In the next installment of teh Blender for Motion Design series, we look at constraints and shape keys. Download the project file if you want to continue with the dissection yourself.

Took a while to bring you another part. Enjoy.

In this episode I’ll demo how to clip objects using another with Blender’s amazing modifiers. As a bonus you get to see the terrible working conditions I sometimes have to endure

You can grab the project file from the gnome design repository (you might need to clone the whole repo to get the textures).

Someone asked me the other day if I plan to resume work on my pet project, Gorilla. I thought it’s worth replying in public.

Continuing to embrace the unique Gorilla style I would be undoing hundreds of hours of work we invested in the Tango project. I am happy to see people willingly or inadvertently staying within the boundaries set by the guidelines. There is nothing worse than getting a fan mail from someone who has assembled a “theme” composed of all the clashing styles you have created.

Gorilla, you’re my (the?) first SVG icon set, you are my darling. But the world is better without you. Rest in peace.

Set up your screen for animation, learn how to export portions of static mockups, learn keyframing, dope sheet and graph editor. Grab the finished scene here.

Part 5 — Animation

Understand materials & textures, learn how to quickly load them up as mesh planes. An example project file available for download here.

Part 3 — Textures

Part 4 — Mapping

A while ago I was shocked to see Allan create a transition design using manual frame by frame animation and decided to shed some light at how I do the motion graphics you can see in the previous few posts in the hope of more people picking up the tool and investigating alternate paths.

Please do understand that this is not a general introduction to Blender and that there is great amount of books, documentation on the web and even youtube screencasts. This series only looks at the bare essentials to be able to create these 2D transitions and will hopefully spark interest in learning more of the amazing tool that is Blender. Here’s a few links I recommend if you need a more in depth look:

• Blender: Noob to Pro
• Johnny Blender Intro
• Blender Google Books

I have my doubts about completing the series so any cheering counts if you actually enjoy this one and would like to see it come to an end. If you don’t want to miss a part, feel free to subscribe to the channel.

As Allan already mentioned in one of his useful summaries, I’ve been pondering how how to improve the layout of the application picker in shell’s overview. While the mockup he showed does address the small click target problem, it still felt out of place with relation to the dash. I tried to apply different lipstick on it, but there was something inherently wrong with the layout and the overview lost its clean, “no boxes” feel.

The reason for the windows/applications toggle was easy extensibility. We thought of using shell to access people/contacts in the same way as we access applications. We thought to present documents in a better way without exposing the filesystem here as well. We thought the orthogonal arrangement ala Sony’s XMB would be fun on touch devices. Over time, I have come to the conclusion that extending the scope of shell might do more harm than good. I’ve never been a fan of all-in-one solutions ala iTunes.

Looking up people in a well designed contacts app might be an extra step to go through, but it won’t force us to kludge in some mode switching. We don’t yet have answers to finding & reminding, so I’m not stepping onto the thin ice just yet.

After some frobbing in Inkscape and Blender, I came out with a streamlined layout the overview, using a toggle button on the dash to expose ‘all apps’ for the less commonly used ones:

There are currently a couple of benefits to this approach — removing an item (favourite) from the dash is a matter of dropping it back to the ‘all apps’ pool without the need to show a temporary delete icon. We’re only removing it from the dash, not really uninstalling or deleting it. The ‘…’ button (“show me more…”) lives in the context of application launchers rather than arbitrarily floating in space.

You probably noticed the app picker here uses a pager instead of a scrolled view. Obviously this would require the apps to not be auto sorted and we would have to give the user the ability to sort the list. That way the pages would aid us better when finding a less frequently used app (“I know it’s down here among X and Y”).

How the transitions feel adds to the experience. I was aiming to have the launchers behave like a swarm when you toggle the button on and off. Sadly Blender trunk seems to misbehave with regard to the follow path constraint, so I have to punt that for now.

I regret we didn’t have time to go through this iteration before the 3.0 release, but I think the change is worth the pain.

In the past, defining the screen area you want to map to the tablet was a matter of defining the active rectangle with bottomx, bottomy, topx and topy per device using xsetwacom.

In Fedora 15 you only need to set the target screen ID with MapToOutput. You can learn the display ID by running xrandr. The tablet devices you get by running xsetwacom list devices. For my setup I use:

xsetwacom set "Wacom Cintiq 21UX2 stylus" MapToOutput DVI-I-2
xsetwacom set "Wacom Cintiq 21UX2 eraser" MapToOutput DVI-I-2

Hope this helps anyone struggling. This was the TL;DR version, Wacom project documentation is pretty useful.