The Blog-thing

So here’s the premise: For scenes that take around a minute or less to render, performance is actually worse if you render on all of the cards with a single instance of Blender. This is because (AFAIK) there’s a bit of additional time necessary to collect the render results from each card and stitch them together. That time is a fixed short duration, so it’s negligible on larger/longer render jobs. However, on shorter render jobs, the ‘stitch time’ has a much more significant impact…

When doing my work, sometimes I need to get information out of a .blend file. For example, I sometimes need to do batch image processing (renaming, file conversion, etc.) on my rendered output. There’s not a nice way to just query the .blend file for that information. Sure, there’s BAM and even the old blenderaid tools, but they’re a bit heavy-handed if you don’t have them installed. So here’s the hacky solution I’m currently using…

I got myself good and distracted from my regular project work and ended up writing the start of a little script that I’m calling JungleBook. It’s makes images that are pretty and interesting… and might just provide a little bit analytical benefit.

OK, OK… I know that I haven’t posted anything new here since May. However, it only looks like I’ve been on a summer vacation. In reality, this has been a surprisingly busy summer for me. And the approaching last quarter of this year doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Not one little bit. So what have I been up to? Let’s scurry through the the list…

So in the midst of my indie writing shenanigans, the 3rd edition of Blender For Dummies is officially out and in the wild as of today! Wheee!

One of the rewards for my Kickstarter campaign is a daily tear-off calendar, with a lie from Definitely True: Year One on each page of the calendar. It’s actually at the printer being made right now (woohoo!). One of the fun things about a tear-off calendar is that it’s built exactly like a simple flipbook. So I couldn’t resist adding a little animation to the bottom of each page…

Well… It’s started…

Assuming all of the approvals go through and there are no hiccups, then within the next 24 hours, I’m going to be launching my first ever Kickstarter campaign…

So this has been circulating the interwebbernets today a bit and it got me thinking. So much so, that it got me writing here. With any luck, it’ll get you thinking, too.