Just MAKE it!

Well, I’m glad to introduce a new website design… Huh?! Someone already noticed? So I’m late. ^_^”

This task was a really challenge for me because… I don’t know, but for some reason it was hard for me.

And, yeah, we migrated to blender 2.46. I know, much time passed by since it come out and 2.47 is already coming, but that reworked particle system (which is really great, by the way) caused much troubles for us. Anyway, it worths so – we really needed the opportunity to properly manage external lib data, especially for Video Sequence Editor which we using to compose all scenes together. Now our project directory tree is completely transferable and we moved towards the improvements in the managing of the rendering process.

I explain. Recently we started to deal with more complex compositions (i.e. scene 54), which includes need to render a set of files (synfig and blender ones) in certain order to get a rendering of single scene. It wasn’t funny to repeat the routine steps to get a new rendering of recently modified single scene. And it’s always hard to track remember which files need to be re-rendered.

That’s why I’ve started to study GNU make tool. And result? Now ‘make’ automatically track the changes in the project tree and renders updated scenes in appropriate way just like it does for OpenSource software. Also it means what now rendering of all project sources to a final movie is as easy as type four letter word (no, I meant not THAT word =_=” ). So if we’ll include all sources on to the DVD in that form, this will give the people opportunity to modify them (nothing new, huh?) and build the whole movie from the sources just by issuing “make”. Of course if proper versions of requisted software is installed.

And here comes small talk about proper versions. Do you smell the trap? Yes, yes – at start we were talking about troubles caused by migration from blender 2.45 to 2.46. You didn’t saw that, but our particles just got wild! I’m not complaining, but who will guarantee what by the time we finish and publish the demo the file formats of synfig and blender remain compatible? No One. So one of the possible solutions I see is the publishing the whole Linux operation system on the Live disc together with sources and particular software. Well… Why not? ~_^

On the other hand, having a build system like that, allows to consider our project directory tree as one huge regression test. Not bad at all.

All thoughts for today, back to work!