harkyman.com

So I’ve been pretty happily using Ubuntu for over a year now — currently 9.04 on my laptop and 9.10 on my desktop. I got to looking at some of the great desktop setups that you can do with the Plasma (KDE 4.0) desktop, and wondered how hard it would be to switch to using KDE on my machines. As my desktop is my test bed, I went for it on there. It turns out that it’s ridiculously easy to switch. Just enter “sudo apt-get intall kubuntu-desktop” from a console. 480MB of download later and it’s done. I just love how easy it is to do things like this with Debian/Ubuntu.

Thus far, I’m very happy with it. I like the options and such way better than the Gnome ones presented with the default Ubuntu install. Look and feel fits the way I like to work better, too. In fact, after several days of using Kubuntu on my desktop, I’ve also switched over with my laptop. This isn’t to bust on the Gnome desktop or anything. It was fine for a long time for me. After a suitable acclimation period (like, a day) though, I have KDE working in a way that really suits me.

Having to deal at home with supporting Windows XP, Windows 7 (which ain’t bad) and a Mac makes me appreciate the ease and elegance with which I can administer my two Linux computers. The Mac’s not bad, but trying to get those Windows machines to place nice is really taxing me.

A looong time ago, I promised to make the “film look” compositing network that I use available once Soft Light mix mode was in trunk, as the effect depends upon it heavily and irreplacably. That time came a couple of months ago, and I just remembered to follow up.

So, you can click on the thumbnail below to get the full sized image of the network.

Film Look node tree

Download a .BLEND file here.

The effect is created from an old tutorial I had found on some kid’s website for adding a film style look to his digital photography in Photoshop. I re-purposed the decently complicated Photoshop layer-based work flow into a nodes-based one for Blender. I went looking for that original one, so I could link and credit, but I’ve been unable to find it since that one lucky strike a couple of years ago. To be fair then, the general theory behind this technique isn’t my own, although I added and adjusted a bit while I was nodifying the process. As a reminder, the results are:

Before

After

You adjust the way that the shadows, highlights and midtones cast by changing the colors in the RGB color node, and in the Color Ramp node. If you’re going to use this, make sure to set the render dimensions to match the dimensions of your input image.

Merry Christmas!

After discussions with Matt and Brecht, I took their advice and just rolled the functionality into the “UV Project from View” operation. So, if you’re in a camera view and use Project from View now for your UV coordinates, it actually works like you’d expect. Before, this resulted in a nasty mapping that had to be scaled, skewed and tweaked by hand to even get close to working. Now it works as is.

The whole point is that if you want to do some quick camera mapping for 2.5D matte work and don’t want to deal with the UV Project modifier, you can just blast it to UVs from camera view now. The nice part is that you don’t have to do anything special to use it — just jump into edit mode, press the U-key for the Unwrap menu and choose “Project from View.” If you’re in a camera view, it’ll do it.

Very cool news! Animating with Blender is now available for Amazon’s Kindle.

Now, besides being called the “top recommendation” among all books about short animation production by one reviewer, it is also available for perusal on your Kindle or iPhone with Kindle app.

You can bop over to check it out here.