2002.07.09 ~06 NaN Blender blue sky http://www.blender3d.com/ On July 5th, Ton Roosendaal (head dude of some kind of Blender... or of NaN... or something) announced having reached an agreement with NaN shareholders to open up the sources to Blender. The majority stakeholder apparently is a VC firm called NetVenture. From what little tidbits and snippets I gathered since NaN tanked back in March, this VC firms seems the type to be bass-ackwards enough to "not get" the GPL. I *seriously* doubt Blender will be licensed under GPL. Well, that's the first of the blue sky: Blender under GPL. - File format Apparently the native file format used by Blender is a real mess. Hearsay has it that the file is "a glorified memory dump". Regardless, I'd like to steer away from binary format. Other folks pitching plans for Blender's future are rooting for XML. Personally, I'd rather use S-Expressions. S-expression is simpler than XML, it's less verbose, it already has a "natural form" for lists and aggregates, and it looks prettier than XML. Oh, and it's a small step to throwing in a full Lisp system :) I should probably draw up a proof-of-concept s-expr export in the current incarnations of Blender. - Python & Armatures Armature bones are currently inaccessible via Python (Blender's extensible language). This means automated/procedural animation of armatures is impossible, and must be all hand-animated. I feel this needs to be resolved first. - Blender210 module, model import There's a minor bug in Blender210.Mesh.addFace() which bit me during my development of a Blender MD3 import script. The method has six arguments: four vertices (index number into list of vertices defined earlier with addVertex()), boolean for smooth shading, and index number into the list of materials. Whether a quad or a tri is created is determined by the fourth argument. If it's 0, the method forms a triangle, otherwise a quad. The problem is that I often needed to make quads where the fourth argument is vertex 0. This leads to an erroneous creation of a triangle when I really wanted a quad. Although I could reverse the order of vertices, that would change the face normal to an incorrect value. The workaround in my import script creates a meaningless "throwaway" vertex 0 before the actual vertices, sets up the polys, then deletes vertex 0 afterwards. This bug needs to be worked out. I came up with three potential solutions: * Use "-1" to mean no vertex. This is ugly. * Use separate methods for quads and tris. This gets messy. * Based quad-vs-tri on number of arguments. 5 for tri, 6 for quad. This is potentially confusing. - Completing the menus The popup (SPC) menu could really use having all possible Blender actions thrown into it, possibly also allowing reconfiguring of hotkeys GIMP-style. - Intersect sucks The closest thing that Blender has to a boolean operation is its "Intersect". The results are often ugly and splintered, especially when both objects are complex. I have no idea if I'm up to snuff to improve this, but it's a wishlist item nonetheless. - Ogg Vorbis I throw Ogg Vorbis at everything. - Blender Game Engine Neat-o feature, but sort of distracts from Blender's modelling/animation roots. On top of that, activating UV-texturing starts doing weird things to shaded mode. This isn't reversible until Blender is restarted. Even without this annoyance, I'd prefer the game stuff to be clearly separated from Blender, either plugin-ish or moved into a separate project. The current Blender python modules already split the gaming stuff from the modelling stuff, anyway.