Also now we are working “officially” with the render branch My English is not too good, so I’ll let the image talk by himself!

Also, for a better “sharing” issues between the members of the team, and also for scripting work, we decide to made a convention about how we have to use the layers for the props and for the sets files. Meaby it’s usefull for you too. here is:

We are also putting base materials in the objects using only procedural textures, and we are trying a new way to assign and modify materials, using a library.blend file which have the basic materials for all the files, so we just link the material and any change in the original file is updated in the other files too, nothing fantastic , but for us is kind of useful and fun!.

What else i can say! , well, Jarred is doing layout and he is also scripting a lot and Bassam is doing everything else needed for the project to keep going forward. They’re going to post soon with some massapusset (ask to Jarred about that word XD ) scripting!

Also we start doing Layout in 3d! YEAHHH!!! , I’m not able to show you too much, but here is a little sample:

The last thing i want to show is a little test of indirect illumination with the render branch build. Just for play I start to emit light from the light tubes, and here are the results! , (non lights only meshes!)

By the way, all the materials are only for preview and the models are not “final” … we have a lot of things to do yet! Another image to test the variations in the edge of the platform and in the pedestal too. Do you see any repeated and annoying pattern? Tell me please

Well that’s all for now!, keep in touch, please comment and see you soon!

Bye!

- pablo

Official website: http://www.inkscape.org

The main issue with Inkscape is the ugly theme that came by default. There’s no too much tweaks needed for Inkscape but at least we can get almost the same look and feel of gimp — a dark and tiny theme which is Very Fine and don’t make you feel uncomfortable to use it on OSX. As in the Gimp post, all these things also work in Linux and Windows so maybe you should give a try to these kind of hacks!

Ugly, big and too light gtk theme:

Well, as I said recently, you cannot install a theme in Inkscape, But if you do the following you can get a nice and dark theme! Get this file -> Clearlooks-Quicksilver-OSX and unzip it, into a new folder called themes, into the Inkscape App folder:

OSX: /Applications/inkscape.App/Contents/Resources/themes/

Tired of old school icons? Let’s Tango-fy Inkscape!

I don’t know why new releases of Inkscape still coming with that oId school icons. I don’t know what do you think, but I don’t like it :/ So there are good news! You can change the icon theme. It’s very simple, and I found 2 themes to install, both based on Tango guidelines. Just get the file, unzip it into the icons folder of the Inkscape App Folder, and rename the file to “icons.svg” . If you don’t want to lose your old scheme of icons, just rename the original to something like “old_icons.svg”!

icons_original.svg – Original set
icons_tango.svg – Tango Style
icons_tango_colors.svg – Tango Color style

Change the shortcuts

Inkscape came with a lot of presets for shortcuts keys based on the most popular vector editing software like Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator or Freehand so you can set as default just changing the file to “default.xml”. You can find the folder here:

One more for gimp!

Is very easy in gimp to change the shortcuts to make your work more fast and dinamic. But what if you came from Photoshop and you want to switch to Gimp without suffer too much? Well , one thing that you can do is look at for the ps-menurc file and rename to menurc (remember: if you dont want to lose the original settings please rename the original menurc to something like menurc-gimp) You can find the file in this path:

Well i hope this kind of things will helpfull for you! Thanks for the comments, and stay in touch for more post!

Official web: http://www.gimp.org
Unofficial buils for OSX: http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/Download.html

The main issue with Gimp is related with the gtk port which even when it’s very good, still has somethings in development that you have to solve manually. For Example:

Ugly, big and too light gtk theme:

How to solve it? Get this file -> ProApp_Small.tar and unzip it into your personal gimp folder:

OSX: /Users/……/Library/Application Support/Gimp/Themes/
UNIX: /home/……/.gimp-2.x/themes/
WIN: C:\Documents and Settings\……\.gimp-2.x\themes\

This theme came as default in the Gimp Build for OSX, but it has been modified by me to get tiny icons, less space between the elements, less padding, less margin and more tweaks.

