News

Today, and a bit yesterday too, I improved the (to me) highly mysterious "vertex" mode in Layer Painter. I read enough code to realize it's actually doing displacement, although it used to say "color" next to the slider where you set the value to paint with. It also only supported positive displacement, which I found a bit limiting. So, I enhanced the slider code to support any range, and made it use -1 to 1 for displacement. I also changed the label, so it actually reads "displacement" now. I also found and fixed a bug that prevented the brush size from being displayed, both the UI for changing it, and on-screen during painting, while in displacement mode. /Emil

Yesterday, I added a page to the Uni-Verse Wiki about the Layer Painter tool, one of Eskil's programs. It's a fairly simple application, but might still benefit from having some kind of written documentation. Enjoy. I've also spent some time polishing the application itself, and as a test I added a fourth material to the trusty car model; now the wheels have "chromed" rims, heh. My chrome interpretation is probably not very realistic, but at least it's shiny. /Emil

Ah, back from the IST 2006 in Helsinki, which at least from trains, taxis, trams and buses seems to be a nice city. No time to find out this time, though.

In one hotel night during the Expo, in order to add some dynamic element to the demonstrations we did in the booth all day long, I wrote this. It's a Verse client, written in C, that creates and then updates a digital clock in a bitmap node. This means you can put a live clock as a texture in your world, which can be amusing. It also nicely shows off how Verse data and scenes can be truly dynamic, not only when being edited by a human being.

Update 2006-12-08: there's now a wiki page about vclock.
/Emil

There are great strides of progress with Verse master server support in Blender! The work is being done by Nathan Letwory (aka "jesterKing"), and is currently available in the form of a patch in the Patch Tracker. The patch relies on my little verse_ms helper module.

To celebrate the new ease of finding Verse servers to connect to, I tried modelling some text in Blender and exporting it, while being connected with Connector to the same server. The result is the screenshot shown. Thanks jesterKing for this great contribution!

Update: the patch has now been merged into Blender's main CVS. /Emil

	The new master server list interface.

Since some time last week, when I sent him a patch, Brecht Van Lommel's Verse page holds a version of his GIMP Verse plug-in, with master server support. The patch relies heavily on the verse_ms module, available in CVS separately.

In other news, we held a PCC meeting in the Uni-Verse project last week here at KTH. It was mainly focused on integration-testing and continuing work on the various pieces needed for the project's participation at the upcoming IST Event 2006 in Helsinki, where Uni-Verse will be part of the exhibition. /Emil

Here's a quick snapshot of a model with slightly more complexity than is usually seen on these pages. It's the simple renderer's view of a 3ds model of The AlbaNova University Center. For this to look even semi-decent, I added some simple (just basic OpenGL) lighting to the renderer, in place of the usual pretty random colors. I don't think I got it all right, but it's good enough for now. Note the number in the bottom right corner: the scene contains 142,422 polygons, which certainly is more than I usually throw at it. Transferring this scene from the Verse server, even on localhost, takes a while. Once downloaded, even this super-naive code (it's all OpenGL immediate mode, with plenty of logic in the inner loop) manages its usual ~20 fps. I thank the hardware. /Emil

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've been looking into the pile of fun that is the RenderMan format. Specifically, into going from our XML-based format, VML, to the RenderMan Interface Bytestream, RIB. For simple cases, this can be done without any programming, thanks to the box of tricks that is XSLT. The image shows our good old friend, the Purple torus primitive, as rendered by the simple online Verse renderer, and as by Aqsis after conversion to RIB. Neat, huh? The RenderMan export is not online; I save the contents of the scene out as VML, edit it slightly to remove cruft that would otherwise confuse the converter, and then run XSLT with a stylesheet that emits RIB. That is then lightly edited again, to put the camera somewhere sensible. Materials are ignored, at this point. /Emil

Another week, another Purple plug-in. Today I've been getting back to basics, and teaching Purple how to count. The new basic arithmetic operators (that's what we coders call +, -, * and /) support bitmaps, or real numbers. Or mixes, thereof, letting you (for instance) compute 3 * (a bitmap). This can be used to implement everybody's favorite graphical feature: alpha blending!. It's perhaps not too pretty a graph, but at least it works. The current module is the "constant" in the lower-left corner, i.e. the alpha value. The window on the right shows the resulting bitmap, as uploaded to Verse.

It's been a busy week! I've been polishing (and sending off) my slides for the upcoming Blender Conference, as well as being ... made attentive of the fact that there is a a Standard Plug-In Library deliverable in the Purple project that needed more attention. Oops. But, I think I'm getting on top of that, and am just about to commit the latest addition; the lovely Torus primitive! /Emil

Continuing with the bones, I wanted some sample data. Since there is no Verse-native test data that uses bones, I turned to Google. That soon lead me to hanim.org, home of the Humanoid Animation Working Group. I applied some simple scripting to their spec's hierarchy, extended my simple renderer with initial supprt for bones, and the result is seen in the image next by. It is not ... without problems, for instance the spine looks like it's too high up, but I believe the basic structure is there. The mess around the hands is because I used the full level three hierachy, which has 93 bones, including those in the fingers.