Sunday, September 25, 2011

Old Tutorials and New Utilities


My first week using of using a lean startup style to Blender Addons has been interesting. The lean approach is already turning out to be an excellent learning tool. Here are the results so far on what I've learned and done.

Khan Academy and 3D Math
Khan Academy does a good job at teaching the basics of linear algebra. The topic of matrices is very well done. Manipulating these structures is key to understanding how moving, rotating, and scaling 3D scene objects work.

For math specific to curves, trigonometry and quaternions look like concepts worth looking into. Trig math shows up all over the place with curves.  Quaternions seem to appear in a lot of round shapes. This should open up some interesting possibilities.

PHP Reduction
Blender Addons could get by fine with less PHP. Templates can probably be done with JQuery. Code coloring can be done with a JQuery plugin. Dialing back PHP will open up more web hosting options. Hopefully, those options will include one with Django support.

Retirement of the 2.49 Tutorials
The Blender 2.49 tutorials become less relevant as time goes on. This justified a new “retired” section for those tutorials. It makes more sense to deprecate them rather than remove them outright. They still serves a purpose for people who want to port over scripts to the new API or for people who haven't moved to 2.5 for whatever reason.

New Utility Script for Developers
Every decent developer will find themselves, at one time or another, making tools to automate certain tasks. My own collection of tools were added to the site today. They include module searching lambdas along with functions for handling materials and deleting data. They've been very handy for me and, hopefully, will be likewise for other coders.

Conclusions
So that's all there is for now. It's back to work now to see what can be made of this coming week. Cheers.

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