If you want to install the theme for all the users just unzip the file into:

OSX: /Applications/Gimp.App/Contents/Resources/share/gimp/2.0/themes/
UNIX: /usr/share/gimp/2.x/themes/
WIN: C:\Program Files\gimp-2.x\bin\share\gimp\2.0\themes\

Basic Brushes and tools presets?

As default gimp doesn’t came with nice brushes so maybe you’ll want the GPS add-on for it, you can get it from here , it “provides an adequate working environment for graphic designers and artists to begin to paint and feel comfortable with GIMP”.

Problem with the window focus.

You will find that you need to click twice on each GIMP window to bring focus to the window first before you can do anything. That’s REALLY annoying. But you can fix that! Just open the OSX Terminal and type this command (Close Gimp and X11 before starting!) :

For MacOS 10.4 Tiger and MacOS 10.5 Leopard:

> defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm -bool false
> defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_click_through -bool true

For MacOS 10.5 Leopard with updates from XQuartz:

> defaults write org.x.x11 FocusFollowsMouse -string YES
> defaults write org.x.X11 wm_ffm -bool false
> defaults write org.x.X11 wm_click_through -bool true

If you are not sure what version you have installed just try both ways.

Is your Gimp Toolbox full of useless icons?! do you need wilber on the top of it? I don’t!

To remove wilber just edit your gimprc file and add this in a new line
(toolbox-wilber no)

You can find the gimprc file in your personal gimp folder (just the same as before!)

To remove useless buttons from your toolbox edit the toolrc file and add change the value from YES to NO for example:

(GimpToolInfo “gimp-iscissors-tool”
(stock-id “gimp-tool-iscissors”)
(visible no))

(GimpToolInfo “gimp-foreground-select-tool”
(stock-id “gimp-tool-foreground-select”)
(visible no))

We had a issue with the soundtrack of the video, in the first version I put a song without taking care about the copyright and license of it. So Fateh advice me that I should try to look for copyleft music on the internet, and I must say that it’s wasn’t an easy task!, but in the way to find the song we found a lot of sites and resources related to free music or copyleft music.
Here’s a few links that we want share!:
Jamendo
musicleft.net
nomag
sounds, loops, effects and more:
freesound.org
And again, thanks to The Art Punk Band to share the song that we use in the video.

Also we must say that all the video was edited in the blender 2.5 sequence editor.

Seems to be problems with Live Streaming so, here’s the link to download the video in .ogg format (Ogg/Theora). Only 4.2mb.
behind_the_chaos

I came just six days ago, so all is new for me, luckily all the people in the team and at the hampshire college are great and really kind. So there wasn’t problems with the adaptation time. Before I start talking about the project, I want to make a special mention to Bassam, Fateh and Jarred who give me all I need, and are always asking if there’s all going right!

Well, do I’ve mentioned that the town/city (Northampton, MA) is really beautifull? i think not! All the buildings and houses are like the movies

Another little thing to mention is that all has a lot of patience with me , because my english is really bad XD, I guess that get laughs at my back! But i think that i’m learning a lot, so i think that in … 3 months I’ll be ready to communicate with english people

Lets talk about important things! The food is really strange, I miss the argentinean food! but I must adapt to this new forms of eat! I feel lucky because I came with Yerba Mate.

From the first day I start to work in the Nerdodrome,It’s a very nice place where a lot of cool things happen!, There’s also a project called Caldera which is produced in the same place, fortunately here we have a lot of new computers to do all the work together without disturb to anybody.

In the project, I’m mostly dedicated to draw some boards for the animatic. So I’m doing a lot of 2d stuff, sometimes i have things to do in 3d but not too much. I don’t have problem with that because I love to draw and make sketches!

Here’s some images that I did in this few days. Keep on touch for more blog updates!

- Pablo