November 16th, 2004 .
Well that was fun, being here at Ton’s place when the big button was pushed and the new release of Blender 2.35 was made available to the world, and he even sneakily used a testing file of mine for the front page screenshot. We also had a good dinner tonight with Bart about how to proceed with the sticky issue of the website, which was very productive.
I had some high hopes for cool stuff to put in version 2.35, but unfortunately other things like preparations for the conference and having a good time in strange new countries got in the way! Oh well, there’s already plenty of awesome stuff in this release anyway, got to save something for 2.36. 🙂
October 7th, 2004 .
Last night, in another display of hardcore coding brilliance, Ton Roosendaal added a feature to bf-blender CVS that we’d been discussing a bit in IRC – an ‘Outliner’ scene management tool. I made a design proposal, from which Ton put this first working version together in the space of a couple of days. In this initial stage, it’s mostly useful for visualising, selecting and activating different Blender data for editing, and hopefully as it develops, we’ll see more interactive functionality being implemented. In particular, I’m really enthusiastic about the proposed Ipo channel editing functionality for setting keyframes etc, which would surely tie in quite nicely with the work on animation tools that Ton’s interested in doing for version 2.36.
Out of liners
September 25th, 2004 .
Last night, I added some new code to the ‘tuhopuu’ experimental Blender version to allow cutting strips in the Video Sequence Editor. It cuts any strips you have selected on the current frame, though there are a couple of minor limitations that perhaps someone more experienced in programming than I may be able to help with. Nevertheless, I’m quite proud to be capable of more ‘functional’ additions as well as the UI stuff I’ve been doing too (though I must also credit Alexander Ewering for sharing some similar code of his, for help and reference). Hopefully this will improve Blender’s NLE capabilities somewhat, which might be nice for Linux users, who don’t have much choice in video editing software on their OS.
How it works (MPEG4 video)
August 7th, 2004 .
It’s been an intense week or so, but R-Day has finally arrived, fire extinguishers have been strategically placed around the web servers, and blender.org has been plunged into B-Con 5 with the brand-spanking new release of Blender version 2.34. In the final throes before the source code was frozen against new changes, I managed to squeeze in a bunch of smaller UI tweaks, the left mouse button selection preference and the long-awaited Python driven Help menu, all of which I’m quite proud of, along with my earlier additions, too.
Everyone involved, from developers, to testers, to doc writers, to web admins, to bug reporters, to demo file producers deserve a big pat on the back and a nice cold beer for their efforts – it’s a hell of a release and if you haven’t done so already, go and check it out now at blender3d.org. Time for some well needed rest and relaxation before starting the vicious cycle again for version 2.35 🙂
