Jonas Dichelle and Luca Rood are a delight. They’re such fun to talk to… especially when it comes to a cool event that they organize, Nodevember. It’s an annual event (in its second year) where artists celebrate the awesomeness of nodes throughout the month of November. Think of like Inktober—or maybe bettter, NaNoWriMo—but for art generated with nodes. Of course, to be a part of Nodevember, it’s probably a good idea to understand what nodes actually are. A lot of digital are familiar with a layer-based approach to work, as you may find in GIMP, Krita, Photoshop, or sheets of acetate. Layers a ..read more

It’s been too long since the last episode. However, we’re definitely not done. This time around, I got to talk with Greg Zaal about all things HDRI. In case you weren’t aware, an HDRI is a “high dynamic range image”. And in the context of what Greg does, we’re specifically talking about full 360° panoramic images with high dynamic range. In Greg’s words, it’s a means of “copy/pasting” the lighting from a given environment so you can use it in your 3D scenes for realistic lighting. It’s a fantasticly informative talk and his workflow for capturing and processing HDRIs is worth taking notes on ..read more

Mo is a delight to speak with and her example is one of the best rebuttals to any notion that a person can’t work professionally using open source tools. Because that’s what she does, and has been doing for 15 years at Red Hat. In this episode we go over what’s involved with her work, and how she gets it done with tools like Inkscape, GIMP, and a host of other applications. Of particular note, I really appreciate her “actually interact with people” approach to interaction design. It really struck a chord with me because I think it really applies anywhere we discuss design… or even art, for tha ..read more

Pat David joins us this episode to have a wide-ranging discussion about making creative work using open source software. And he’s a great one to talk about it since he’s been kicking around the community for a good long while now. His interest in photography (and doing it with Free and open source tools) has gotten him involved with all kinds of open source image editing applications. Most notably among them is GIMP. Although not a developer on the project, he’s an integral part of the very small development team that manages that enormous project. Another big topic we cover is that of communi ..read more

Marcin guests this episode and talks about Open Source Ecology and their “Blueprints for Civilization”, which is a list of 50 different machines that they’ve determined are essential for a self-sustaining, distributed society. Really interesting stuff. The machines themselves are pretty cool and they’ve got prototypes of a lot of them already. Of course, I’m just kind of drooling over the cool stuff that could be made with these tools. Build my own furnace for melting steel? Yes please! And you can help contribute to finalizing and improving these designs because they’re all released under a C ..read more

This week’s episode is born from some listern feedback from Romain Marteau. He suggested that I spend an episode talking about the rotating mount I designed to help me carve my bent wood rings. Because of that, this show is a bit more visual than any of the ones I’ve done in the past. I show the actual mount as well as walk through the .blend file a bit and show a bit of the print prep in Cura (the website doesn’t mention it, but it is open source, as evidenced by their GitHub page). I try my best to describe things for those of you who are audio only, but this one is really best for watching ..read more

In this episode we get a bit more clarity on not just the BlenderNPR community and the BEER Development Campaign, but the talk goes really in depth on the BEER renderer itself. Bong and Miguel give a lot of detail on how it works and the vision for how it’s planned to integrate with the rest of Blender. The show does get to be a bit technical in parts, but that’s OK. An artist really ought to have an understanding of how your tools work. That’s how we get under the hood and get to make really interesting and novel work. They also give a lot of really cool examples of NPR work in various media ..read more

So we have an episode of firsts here. Not only is it the show’s first interview with a guest, but it’s also the first episode that’s been recorded with video! In this episode, I talk with Lee Posey all about the BlenderNPR community, as well as non-photorealistic rendering in general. Blender is actually quite adept at helping artists create non-photoreal artwork, but some of the tools and workflows could be better refined to support NPR artists. And this is why they’ve started development of the BEER rendering engine and have launched the BEER Development Campaign to raise money for its devel ..read more

Here’s the deal. With the various things like Epic’s megagrants and some of the accelerated development action happening around projects like Blender and Krita, some creatives who haven’t been exposed to how the rest of the world does open source might mistakenly convince themselves that something has shifted fundamentally with how open source developers are handling things. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is that successful open source development models rely heavily on an actively participating userbase. And when I say “participating” I don’t mean just using t ..read more

Three years is a long time to wait between episodes. For anyone still subscribed to this show through your podcatcher (that’s still a thing, right?), thanks for sticking with me and not dropping me from your list. For those of you just now discovering this show on its relaunch, welcome to the party. You’ve got a strange, awkward host, but he talks about some pretty cool things. Stick around. This is going to be fun. This episode is a catch-up episode. I get a bit rambly, but here’s a quick rundown of what I talk about in this show: Blender 2.8 was developed, released, and now the 2.83 release ..read more