without the constant distractions of the internet. I’m alive and well in my new place and enjoying it a lot, but thanks to incompetent phone companies I’ve been disconnected from the net for the 2 1/2 weeks I’ve been here. Hopefully I’ll be back online within the next couple of days, so sorry if I’ve been a bit out of contact, I’ve got a huge backlog of emails to get through.

Apart from cleaning up a demo reel, some coding and of course unpacking, the other day I did a little test of the in-development multi-res sculpting tools, currently being constructed by Nicholas Bishop, who’s doing a sterling job as part of Google’s Summer of Code. I’m using a build that’s about 3 or 4 weeks out of date, but even so, it works very nicely already.

• I think the editors at Blendernation.com are stalking me. Should I be scared?

• Added curve shrinking/fattening to Blender, to help making tapered curves nice and quickly. Coming soon after I also added Mac tablet pressure support (there’s X11 support now too, still no Windows yet :/ ), Campbell had a nice idea about a freehand curve sketch tool that could support adjusting the curve taper radius with pen pressure.

• Finally, after a few months of searching, my friend Julien, his friend and I have been accepted for a reasonably nice terrace in south Surry Hills. The location is fantastic and I spent the last couple of afternoons cleaning and fixing up my old bike so instead of sitting on buses for hours I can ride it around just like back in Amsterdam! Yay! Move-in date is slated for the 26th, lots of packing to do by then!

There’s been the usual flurry of reporting around the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynote address. I watched the video this evening and subsequently found a few interesting tidbits that haven’t been mentioned that much in the big internet news, and I might as well post them here, this site being my insignificant outlet to the world :)

Right now, some of the Orange and Blender contingent are living it up in Boston at SIGGRAPH 2006, the premier Conference/Festival/Tradeshow for the digital graphics industry and community. This year, we’re lucky enough to have a booth on the main tradeshow floor, the ‘Open Source Pavilion’, shared with people from other open source graphics projects like Inkscape, GIMP and Verse. The booth was sponsored by a few sources, but largely by an extremely generous private donation. We’re right there in the trenches just next door to Houdini and ZBrush.

Unfortunately I’m not there myself, I really wish I was. But the next best thing is the fantastic video blog coverage that Bart from BlenderNation is producing each day. It’s giving the event a great feeling of community involvement, so do go and check it out and see some of the faces behind the internet aliases!

Rarely does one see a truly funny, biting and original Australian satire, but ABC TV’s The Chaser’s War on Everything is most definitely one. After previous experience from their satirical newspaper and other TV shows such as The Election Chaser and CNNNN, they’ve been producing War on Everything for about 6 months now, and I’ve been following it very closely.

The team is ever vigilant in exposing and revelling in the absurdity of our society, media and public figures and don’t shy away from offending people or getting themselves arrested in the process of getting their points across. Parts of it seem similar to what I’ve seen of the Daily Show in the US. Some of the humour would be lost on non-Australians, but hey, it’s just started being offered as a free weekly download, courtesy of our most excellent national broadcaster. I’m not sure if previous episodes are going up there, but there are clips on the website, and full episodes in *cough* other places.

Another video podcast I’ve been catching up on is from a show that aired on SBS a while back is Speaking in Tongues. It features John Safran (ridiculous Jewish satirist of Race Around the World and John Safran vs. God fame) and rambling elderly social activist Catholic Priest, Father Bob Maguire discussing all matters bizarre concerning religion. The pair also have a radio show on JJJ radio which also has a free podcast. Anyway, the video podcast is here, free and courtesy of my tax dollars and the wonderful SBS TV.

Here’s another comp test in some of my experiments with cekuhnen in the blenderartists forums. It makes use of a simple Combine RGBA node, which I wrote the other day. It doesn’t exist in Blender but a patch is available in the tracker. Without that patch though, you can replicate the functionality using a slightly convoluted node network. This technique basically takes three different versions of the refracting material, with slightly different indexes of refraction, then adds them back together in the different R/G/B channels. I’ve blurred them slightly with a mask taken from the sphere on another render layer.

It doesn’t hold up too well in close up since you can see the three different layers quite sharply, rather than a smooth blend - for that you’d need more IOR layers. I also tried doing this in material nodes too, which would be a much better approach, however the way raytraced refractions is handled there seems to be a little bit weird, and it didn’t work out. Hopefully in the future this can be cleaned up, perhaps with specific raytracing nodes that output RGB or alpha or whatever.

  .blend file

I’m sure most of the people reading this will know already, but Blender 2.42 has finally been released! Hooray! Do go and check out the extensive Release Notes, not just to see the beautiful demo images and movies but to read about the enormous amount of improvements that are in this version, many of which have come directly thanks to the work during the Orange project.

From my own perspective here, once again I’m proud and very happy to have played a tiny part in it’s creation, at Orange and away. My favourite contributions this time round were: