New Blender Tutorial

Well, since I complained a while ago about Blender's documentation, I guess it's time for me to point out that this issue has been addressed (though I haven't yet had time to find out how well). Google's 2007 Summer of Code funded, among other things, the production of a new tutorial. Rene Dudlfield says nice things about it, so I guess from now on it's going to be easier to learn how to use Blender. Great news!

One question, though. Why doesn't the word "documentation" appear at least once in the Blender home page?

Python Further Embedded in the Animation Industry

Python's inexorable march towards world domination* continues with the recent announcement that visual effects provider The Foundry plans to incorporate a Python programming interface into the next version of its Furnace product. The UK broadcast industry news article that brought this to my attention also (correctly) says Python is

an extensible programming language, which is becoming widely supported by other application vendors and forming the backbone of many studios pipelines

It seems that Python's origins in "computer programming for everybody" has allowed it to become a default choice for embedded scripting capabilities in many areas. It is fast becoming the standard in the film industry. It would be nice, now the secret is out, to see that industry contributing a bit more to the development of the language and its community.

* Just in case you wondered, there are no such plans!

Is Python becoming a standard for animation application scripting interfaces? Autodesk, originally well-known for their AutoCAD drafting software have diversified into animation with a product called Maya, which has just been upgraded to version 8.5. One of the new features trumpeted in a report of the announcement is Python scripting, which turns out to be very popular with the film industry.

Anders Langlands, R&D lead at The Moving Picture Co. (MPC) and Maya 8.5 beta tester, commented: "Having Python support available in Autodesk Maya means we can leverage many of our existing tools directly within Maya, rather than having to write glue code to bind Maya to our pipeline. This allows us to develop new node and command plug-ins in a fraction of the time it would normally take using other solutions."

I already knew that Python was popular with companies like ILM and Pixar, but it seems as though its value in animation is now an open secret.