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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.

If you’ve been following this blog, you saw my proposal and skeleton code for a surface deform modifier that would allow you to, for example, do cloth sim on a basic shirt form, then use that to deform a more complex shirt model. I had proposed it to utilize the shrink wrap code for initial pinning, and the internals of the old-style hook code for actual deformation.

The other day, Brecht committed an addition to the Cage Deform modifier which performs this same task. I believe it uses the heat weighting algorithm for pinning, followed by the cage deform method of deformation. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds like it will do exactly what was needed!

In the end, I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I’m just happy that there’s now a way to pin one entire mesh’s surface to that of another.

If you want to do camera mapping in Blender, you have two choices: Sticky coordinates or the UV Project modifier. Sticky coordinates are easy to generate, but they tend to fall apart at the slightest provocation. In theory, you just drop into a camera view, put up your background image, line up your objects and make Sticky coords. They are a special kind of vertex-based uv coordinate. The problem with them is that if you move the camera in any useful fashion, they go crazy, making the stuff you’d normally like to do with camera projection not very do-able. The old solution was to use a script that baked the Sticky coords to standard UV coordinates.

I’m working on the surfacing chapter of my book, and needed to use camera projection. Sticky coordinates were not back in Blender 2.5, so I reattached them to an operator. Sticky worked again, but the old grief remained. I’ve tried the UV Project modifier, and did the tutorials, etc., again but still I just didn’t like the work flow. I’ve heard from people who certainly know better that it’s great, works right, yes yes. However, nothing is quite as intuitive to me as lining your objects up in camera view.

So, after some feedback from Brecht and Matt Ebb, I wrote a new UV unwrap type: Project from Camera. Basically, it works the way that Stickies do. Camera view + background image + tweak your objects right there in perspective. Now, instead of adding stickies, you unwrap the mesh using Project from Camera. That’s it! Now you have a UV unwrap that you can tweak if you need to, and we can get rid of stickies forever!

If you’re interested in trying it out before it’s in trunk (hopefully), bop on over to:

http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&aid=19862

I’ve added a patch to the tracker. It’s the superstructure for a new modifier, in case some kind soul with a bug up their butt for the functionality previously described wants to show up, write only the hardcore code (the bind and deform) and take all the glory. Let me just say that this modifier will be used constantly, by everyone. Maybe even the Pope. So you’ll have that going for you.

But really, who am I kidding? I’m going to end up fighting with this all weekend and into next week when I should be writing my book.

Tracker link: Similar Surface modifier patch