The Blender development and documentation group are asking for some help in translating the Blender tooltips and the Blender manual, specifically for Indian, African and Arabic languages.
They link to the Ubunto Rosetta project which hadn’t heard of but which is really cool: it allows volunteers to help with software translation projects. Looking at the list, there are many more languages that could still need a hand.
The Orange Team have been putting the thumbscrews on Cinepaint (a Gimp fork for use in the film industry), but things don’t look good:
Cinepaint’s capability of editing on a higher dynamic range was instantly evident in a simple curve and level based colour correction. There was no banding, no colour flipping, really nice!
Every Blender release is followed by a ‘bugfix’ release. From the developers meeting notes, it looks like 2.41 may see the daylight next week:
Instead of “2.40a” we drop the a/b convention and the 2.40 bugfix release will be called 2.41. in addition to bugfixes, it will include bpy api additions to complete the new armature/bone module, and the recent game engine improvements. So this week we attack the tracker, next sunday we then do 2.41 release, unless showstopper are found during meeting.
2.42 later, with bigger patches like the sequencer memory management, and perhaps this is when the orange merging will happen (so armature layers, nodal material editing etc. will be included).
Aidan volkofsky posted a very nice tutorial on creating fur with static particles on the CGTalk forum. It requires Blender 2.40.
Secunia.com issued the following security advisory yesterday:
Blender “get_bhead()” Integer Overflow Vulnerability
Damian Put has reported a vulnerability in Blender, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) or to potentially compromise a user’s system.
The vulnerability is caused due to an integer overflow in “get_bhead()” in “readfile.c” when parsing “.blend” files. This can be exploited to cause a heap based buffer overflow by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted “.blend” file.
This vulnerability has been fixed in 2.40 so if you haven’t already, upgrade now. If you ask me, embedded Python scripts are a much bigger risk so it’s always a good idea to check the source of a .blend file before you open one.
You can read the full advisory here.
Yesterday I mentioned that the ResPower renderfarm now supports Blender. But that’s not all. Early Ehlinger, President of ResPower writes on the Blender.org forum:
Also, we have some minor bugfixes/patches that our lead blender developer, Cory King, should be signing on to the dev list to get integrated back into the trunk.
Kudos, guys! It’s really nice to see companies who don’t just take from the Open Source community, but who give back as well.
While the Blender Wiki is getting more and more translations, the Chinese Blender community has been steadily working on their own translation. On the Docboard maillist they commented that they needed their own installation because internet access is restricted in China and not everyone can reach the Blender site. In time, they will port their content to the main Wiki though. You seem to have to log in to see the actual content, but just looking at the table of contents makes me happy :-)
If you are a Mac user like me, you may be experiencing some OpenGL problems (no screen updates, no menus) under Mac OS X 10.4.3. From the reports it seems that this only happens on systems that have NVidia videocards. The problem seems to originate from the OpenGL drivers. Apple has been notified of the issue and hopefully it will be fixed in 10.4.4. In the meantime, people have reported a workaround: resize the Blender window to a smaller size and the menus will work again.
More information can be found on the Blender bugtracker and on the Blender.org forums.
ResPower, the global leader in the on-demand computer graphics rendering industry, today announced another industry first: unlimited rendering for users of the Blender 3D graphics suite, for a low monthly price, available January 2, 2006.
“Blender 3D has caused quite a stir in the computer graphics world,” says Early Ehlinger, ResPower’s president. “More than 1.8 million users downloaded the free Blender software over the past year. More recently, over 250,000 users downloaded the 2.37a upgrade in just the first week of its release. The 2.40 upgrade made headlines in recent weeks. I believe this explosion in Blender’s popularity means a whole new wave of creative 3D graphics enthusiasts is ready to make its mark in the computer graphics industry.”
Does anyone have experience with this service? More info on their website, including prices for Blender.
The German magazine C’T features a 2-page article about Project Orange. They were kind enough to offer a PDF version of the article (in German, of course).
Source: Open Movie, Florian Sailer, c’t magazine issue 01/06 page 172-173. This document is presented by courtesy of Heise Zeitschriften Verlag.
