Plexus Effect

Video on Odysee

So I spent my morning digging into a tutorial by Chris P on YouTube building a lovely Plexus Effect using Blender and Animation Nodes. There were a few stumbling points due to the tutorial being for slightly older versions of both, but they weren’t so different as to be a huge problem. And if I were more practiced with Animation Nodes it would have been much easier to figure out those differences.

My resulting video isn’t a super high quality because it was rendered for upload to Odysee/Lbry. I don’t know if there is a way to embed as there is with the other video players out there.

My result video on Odysee

Outliner on the LEFT?

Just watched nice YouTube video from YouTuber Steven Scott, titled “Blender Blasphemy, outliner on the left?” and it got me rethinking my workflow, since I increasingly use the numpad keys with my left hand so my right hand can stay on the mouse. (especially since I’m using USB numpads with laptops more and more)

Anyway, check it out:

Construction Zone

I’m migrating to a different platform as a learning experience, so things could get weird.

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 :

Published
Categorized as news

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. 

Stellarium remote fun

I LOVE open source software! 

Stellarium sky

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.