What can you do to make Happy Blender Institute much more happier ? You would order a cake for us ! 
An Apricot cake. Today one person from Blender’s community surprised us with apricot and rise cakes ! Thanks a lot ! Really appreciate What community can do for us except coffee machine and cakes and of course DVD-pre orders ? Well.. we accepting also beer for example 
Hmm bazooka you say…
I’ll be at Libre Graphics Meeting in Wrocław/Poland (Thursday 08th May - Sunday 11th May). This is third edition of this event where people interested about free graphic tools like for example Gimp, Scribus, Krita, Inkscape and ofcourse Blender can meet together. You can expect Blender workshop also Apricot and Peach presentation.
Apricot presentation will be in Saturday 10th 15:30 - 16:15 room D-20 B, so don’t miss it ! But if you do - not a problem because we will show full report here too.
More info: LGM 2008 page.
If you want to help Apricot and are not afraid of Crystal Space, C++ code, and in particular Crystal Space’s C++ code - take a look at the Development page, I slightly expanded the Crystal Space section.
Lighting things is pretty well covered in Crystal Space* right now; multiple lights can be rendered in one pass, and materials can have the usual assortment of properties such as normal maps, specularity maps etc. giving shiny visuals. However, for a truly convincing environment you also need shadows.
Crystal Space actually supported stencil shadows for a while, but they’re not with out issues: the algorithm inherently can’t support any transparent textures, and extra care must be taken by the artists to produce “closed” models, otherwise the shadows will mess up. Also, the Crystal Space implementation has some issues: they need some effort to set up and animated meshes are not supported.
Thus I implemented shadow map support. Without going into too much technical details, they can support binary transparency (aka alpha test), don’t need special care for the models (just throw anything at them and it’ll look as it should), and due simpler implementation, they work on animated meshes in Crystal Space. Within the render manager framework they can easily be utilized by either using a stock render manager with shadow support or some lines of code in custom render managers.
Now some screenshots on how they look in that well-known small test level:
Shadows test, from a distance
Some close-ups
Shadows also work on somewhat larger levels:
(Ignore the missing textures etc. Focus on the shadows
Some implementation details: Parallel-Split Shadow Maps on top of a plain normal shadow mapping. (You can see the shadow maps displayed for debugging purposes in the lower left corner of the shots.) The”soft” shadows you see are actually provided by the NVidia hardware - so real soft shadows is still something left to be done.
* Well, render manager branch.
(note the 2 (!) exclamation marks in the title, i’m excited)
yay! I hated that green background 
The other day, talking with Chris about ApriStuffs, we agreed that the old theme wasn’t the better, at this moment we all know that its gonna be a Frankie’s game, so.. why we have 3 rodents in the banner? lets give Frankie what he deserves! a big and *rendered* header
Was all made in The GIMP, Inkscape and Blender, was just playing around with the old logo in Inkscape, then imported the .svg in Blender as curves, added a material, rendered, and composited.
I’ll be making a splash for our brand new and shiny ApriBranch! we have our own branch! like the one that the Orange project had years ago, we will be adding and testing lots of features we need in this project, before going to trunk.
That’s all for now, hope you like the new theme, is not a big change but i just don’t like white-eye-killing backgrounds.
If you find a bug or something weird just drop a comment please.
Many people asking what is what in out development toolchain.
So… for graphics we are using Blender and Gimp (unexpectable huh ? ) Read the rest of this entry »
hey ho! my very first post!, luckily WordPress looks the same everywhere =)
Oookay, what to say.. today is a week and a day since i’m here. Got to know all all the Peach team, I even assisted to the Premiere! (pretty awesome btw), but they are almost all gone now, Sacha and Williams are still here in nl, yesterday Nathan went back home (told me to give 1 hug per person a day!, i’m on it). So that’s it, all the institute for us, is Apricot Time!.
Here follows some explanation of how we’re working on the game logic.
The idea is to give an initial picture to the uninitiated, so that you’ll get the basic jargon we use, while also talking about some apricot specific stuff more towards the end of the post.
We picked VenomGFX from Airport. On this picture Dariusz, Chris and Pablo waiting for him (together with Margreet making picture) near Gate 1 carrying original Blender(R) labeled sign made by Ton.
According to Murphy’s law - he arrived from Gate 2 and surprised us from back
Then we went to Blender Institute with pizza, beer, watching anime movie, and we had cool party.
Here’s a peek at the base terrain for the Apricot world. As it stands now, the dimensions are around 3km by 3km. Platform objects like slabs of rock and other terrain features are being created separately. Feedback is welcome but will be totally ignored, because I’m an artist and can’t handle criticism. No, if anyone has any ideas, of course we’d love to hear them, especially at this stage and especially about terrain. Although more comments about apricot rocket launcher cheat codes will still be considered.
To create the terrain, I started by painting a pretty simple black and white height map in Gimp and then applied it to a subdivided plane through the displacement modifier in Blender. After modifying the height map a bit to produce a result that was good enough to work with, I applied the filter and then used sculpting for then on. It had taken a few attempts to figure out an efficient technique to create a massive chunk of terrain while still having a decent amount of control over the proportions, which was extremely important and difficult in this case considering the main character(Frankie) is only like half of a meter long.
This week we’ll be working on texturing this with splatting and getting it all into Crystal Space. Also below is some concept art.
darek | 
05 5th, 2008 
