We’ve been developing a script to convert from Blender models to Haxe code. You can get it here:

http://github.com/paulfitz/blender2haxe

Haxe is a nifty language that can compile to Flash swf and other targets. The blender2haxe exporter uses sandy, a Flash 3D library that has excellent Haxe support.

The exporter is based on the excellent AS3Export script by Dennis Ippel. A basic patch for Haxe export has been integrated into AS3Export.

Generator news has been moved to the main MakeSweet Blog.

We’ve updated our call for blends to advertise the Generator Wizard, a tool for streamlining the process of making an image/animation generator with Blender.

Just had quite an adventure getting blender’s game engine to show shading on a design. In the end, the problem was that there was one visible object (that I didn’t care about) on a layer without a light source. The result was that no shading was shown on any objects. D’oh! Deleting the object sufficed to fix this.

I was running into a problem with blender where I couldn’t preserve the aspect ratio of an image being used as a texture on a deforming surface. For rigid surfaces, the solution described here (basically, using an Empty) worked fine. But for a deforming surface, a better solution turned out to be to modify the “texture space” of the object. I didn’t even know that objects had a texture space, but they do (see bottom of this page, the “texture space transform” part), and you can change it. Just select your object, hit “T”, choose “Scale” and resize one of the dimensions (by hitting X, or Y, or Z) to get your aspect ratio back to what it should be. Yay! I wish I’d known about this earlier…

Our demo video for ucanvcam has caught up with the latest version. See the silent grainy happy lizard demo. The videography leaves something to be desired, but the main point is that effects can be created online with the picture mixer and downloaded as stills or animations. So put your video stream in a heart or on a wine bottle and enjoy!

A new version of ucanvcam has been released (download from the usual place). The most interesting addition is an effect that lets you take a blender-based design created on the picture mixer and project your webcam feed onto a surface or surfaces within that. Video examples coming soon…

Update: video example is available.

Getting steps in shadows where you should be getting a smooth gradient in blender? If you are on Linux, make sure your X server is not running with a pixel depth of less than 24. I didn’t expect that this would affect the rendered images, as opposed to how they appear on screen, but it does. This affects flat surfaces with fairly dark shadows - you get a quantization effect that in hindsight should have shouted “pixel depth”…

One of my projects at MakeSweet is to create a simple interface to blender, the 3d graphics and movie maker, that lets people make small videos online. The functions of blender are far too vast and the computational requirements of rendering too exacting for a general-purpose interface to make sense. So we created some simple template .blend files, and let people plug in images or text at strategic points. These modifications are implemented using blender’s python interface. You can access the public version of the interface here.

It turns out that for simple scenes at fairly low resolution, rendering times for stills are short enough to do online (however, we can run into trouble if we are hit by a crowd of users). Rendering actual videos takes tens of minutes, so such jobs get shoved in a queue rather than done online. The queue is processed by a remote rendering farm, running a copy of the .blend customization scripts. The farm sends the results back to the web server, and dispatches an email notification to the user.

There are lots of technical problems to work on still, but actually our main limitation at the moment is artwork; our templates are not terribly exciting! Time to find some decent artists…