Migrating to FOSSdome.com as a learning experience.

Nodevember is here!

Too much going on this year for me to dive into Nodevember, but I'm looking forward to seeing what other Blender peeps come up with. Rock on, node nerds! 

From http://nodevember.io :

Almost #nodevember... time to Prepare

 I'm looking forward to #nodevember this year. Last year I only made it about a week before life got in the way, so I'll try again.

My personal goal is to improve my node skills and in particular try to stretch beyond the types of things I would ordinarily attempt.

In preparation, I'm enjoying reviewing the amazing work of others last year, like through this video from Curtis Holt: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhLVzcCl1ug

And through my subscription to the Blender Cloud, I'm following the series Procedural Shading: Fundamentals and Beyond.

I don't know if I will keep up this year, but for me the learning is never wasted. The prompts aren't up yet as of this writing, but they will be here: http://nodevember.io/

Open Source Creative podcast

I highly recommend the Open Source Creative podcast. 

The host, Jason van Gumster, is one of those folks I've seen for years on the online Blender communities. He's an author, a creator, and an all-around interesting character. 

I first discovered his podcast back when I was thinking of starting my own podcast but his is much better than what I'd had in mind. 

Find the audio in your favorite podcast player. Or visit the website directly. Some episodes are also in video format on the Open Source Creative YouTube Channel.

If you're a FOSS user, do check it out!

Jitsi Meet and New Friends

 Last night I joined in a meeting of a Linux User Group in my state. I'd been meaning to physically attend a meeting for the past 18 years but never did make it happen. With the switch to everything online, I figured it would be cool to finally meet some of these folks.  

The Linux Users of Central Illinois - they announce meetings on their list: http://www.luci.org/luci-announce/ 

Turns out to be some pretty interesting folks in that group. Like those times my hubby and I attended Ohio LinuxFest in the mid-2000s. 

The point of my posting, however, is to say that it was my first time trying Jitsi Meet. You go to https://meet.jit.si/ and either type in the name of an existing meeting to join or else you start a new meeting.

At one point it wouldn't let me turn my video back on after I'd turned it off, but that may have been a browser/permissions thing. (I was using Brave as my browser, and I'm still new at using that.)

I liked Jitsi Meet and I think it has some very nice potential. 

Waylena returns to the dome Fall 2020

Video shot on my phone, put together in Blender's Video Sequence Editor. 

Python for Blender tutorials

There are a lot of tutorials out there on the topic of Python for Blender, but this series is working particularly well for me. 

I found this set through BlenderNation.

Raghav Venkat of the cordata Youtube channel has created the series as a playlist.

Python for Blender: Artist Friendly Programming Guide for Addon Development

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmGhGFnN_vMITtIKBKjPJ1h5C5i-iabqO

Stellarium remote fun

I LOVE open source software! 

Stellarium is one of the top open source software packages for desktop sky viewing. Since I won't be presenting shows in a physical planetarium any time soon, I figured I should work out how to present better online.

Stellarium has a remote web interface plugin that is pretty easy to set up.  So I'm using my giant monitor for presentation and my little monitor for controls and for programming.

I'm clumsy with the on-screen menus, so having them on a separate monitor is great! Some actions take a while to set up, so I tried a little scripting to automate some stuff.

And then I decided that rather than hunting through pull-down menus for my little scripts I should make some buttons for scripts and actions.

So I started modifying the html. 

And relied on the kindness of a stranger's blog post to expose the functionality.

Thankfully I found an Atom package to make that json readable.

I don't often spend enough time in any given language to get good at it. But in this effort, I'm digging into Stellarium scripting/javascript, html, and to find the right language for scripting actions I found myself searching the source code for the project itself.

Trig Function-Driven Animation in Blender 2.83

Another fine video tutorial from Ron Proctor!

Check it out! You know you want to...
https://youtu.be/uTZ9el8st5c

3D stereoscopic test

Years ago I used Blender to make a stereographic test. It took forever to render a tiny, very low resolution test so I had to drop it at the time. (http://youtu.be/MWpsBb3enek if you want to see it.)

Now it is 2020 and I had some time last week. I couldn't find the blend file from my original example, so I made a new example, again using Blender.  

Really should be viewed with VR goggles, and you'll need to tell YouTube to use a higher resolution setting, but the compression wasn't too kind. Even so, I'm encouraged to continue.

