Patch time
Recently three different patches made their public debut in the last testing builds posted on blender.org’s forum, the features introduced by those contributions are worth writing a small overview, so here we are.
The first patch I want to introduce You is Upgraded Merge Tools by Geoffrey Bantle aka briggs, it adds three new modeling functionalities:
- Merge at last in vertex selection mode, an useful (and fast) alternative to Merge at center and Merge at cursor;
- Collapse faces in face selection mode, now join two or more selected faces is a snap;
- Collapse edges in edge selection mode, same as Collapse faces but works with edges.
Then we have the new Array Modifier by Ben Batt (artificer), an interactive (aka real-time feedback while tweaking) tool to create parametrical duplicates of an object.
Each duplicate is offset from the previous one by a transformation composed of
any combination of a constant offset, a scaled offset (calculated from the base object’s width) or a transformation taken from another object (empties are handy in this case), moreover the array can determine the number of duplicates through a user numerical input, by calculating the number of duplicates to fit within a fixed length or to fit within the length of a Curve object.
Last but not least comes the Blinn shading node by Nathan Vegdahl (the first of an upcoming series of shading nodes from different authors which comprehends the amazing Python node), the Blender counterpart of the Maya node with the same name as far as the first attempt to move the shading properties from the material panel to noodles, here’s a screenshot:
You can download a patched CVS Build here, have fun while playing with it.
Federico “Lox” Lucignano
I’m working on the pyNodes. Some screenshots about the progress are available over here: http://www.letwory.net/albums/v/Rt/Noodles
/Nathan
There is also the all new Angle Based Flatening for better LSCM results. The two following pics illustrate the results obtained with no pinning:
http://users.pandora.be/blendix/snurgle.png
http://users.pandora.be/blendix/snurgle_flattened.png
truly impressive from my point of view!
More info about the new Merge tools:
http://www.umsl.edu/~gcbq44/MergeTools/mergetools.html
More info about the new Array modifier:
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/ArrayModifier
Some example pictures in the later link are truly awesome!
Cheers,
olivS
The download was unavailable in the early morning due to a server problem, now You can download from the link reported in the article.
Sorry for the inconvenience :-\
Keep up the amazing work Nathan! Python nodes may well surpass PyTex if you allow Python nodes to act as textures.
Really looking forward to this.
Koba
What about the NLE Editor ???
NLE Editor is not a patch anymore, is an embedded feature of the software right now ;-) This was only a little overview for who didn’t know what those new tools are :-)
NLE Editor? more info pls. :)
NLE Editor isn’t a new tool, is simply a simple way of referring to the Sequence Editor enhanced by the last commitments of Peter Schlaile, here’s a small changelog:
* MPEG-seeking improved a lot
* IPOs working on hdaudio
* IPO-Frame-Locking working on audio-tracks.
* ffmpeg-write support working (including audio multiplexing) Includes common presets (DVD, SVCD, etc.)
* frameserver support (starts a small webserver to send arbitrary frames over the wire)
* vfapi-plugin in release/windows/contrib to connect TMPGenc to the frameserver. And yes, TMPGenc runs perfectly in wine nowadays.
* extended the sequencer-plugin interface, so that sequencer-plugins can have private data allocated per instance
* used that feature to port the “dynamic noise reduction” VirtualDub plugin to blender (making it
realtime by the way…)
Thanks to these changes the Sequence Editor can be really used as a NLE Editor for long movies (Peter used it for his 2 hours long video)
Just have begun to document all changes I made.
Take a look at http://peter.schlaile.de/blender/sequencer/index.html
I read the Documentation from Peter Schaile!
a little German:Hallo Peter Gute Arbeit!Klingt alles so Geil!!Bin wirklich beeindruckt was ich da alles gelesen habe in deiner Documantation ueber Blenders Sequencer!!!!Amazing!!!
Quesion:will this all Changes for the Blenders Sequencer also for Windows Blender Version or only Linux….and when …version 2.42 or later???
Vielen Dank!
Thanks
Well, Peter’s contribution is already in the CVS repository and I’ve tested the FFMPEG thing under Windows without issues.
Don’t remember if that feature is available in the build I’ve attached to this article, but there will be for sure in the one I’m going to release near Thursday :-D
Stat tuned.