In an interesting use of blender, Jakub Steiner shows how he uses Blender for designing the animated transitions for Gnome 3, previewing them using GLSL. It's cool to see designers using open source software to make open source software! You can read a little more about it on Jakub's blog, and if you like the video let him know as he plans to do continue with the series if people are interested.
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11 Comments
First! And this looks sweet!
lol, "Blender is usually used for gigantic projects".
He hasn't seen my bouncing cube.
Nice to see blender used this way. As for the ui transitions, they do look nice, but I usually disable them where I can. I dont want to wait for an animation to end when I click on something. I want to UI jumping at me. :) I want it to be snappy.
So, great work, nice Blender use, just not that useful for me.
This is something REALLY REALLY interesting, do carry on, it would be great to know!!
@Sanne: I used to agree with what you are saying and I personally like snappy interfaces. But for the novice user, transitions and cursor cues are golden.
Previously I didn't really get why a window should display some kind of transition while going from a minimized state to filling the window or why it was a benefit that workspaces slide in Linux Mint (and Ubuntu).
However, after watching a various newbies trying out the latest Linux Mint (and one on Ubuntu 11.04) I've completely changed my opinion on how well crafted cues, hints and transitions can aid the newbie through various tasks in a foreign environment. Furthermore, this does not have to hamper the expert user one bit. As long as the transitions are quick enough, you will not be able to catch up no matter how quick you move your fingers across the keyboard.
I havn't seen anyone try out Gnome 3 yet but there are plenty noobs available.
But, of course, a setting that disables all transitions would be very welcome on weaker hardware, though. I guess you can catch up with the transitions in some cases after all. :)
Thanks for the good work, Jakub!
Very nice. I never thought to use Blender in this capacity.
Very cool for Blender - Too bad gnome3 sucks...
Adobe Flash is best suited for this task because it is mainly 2D and also has the features blender is missing.
@John Dow,
I'm familiar with things that can be created with Flash and of course - with good (or best) results.
Blender's possibilities are unlimited - everything's just need to be written properly :)
For example (what Blender does cool and Flash - not):
Shape Tween feature of Flash. It's awfully old. Obviuosly - it's the old code that was not improved from CS2 to CS5 - it works in the same weird way. For those who doesn't understood the stuff - it's almost like Shape Keys in Blender.
For creating the more similar effects in Blender we have the great addon - RotoBezier! And you don't need to manually set any "relative points" if something weird is happening... It's just don't!!! You even doesn't imagine how much time I spend with CS4 tweaking these bastardous points and tricking with the,. It was one slow hell.
One thing that Blender doesn't have on this way - easy gradient placement. I think it's possible... when somebody will made an addon (or it will be the new RotoBezier maybe).
My small demo (sorry - doesn't had a time to play more with this :( )
http://vimeo.com/17104079
I hope, someday Blender can be used to create flash applications with Action Script :) (yeah, it's a rave but positive!)
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/7803 the same about "shape tweening"
Not a great example... but try to make this on Flash! :) I made this roughly but it can be done better.