Under the Transform section of the Add Constraint menu is a new one called Maintain Volume.
I developed the constraint (which is extremely simple) to help with adding squash and stretch to characters. There are a number of ways to do this already, but as I’m not the world’s greatest rigger and don’t have a lot of patience for layering several tiers of controls on top of each other, I wanted an easier way. First, I tried doing it with Drivers. I figured that if I could drive the X and Z scale of a bone as a function of its Y scale that would do the trick (the equation btw is: X (or Z) scale equals the square root of the constant volume divided by the Y scale). Unfortunately, Blender didn’t like this and considered it a cyclic dependency. So, I moved on to using the Transform constraint.
Another user (mtracer) said that he’d done just such a thing with the Transform constraint, and it seems like that’s the case. I just couldn’t get it to work. I find those types of value-mapping interfaces horrible to deal with. I could have tried to do this with a PyConstraint, and in fact something like this was done by Cessen in Big Buck Bunny. Unfortunately, I’ve never done a PyConstraint before and didn’t feel like learning the new API for what should be a relatively simple effect.
So, I was at the point where most users find themselves. Yes, I could have brute-forced any of the previous four solutions (complex rig, drivers, transform constraint, py constraint). However, that doesn’t solve the problem for everyone else. We can’t expect people to be programmers just to use the software. So, I did the easiest thing for me, which was to add a constraint. You can see the effect below:
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.
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.
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.
