Well, after a few weeks working in the concepts and the boards for the animatic, it’s time now to do some modeling stuff, which is REALLY fun! and it give us the possibility to play a little bit more with blender 2.5. I must say that I’m really comfortable now working on it, anyway I use to save the file every big change I made into the mesh, because you know, it’s still a beta release and blender crash -very- often! :P.. we are a little bit accustomed to that 🙂

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/

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\