Thursday July 18th Blender.org released a new version of Blender. This is an important update for Second Life™ users that are doing weight painting.
You’ll find the Blender 2.68 Release Notes here.
Blender 2.68 Released SL Review
Blender
Blender Measurements for Second Life
There is a good thread in the SL Forum for those that are interested in making to-scale objects with Blender. See: Getting a good measurement for SL within Blender.
Codewarrior Congrejo makes a suggestion in the thread that I use in my modeling. Put an avatar in the scene. I strongly urge furniture makers to go to the trouble to do that. I literally do not have ANY furniture that fits my avatar. Couches are ridiculous. The distance from the face of the back rest cushion to the front edge of the seat can be a couple of meters. WTH?
There are bits in the forum thread that may surprise even experienced Blender users.
Blender 2.68 RC1 Released
There is a great article by Gaia Clary in the SL Forum: Blender 2.68: Weight Tools reworked. She is explaining how weight painting in Blender has improved. Tools work as one intuitively thinks they should. I see that as a big improvement. I’ve fought with Blender weight painting for some time.
Also the documentation has been updated. See the Vertex Groups section of the 2.6 manual.
Blender 2.67b is currently the stable release. But, a Blender 2.68 Release Candidate is out. See the Blender download page for the 2.67b version. There is a candidates download page here.
Blender Accepted to Summer of Code 2013
Google Inc. sponsors Summer of Code (SoC) each year for students over age 18. For those under 18 they sponsor Code-In. This year 15 Blender projects have been included in the mix of SoC projects. They are: Painting tool improvements Sketch Mesh Editing VSE Improvements Dependency Graph and Evaluation Engine Refactor BGE Level of Detail … Read more
Blender 2.67 Released
It’s over a week ago (May 7) that Blender released a new version: 2.67. I just noticed.
Blender Download – Use the Archive version for better compatibility with previous versions.
New in this Release
Free Style
This may seem odd to you, but Blender just got a Free-Style Render Engine that renders non-photorealistic images. See: Blender Free Style for more examples.
Paint System
The paint system has improvements. Brushes work in more modes and have more features. Bugs in the system have been fixed.
Avastar Update RC5-834
Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix.org the home of AVASTAR has a new Release Candidate out: 834. I just installed it. The fix I wanted is not yet in it. Gaia tells me I won’t see that until after the next release. 🙁 But, there are fixes and improvements. You need your special URL to get the … Read more
Resetting the Origin of an Armature in Blender
The default Second Life animations have odd pivot points in the animations. If you are using them for import to SL then that is a good thing. If you are trying to use the animations for other purposes, like I am to pose the avatar for weighting clothes, it is a problem.
If you import the default SL animation into Blender, the feet are at the Blender 0,0,0 position. If you change to EDIT mode the hip is at the 0,0,0 position. In POSE more, again the feet are at the 0,0,0 position. See the image.
That does not really matter for our use for making Second Life clothes. But the T-pose only being available in EDIT mode makes it hard to position the imported animation with our clothing avatar.
Weight Copy Blender 2.66a
You will find that the Weight Copy script that many of us have been using with our clothes building doesn’t work in Blender 2.66a. (Some say it does. I’m not sure.) Gaia Clary is not going to be updating the script for newer Blender versions. She doesn’t need to. Blender now has the ‘copy’ function built … Read more