I'm still looking for a way to inject the needed metadata on Linux. I had to do this on a Windows machine because the injector is only for MacOS and Windows.

BTW, I had to render this twice because originally I rendered it side-by-side (SBS) but the YouTube Metadata Injector only accepts top-and-bottom (TAB).

Here's the same frame in each format:

3D stereoscopic test frame, SBS.

3D stereoscopic test frame, TAB

A stitch in time (or space)

Since the planetarium will be operating online for the foreseeable future, I've been working on ways to give everything a nice local touch.

One way has been to make custom panoramas for use with Stellarium.

William M. Staerkel Planetarium             

Parkland College

Champaign-Urbana Astronomical
Society Observatory

We should be able to use them with our Digistar 6 in the dome when we are able to reopen. I like making content that can be used on different platforms


I used a DSLR with a fisheye lens on a tripod to get a good selection of overlapping images, making sure to have some shots with objects of interest centered.




I used Hugin to stitch the images. It's not super automatic, but there are builtin tools for aligning and for masking out troublesome spots.

Finally, I use Gimp to fix up the nadir a bit and to get rid of the sky. I also fix up any small stitching errors that I missed earlier. Some distant power lines and light poles will end up cut in the process, but I can live with that.




It's a messy process, but I use brightness and contrast settings and sometimes desaturation to get a nice mask. I work in smaller sections and then combine them.


And I usually have to over-mask the vegetation because I don't have the patience to cut out around each leaf.


Don't forget to check your edge seams. Layer > Transform > Offset and select "By width/2" with "wrap around" selected for Edge Behavior.

Confessions of a FOSS fangirl

My name is Waylena, and I am a FOSS fangirl. I love that FOSS is both free as in speech and free as in beer. I love that I can poke around in source code and follow developer mailing lists. I love finding FOSS production tools, techniques and workflows. And I love teaching FOSS tools to others.

I am not, however, a FOSS fundamentalist. 

At work I use a variety of closed-source software packages and tools. From the software that runs the planetarium (Digistar 6) to the usual commercial office and production tools. For production I mostly use FOSS because I'm faster with GIMP than I am with Photoshop, and faster with Inkscape than I am with Illustrator. I had finally started working heavily with After Effects before the shutdowns, but working at home I've been almost entirely FOSS. 

Blender 

LibreOffice

Gimp

Inkscape

Stellarium

Audacity

Hugin

...and more, on Linux

I prefer Linux whenever possible because to me it's usually friendlier. I am still using my Linux box, but now I've added a Windows 10 machine. The machine is a 2-year old gaming machine. In addition to the regular tools, I can now also run the full version of WorldWide Telescope, and OpenSpace. Openspace can be compiled for Linux, but I had not been successful at it yet. (New version should change that.) 

So now I have a second computer with a commercial OS and some FOSS tools that either aren't available or aren't yet readily available on my favorite FOSS OS. But that's okay. On my Linux box there are tools like Subtitle Editor and VokoscreenNG that aren't available for Windows. (There are alternatives, these are just my favorites at this time.)

My favorite FOSS software is both FOSS and multiplatform, but I have plenty of room in my heart toolbox for useful software tools that don't fit neatly into any category.

Blendpeaks free add-on for Blender from Oormi Creations

Wow. Saw this today on BlenderNation:

http://www.blendernation.com/2020/05/24/blendpeaks-create-mountain-peaks-in-blender-free-add-on/

It creates a plane and a shader setup for material and displacement. 

I made a quick test using defaults, with a default Sky Texture and the default single scene lamp:

I like it. I like it a lot. In fact, I think I might be a bit in love.

Here's the direct link:
http://github.com/oormicreations/Blendpeaks/releases

And while you're at it, please do check out the Oormi Creations website:
http://oormi.in/index.htm

Fractal Flames a happy mistake

I used a flame that I generated in Gimp, then converted it to the XML format using flam3-convert, then used defaults with flam3-generate and rendered with flam3-render.

I'm working on a workflow to generate some for dome use, but not random defaults.

Oh yes, I didn't apply any processing, just strung the frames together. 

An excellent guide to Blender nodes

Saw this on BlenderNation today...

The complete beginners guide to Blender nodes, Eevee, Cycles and PBR












Wow. I like this. I like this a lot.


http://artisticrender.com/the-complete-beginners-guide-to-blender-nodes-eevee-cycles-and-pbr/

Still here, still looking up