Well, now that the old house is sold(!), I'm not living in mortgage-induced poverty any longer. That being the case, I finally found a nice price on a new computer. Our old kitchen computer had been on the fritz for a long time, and I finally replaced it last night with my main workstation.
Being delivered tomorrow to my house is an AMD 64 X2 (dual core) machine with 2GB of dual channel RAM, into which will be placed the very tasty nVidia Quadro FX video card gifted to me by the Blender Foundation (thanks guys!). Although I'm neck-deep in other projects right now, I feel quite certain that I'm going to have to take an evening off to see how the dual cores and generous RAM allocation treat the parallel processing task that BlenderPeople presents.
I'll let you know how it turns out.
The OS X (Python 2.3) character animation build of Blender is now available:
http://www.harkyman.com/blenderpeople/blender-2.42a-bp.tbzThat's a tar/bzip file, which should decompress straight to the application.
Also, someone asked in the comments whether the animation enhancements of this build are in the main tree yet. Answer: nope. Almost all of the stuff I've done with this messes around with Blender's guts pretty heavily. Ton's comments about the whole thing are along the lines of: "The math looks weird. I'll have to spend some time really looking at this to see what you did." Of course, Ton doesn't have a whole to of time. :)
Just a quick note to let everyone know that I tested the rebuilt binary on a clean machine with fresh installs of Python 2.4, MySQL 5, and MySQLdb 1, along with the official BlenderPeople0.8, and it worked like a charm on my first try. So, the binary is confirmed good!
With the untimely hiatus of graphicall.org, we were left without a good repository for the BlenderPeople Blender binary. Shortly after that happened, my own workstation suffered a power supply "incident", which also took out the electronics on my main hard drive. I found the exact same model # of HD on eBay, and was considering purchasing it to swap to the electronics. However, I actually do keep backups and multiple copies of things on different machines, so I decided it wasn't worth wasting almost $100 on something that may or may not work.
In the end, I purchased a new HD, pulled everything off backups and rebuilt. Of course, due to the fact that I owned two houses, I didn't even have the scratch to buy that new HD until just last week. And the old house is sold now, so, like, Hallelujah. But the workstation is back online, and I've posted the .zip of the BlenderPeople Blender 2.42a build.
Get it here:
Blender 2.42a Enhanced Character Animation BuildI'll try to get the Mac OS X build back up tomorrow.
Graphicall.org went down many weeks ago, and with it went the special binaries for running BlenderPeople. I've had a large volume of requests to repost the binaries, but due to the fact that 1) my main workstation fried, and 2) I could recompile, etc., from backups but didn't have time to fix the workstation so I could do that, it hasn't happened yet.
The good news is that I have my workstation reconstructed, etc., and just tonight I got a successful compile of both regular bf-blender and the special BlenderPeople build. I don't have time to package it tonight, but I'll get it done tomorrow and post it on my own web space.
