Improving Blender

Development

Open Movie projects are not only about making open content, we have to improve the software as well. After all, this project is funded thanks to people like you, that use and/or love your own 3d software!

These are the changes we had in the last few days:

Blender Core

    • General: Copy Paste Curves Widget

      Copy Paste Curves
      Before this, you had to manually copy the X and Y values of each point, now just Ctrl+C over a curve widget, Ctrl+V over another, done! Works across any curve widget. [r60803]

    • 3D View: Shadeless view

      3D View Shadeless
      Shadeless view is important for many reasons, mostly for painting. On Blender Internal, to see a shadeless model you had to delete/move lamps off the view, cumbersome but at list it was possible. On Cycles, it wasn’t possible until now. Welcome Shadeless 3D View! [r60783]

    • Dopesheet: Channel>Bone Selection Sync

      Dopesheet Sync Select
      Selecting a channel on the Dopesheet now selects the corresponding bone as well* [r60823]
      Tweak: Joshua Leung just made it so only works when not in “Only Selected” mode [r60892]

    • Video Sequencer: FPS Display

      Sequencer FPS
      Sometimes when using heavy scenes or big footage on the Video Sequencer Editor, it can get a bit choppy. Now it displays the frames per second on the preview window, just like the 3D View. [r60837]

When can I have this?

Now! All this changes have been committed to trunk and will be available on the next Blender (not 2.69 since we are so close to release that only fixes are allowed). If you compile your own version you can just update, otherwise check the automatic builds, or custom built by the community at GraphicAll

Amaranth Productivity Toolset Addon

This utilities addon has been updated to 0.7, including new tools such as:

    • Libraries Panel

      Amaranth Libraries Panel
      If you already had linked libraries on your file, this panel will show a link to each libraries’ folder for quick navigation.

      Handy when you want to link stuff from a .blend file you already had linked before.

    • Particles Material Indicator

      Amaranth Particle Material Indicator
      When using Particles, you can assign a material by its index. When having multiple materials is hard to remember which one had which index, or if you shuffle them around this number will change.

      This is a simple label that displays the name of the material for that index.

    • Mesh Simmetry Tools

      Mesh Symmetry Tools
      Our character wasn’t completely symmetric in some parts where it was supposed to, this could be by moving vertices by mistake or just reasons. To fix this in a fast way, Sergey coded this two super useful tools:

      • Find Asymmetric: Selects vertices that don’t have the same position on the opposite side
      • Make Symmetric: Move selected vertices to match the position of those on the other side

      This tools may not apply on every single model out there, but I tried it in many different characters and it worked. So probably better use it on those models that were already symmetric at some point, modeled with a mirror modifier or so.

These changes you can find on Amaranth’s latest development version, available on Blender’s official addon-contrib repository (if you are using buildbot’s automatic builds or you compile yourself then you already have it! Under “Testing” category on Blender’s User Preferences > Addons settings), or on GitHub.

We are pretty happy that our tiny two weeks project is influencing Blender on the development side as well (besides helping financially to keep the Blender Foundation / Institute going), even when not being a fully sized Open Movie project.

Pre-order your copy of Caminandes: Episode 2 now!

Thanks for passing by!
Gracias por pasar!

29 thoughts on “Improving Blender”

  2. Killer features guys! My fav is the Copy/Paste Curves and the Particles Material Indicator. Seriously awesome :) Thanks, and looking forward to the film!

  4. I’m so happy to see how things are going good for making blender even more better along with the film wich promize to be awesome with those blender legend such as Andy and pablo … thank you for those new feature so far useful !

  5. I love the dopesheet adition, is it posible that while selecting a bone/channel, with a modifier key like alt it would select all the keyframes in that bone/channel, that would be fantastic

    3. I’ve been dying for that dopesheet bone sync for ages, I seem to remember it being there back in 2.4 days. Having that just makes workflow so much better — quick selection without moving the camera to find bones etc. It’s a 2x animation speedup for me. :D :D And the ctrl+alt+select will be cool too.

    1. I agree about the fps counter in only render. Also the manipulator widget should NOT display in only render,

  9. The shadeless mode is great. :)
    Another great mode would be “Silhouete”, just black object over the background.
    Mainly for checking “readability” of character poses, lines of action, etc.

  11. These are great additions!
    The particles materiale indikator is very usefull, and would be even more so if you could browse the materiale in the same way as in the materials panel.
    With a preview of the materiale i mean.
    Great stuff. Now i have to preorder :-)

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    1. Mmh weird, it is on contrib indeed. When you open the file browser is there a Libraries panel on the bottom left? If the console prints an error please post it, also knowing the version you’re using may help.

    2. Mmh weird, it is on contrib indeed. When you open the file browser is there a Libraries panel on the bottom left? If the console prints an error please post it, also knowing the version you’re using may help.

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