Author: Waylena

Planetarium professional since 1992. User of Free and Open Source Software since 2001.

Vahana VR & VideoStitch Studio

Vahana VR & VideoStitch Studio: software to create immersive 360° VR video, live and in post-production.

I ran across this by accident today. I don’t yet have a dual camera setup to work with, but I want to be prepared. I ran across a discussion thread talking about the software and then the thread turned to sadness with a post that the company making it had folded. Then at the end was another post linking to another thread cheering the revival of the software as an open source project with the MIT License.

https://github.com/stitchEm/stitchEm

Honestly it has been a few years since I’ve built my own packages. Hopefully I can satisfy the dependencies through package managers at least. (If I had time to compile everything, I would still be running Gentoo. It ran mighty fast, but compiling time added up.)

If and when I manage to trying it out, I will be sure to update.

Update on class: 3D Data Visualization for Science Communication

I am still here, I promise! Been away from work and prepping for the upcoming GLPA conference.

In the midst of all that, I’ve been taking the Coursera class mentioned last month. Although the instructors emphasize Houdini because that’s what they use for cinematic rendering, they do mentioned Blender frequently. I have installed the apprentice version of Houdini (yay for Linux version!) but haven’t had time to learn it. Thus I am doing the assignments in Blender.

Solar System render from specific assignment parameters using textures provided.

The instructors are doing a great job of breaking down concepts and using those concepts as they explain how and why they decide on approaches to their work. The quizzes are challenging and thought provoking.

In my own work, I mostly create science illustrations rather than visualizations. Even so, I find myself putting more focused thought into my work now. And I like that. I like that a lot.

3D Data Visualization for Science Communication class on Coursera

It’s not solely FOSS stuff, but I’m taking this course:

The instructors are part of NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Lab team, and they are pretty amazing at what they do. I’ve met them both previously on several occasions and each time they’ve been happy to talk shop and answer my nerdy questions. 
I’m pretty excited about this, and will let everyone know how it goes.

Another great resource for learning Blender 2.8

First Steps with Blender 2.8

I’m half-watching these and listening as I do other things, pausing to note differences from 2.79 that I know will trip me up.

From the official Blender YouTube channel

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1F2ddGya_-UvuAqHAksYnB0qL9yWDO6

And don’t forget the series by Ron Proctor:  Introduction to Blender 2.80

Blender Beyond Beta – 2.80rc1

Blender 2.80 Release Candidate 1 is out today.


It’s looking mighty fine and the UI has been redesigned to work the way users of most commercial software packages expect. 

Give it a try! 

Download it from www.blender.org.
Extract the downloaded file, then run Blender straight from the extracteed folder.