Windows is a solid platform for animation as all of the major 3D platforms support it; however, making it remote render friendly require it to have command line support. Being able to do remote command line for a machine is essential to keep render maintenance to a minimum. First I will go over the SSH (Secure SHell) setup for Windows then get into the a few changes to add better network and Blender support.
Tag: Tutorials
Not the teacher often but when I am, I grab the mic.
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Quick fix for rel=”category tag” in WordPress
Here is a quick tip for helping WordPress, WordPress 3.2 specifically, with the HTML5 spec. HTML5 spec says that only certain rel types are allowed and WordPress’ “category tag” isn’t one of them. Fortunately I found a good bit of code here http://smalldiary.com/wordpresshow-to-add-nofollow-to-category-links.html which strips out the current rel=”category tag” and adds a rel=”nofollow” as a filter in the fuctions.php file for the theme. By adding it to the functions.php for the theme this provides a theme wide fix rather than having to edit individual templates.
I altered the code a bit for my uses, however, as I’d still like the search engines crawling around my site so I stripped the code down to:
add_filter( 'the_category', 'add_nofollow_cat' ); function add_nofollow_cat( $text ) { $text = str_replace('rel="category tag"', "", $text); return $text; }
Now the W3 Validator has one less WordPress quirk to pickup on. -
Blender Transparency Map Shadows Quick Fix
Over the weekend I was working out how to tear a piece of paper in Blender and stumbled on the annoying but easily solvable issue of transparency shadows.
By default a material will not receive shadows based on the texture but on the geometry of an object. As seen here:
To fix this, go to the receiving material’s proprieties and click “Receive Transparent.”
Now the shadows are based on the texture:A simple fix, but if you are coming from a 3d software using clip maps or settings on the texture this can be a bit difficult to find. I will be taking a closer look on how this effect is best used and if it affects render times in a later post.
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Dynamically generated HTML5 manifests
In the specification for HTML5 several methods for storing data locally are outlined including localStorage and manifests. While building out the offline storage for Animatic Builder, I attempted to keep the stored data dead simple; as in the case of the shot information which is stored as one long JSON string. In this way the shot data can be pulled into any other use by reading the string. Keeping the images stored proved more difficult due to the number, potentially hundreds, and their format as many separate files. As well as making sure the storage is universal on mobile and full client systems. (more…)
