!! DURIAN !!

You can pre-order your DVD (and get credited) now!

If the pre-ordering campaign is very successful, the foundation could hire additional blender devs (Jahka?Farsthary?etc. (nothing official at the moment, these are only ideas from a blender community member, not the ones from somebody who has talked with the foundation)) for this very ambitious project (advanced VFX and rendering methods in blender)

Other very good news, the great Daniel Genrich just committed his additions in the 2.5 repository (beware: the volumetric render from Matt Ebb and Farsthary (sim_physics branch) is still not merged in the 2.5 branch, so “only” smoke simulations and UI preview at the moment). So just go on graphicall and grab a build with a revision number above 22059.

I sent two months ago a DVD with the blender 2.5 branch source code to Farsthary (more than 100 Mb, impossible for him to download), and he received it 2 weeks ago, now I will send him a patch (less than 1 Mb after compression) so that he can stay updated despite the very poor bandwidth in the cyber coffees. If you want to ease his life, you can consider sending him sms (you can buy pre-paid pack through paypal to send them like email) to give him some information about the progress here as he can hardly go to the cyber coffee (very expensive over there). You can also send him CDs/DVDs with open source ressources, recent linux distros, trials version of CG applications (for comparative analysis), SIGGRAPH 2009 papers. (small donations are still useful to cover some expenses).

This way, he will “thinker” the source code from Daniel and Niels, and try to adapt his fire simulator. More importantly, he will get familiar with the 2.5 architecture (pedagogical value).

Congratulation to all the people who have supported the blender projects mentionned in the previous post:  Joseph has now better conditions to  finish his project. For people who would like to support the Durian project but cannot afford to buy a DVD, I would advice to make instead a small donation to Jahka (indirect support, cf. last paragraph), as this guy is a long-term contributor to the blender source code and has so far not attracted a lot of donator because of the similtaneous needs of Daniel and Joseph.

He is very generous (as previously said, blender powerful hair/fur/particle system is mostly his baby (after about a two year coding pregnancy) and he hasn’t earned money before from his coding (no Google summer of Code)). His tasks are very ambitious (see the right column on his site) and are very useful for the Durian project, so you can still consider a small donation to him for his everyday life.

Regards

a friend of Farsthary

My current status and contact

Hi all

Currently I´m in the period that i call the dark times, in vacation the college close and on top of that now that I´m no longuer a student, my internet access is denied. Luckly in september I will get a job with internet access again and that is all that I need.
Off course, I´m not wasting time, I have a lot of resources now to learn, thanks to the incredible support from the community, and as my friend marc told me , I´m now in a point where in order to move further I need to take a pause to learn, so this Dark time is no so dark after all.
I will not rest untill be online again, there´s currently lots of things happening in Blender and blender related world… and missing it is very frustrating
But on the other hand I´m happy for the big shake that Blender have received in recent years, there´s no turning point now except for becoming better and better

I want to appologize for not answer now emails, I´m hand tied , I´m also miss to post in bf-committers, in the forums and also the luxrender team that due to their dev speed , excelent quality and my connection troubles I haven´t being able to catch up yet.

But don´t worry, one way or another I will be back soon, my email echelon@infomail…. is no longuer valid so use instead farsthary84@gmail.com and also thanks to your support I could get a mobile phone so feel free to call
me at +53311222.
I will be very happy to talk with friends (just check timezones

I want to send my greetings to all my friends of the Blender community and Luxrender community.

Cheers to all and see you soon Farsthary

Sorry for the advertising…

Hi, this is again a friend of Farsthary,

First, I would like to thank him for letting me do this on his blog, this is all about receiving and giving back support..

Daniel Genrich’s received great support for the simulator integration project, as he’s received about twice as much support as  expected!   he’s been doing great progress, so a concept of simulator should be available when the Durian team starts (and then it will be improved according to their needs). He will told us when his source code will be available

Janne Karhu (aka jahka) has also thanked the blender enthousiasts for their support. (take a look on the TODO list on his site: it must be an impressive amount of work, so let’s keep donating). He is directly committing his progress in the Blender2.5 branch, so just grab one of these builds on graphicall.

Joseph Eagar is also very grateful, but personal reasons could postpone his work on this project: He’s chosen the donation system at the very beginning to work half of his days on it and thus quickly integrate it. However, because of troubles he needs additional support to continue working a significant amount of time on it and finish it in a few month (remaining work consists in bug fixes and rewriting the mesh modifiers with the new system, the core being already operational thank to the hard work of Geoffrey Bantle aka Briggs, original designer of this neat system (Kudos to him!). Even if you don’t care about NGONS (“Evil! quad topology rulz!”), you should keep in mind that this a only an extra consequence of this new system, and that the main advantages consist in adding a LOT more of flexibility in blender modelling tools (having a worklow similar to the Wings3d one), easing the writing of fast mesh editing scripts, having a cleaner source code to speed up the debugging process.. Here are comments of famous blender dev Campbell Barton aka Cambo (Big Buck Bunny & Yo Frankie! dev, is to be hired anew for Durian, main coder behing Blender Python API…) about this:

Writing mesh tools with editmesh (note: current mesh editing system) is incredibly annoying, there is no easy way to know any connectivity info, like what faces are connected to a vertex, or what faces use an edge.
You end up needing to write code to calculate this for each tool, It makes the tool run slow, makes development slow, and makes the code messy.
Basically cool modeling features become a lot more annoying to write, so BMesh solves this and other problems
Personally I think BMesh is as important as 2.5′s event refactor.

 So if you don’t want to wait for ages and in the same time help a blender dev who has already shown his dedication (he’s been working on BMesh for more than 6 month before setting up this blog and the donation system, merging the 2.5 branch with it and adding new editing tools, doing a lot of bugfixing, etc), and if you can afford this, please help this project to be done in time: remember, speeding the integration will avoid work redundancy, and thus will save the time of others devs for others tasks (ex: Brecht and Ton won’t have to port the old mesh editing system to Blender 2.5 and will work instead on other important tasks). More importantly, like for the others project, the new system will be heavily tested by the Durian team.

Personnaly I”ve done a significant donation to this project, and hope that if you can you will do, even a small one, to help him now..

A huge thank in advance for the support

regards