Marc Pampols

Now i'm stucked in two problems since I installed MacOS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on my new MacBook Pro, I'm not an expert with OSX, so there's probably a very dumb solution for all of this...

Besides the problem with Blender which I'm going to talk about, I can't install the actual version of Plone CMS with the official OSX installer, it's a known issue and the Plone team is already working hard to fix it.

The problem I'm going to talk about is compiling Blender using scons (it's an actual requirement for Mechanical Blender) , this is what I got in my first try:

scons: done reading SConscript files.
scons: Building targets ...
Compiling ==> 'creator.c'
cc1: error: unrecognized command line option "-Wno-long-double"
scons: *** [/Users/marc/Documents/Mechanic Blender/trunk/build/darwin/source/creator/creator.o] Error 1
scons: building terminated because of errors.

Then I realized that Snow Leopard uses gcc 4.2.1 by default, and there's no gcc_select anymore for switching to the old 4.0, so I changed the symbolic link with:

sudo ln -fs /usr/bin/gcc-4.0 /usr/bin/gcc

and then, the output was:

...
scons: done reading SConscript files.
scons: Building targets ...
scons: `release' is up to date.
compiling ==> 'creator.c'
source/creator/creator.c:29:20: error: stdlib.h: No such file or directory
source/creator/creator.c:30:20: error: string.h: No such file or directory
In file included from source/creator/creator.c:34:
intern/guardedalloc/MEM_guardedalloc.h:61:42: error: stdio.h: No such file or directory
In file included from intern/guardedalloc/MEM_guardedalloc.h:62,
from source/creator/creator.c:34:
... and so on

It seems that gcc can't find the standard libraries, here is where I'm completely lost because stdlib,h, string, stdio and the rest of the files are in /usr/include, I added this path into system's $PATH and didn't work either! my gcc 4.0 can't find the libraries and the problem is exactly the same.

Any idea?

This is a new Blender project created by my friend mauge, a mechanical application for Blender 3D

UPDATE: Blendernation links the video and receives nice feedback :)

Mechanical Blender Sketch Drawing (Tech Preview) from mauge on Vimeo.

Daniel Martínez Lara (aka Pepeland) is showing some videos around about a new animation technique called AniSculpt with the help of Blender Sculpt Tools.

I have to admit that after watching this videos (AniSculpt Maya Connection, AniSculpt Tutorial and AniSculpt test 01) I have downloaded and installed Blender again :)

This technique consists in using Blender Sculpt Tools to make object deformations (specially for characters but obviously it works on everything) at specific frames, and then, export the animation in your favourite 3D program, he's working on a Maya and a 3dsMax connection right now.

Congratulations to Daniel for all the work done!

AniSculpt video screenshot

Information from Maillist and Maxunderground news

ProMotion Studios has finished a new 3D short film called Lighthouse, Directed by Charlie Short & Ming Hsiung, created using 3dsMax and Blender, and made for the American insurance firm Liberty Mutual.

Its a short (3min) film with a great animation and rendering, the overall quality is very nice.

Lighthouse shot

They have also developed open source tools that will be released in the next versions of Blender, a software that is growing fast and it has been used in some very interesting and successfull projects like "Elephants Dream" and "Big Buck Bunny"

Click in the image below to watch the film (flash video)

Link: Original CG Talk thread anouncing the film

Link: Making of (Flash movie)

Have you ever heard something about the "greeble" effect ?

"A greeble or nurnie is a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object to add visual interest to a surface or object, particularly in movie special effects." - Wikipedia

Here is a nice example of what does this effect:

Greeble example, Rendered by Gargaj / Conspiracy.

I discovered this effect some time ago with a plugin for 3dsMax called "Greeble", a funny plugin that generates random detail in objects simply by adding a modifier, it was available since 3d Studio Max version 3.

Another great resource for greeble fans is Greebelicious: http://www.greebelicious.com, a forum-gallery where users post their artistic creations with various greeble tools available for 3d software.

Render by "pure render" from Greebelicious

If you like it and you want to start greebling, below is a list of plugins available for various 3d packages, and if you don't have any, I recommend you starting with Autodesk 3dsMax (trial demo available), or if you like open source software, Blender is a good choice.

Greeble plugin for 3D Studio Max (from R3 to the actual 2009) - Tom Hudson website
Discombobulator, greeble script for Blender (working version is for 2.40, latest release of Blender is 2.46)
LW Greeble & Nurnies, script for Lightware - Download