The end of Gyes

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NEW FEATURES
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All things come to an end eventually so it comes to no surprise that Gyes ends here. The initial goal of Gyes was that would be an addon that could include all my future blender script , but I can see now this is not the best idea. Both RMG and RTG work great under the roof of gyes, but they are only 2 scripts and that keeps the GUI easily and manageable.

However Gyes did not end silently, it ended with a BANG!


The first thing added were a feature to import all material to the history tool that match a specific text filter even partial, making it dead simple to randomly assigne tons of already available material.

Another big addition is the fact that now history is multi-history , the history now has 12 slots each slot is a history or a group of material each material taking one index. Material of course include node materials, texture and node textures.  This means that history is ideal if you want to organise your materials into material groups and because of the filter text import you can import all that material even if there thousands of them in mere seconds.

The final BANG and the biggest of all, is the fact that I finally sit down to create a wiki for GYES. I tried to document through videos but it turned out to be a really bad idea, because I keep improving features and that meant that videos had to be redone  and that meant also loads of free time lost. Lesson learned from now on youtube video only for demonstration purposes.

This is where the wiki is located

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.5/Py/Scripts/System/Gyes

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LOOKING BACK
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To be honest when I started this project I did not intend to be 1288 lines of code , with a tons of features inside. I did not intent to randomize textures . I did not intend to offer full customisation on the randomization. I did not intent to invent a new tool for blender to store data that will be easier to organise than conventional material lists. I did not intend that tool to be saved with the blend file. And of course I did not intend to import materials based on text filters

I did not intend many things. I was a noob , did not know what the hell I was doing , I was just toying with an idea.

But I managed to do all those things, and loads more that are documented in the wiki. I certainly did not imagine that my first attemp with python and blender addons would be included in the contrib. It was so fun that I could not stop.


The thing is that for me I consider this project to have come far away, I dont want to say that I am a super coder , far from it (though I like to use the term "python wizard" for fun) , I am still very noob. But if you look into the history of blender from version 1 to version 2.6 , there have been some texture and material randomisers but nothing that offered the level of control of GYES. Probably I could go even further, but I dont try to prove how great coder I am, cause I am not . I prefer making addons that people really need and use.

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AND LOOKING FORWARD
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I like to inform people here that I decided to drop the idea of material librarian that can show thumbnails. I had the oportunity at last to look into cycles and draw 3 conclusions

1) cycles is already excellent way to preview materials
2) cycles is the future of blender
3) cycles is not yet matured enough to develop on it an addon

So my next project will be porting lithosphere and updating ANT , or to be more precise I intend to create a Ecosystem builder, starting with a terrain generator. Already speak with developer of lithosphere and I have porting some of the code, it will take some time till I release the new addon but I can promise you it will worth the wait.

By ecosystem I mean that you wont be able just to build terrain , but also river, trees, rock , cities , asteroids, planets and even solar systems

Its an ambitious project that probably will take me years to complete and it will bridge many addons like Plant generators, tree generators, littleneo's city generators, rock generator and any future addon that comes out that is related to my project.

As "taste for things to come" I link screenshots and videos from lithosphere, they are going to impress you

http://lithosphere.codeflow.org/screenshots.html

Have fun and see you soon

Gyes : RTG (Random Texture Generator)

When I started my Random Material Generator ( http://blenderartists.org/forum/show...ial-Generator-) ) I knew that no material can look really interesting without some kind of use of textures. The reason is obvious a texture not only adds detail on a material but also brakes its uniformity making it much more interesting and natural. So it was always my intention to implement some kind of texture randomisation inside my material randomisation. However the issue was that RMG grow bigger , more complex and much more powerful I did not want to cram the interface so I decided to implement texture randomisation as a separate tool always from inside GYES.

The big diffirence between RMG and RTG is that the gui in RTG is adaptive to the texture type choosen. That means that GUI changes each time a diffirent type of texture is chosen making sure that only the necessary parameters are displayed keeping the GUI as compact as possible.

The tool is still a WIP but I have finished implementation , for texture types "BLEND", "NOISE", "CLOUDS" ,"DISTORTED_NOISE" and create my own type called "RANDOM" that chooses randomly one of the above 4 texture types and of course it randomises it too.

As in RMG simple mode give you the ability to choose which parameters you want to randomise and percentage mode gives you the ability to choose how much those parameters will be randomised . General percentage is used in case any of the parameter percentage randomisation is 0% , it makes it easy to have the same percentage for any amount of parameters. Percentage means the following : 100% is the full range of available values for the specific parameter, any percentage is divided in half, half going bellow the current value and half going above , so for example 50% of parameter that its minimum value is 0 and its maximum 6 and current value 3 , it will give a random value value in the range of 1.5 to 4.5.

Many things are yet to implemented till this is done, but its no less a released script that should be very useful for you. Bare in mind there is an error each time you change the type of the texture from inside RTG gui, I dont know why this happens but I will speak with blender devs to see if its a blender bug or a mistake from my part. This bug has not crashed my blender or stoped the script from working properly , but caution should be exercised and always save your work before trying this script.

RTG is part of my GYES addon so chances are if you got the latest version of RMG you already have RTG as well. Dont hesitate to ask any questions and here is the link of the download.

https://github.com/kilon/Gyes

GYES -- Random Material Generator (Percentage Randomisation)

I added percentage randomisation. Now you can control how much random your material is . You can randomise existing material as much you want. GUI update, click on Mode and it will navigate through several pages of the GUI. "Percentage" page will give you even more option to apply specific percentage randomisation to specific parameters, all other parameter not covered by the specific percentages are covered by the general percentage. When a specific percentage is zero, the general percentage is used instead for that area. When a specific percentage is not zero then general percentage is ignored and specific percentage is used instead. If you dont want to randomise that area at all, in "simple" page use the corresponding button to completely disable that area , the percentage slider will also be disable in the "percentage" page.

Percentage randomisation means that the parameter is randomised inside a range of percentage of the full range of the value. For example a 50% randomisation of the specular intensity means the following :

specular intensity start from 0 and end 1 , 1 being the maximum value , 50% of 1 is 0.5 . If your existing specular intensity value is 0.3 then randomisation will range from 0.05 to 0.55 , which mean it can be any value that exists in this range which is a diffirence of 0.5 or 50% of full range. Of course randomisation takes always the current value as starting point so the next randomisation will use the current randomised value. Randomisation is always 50% of the specific percentage bellow the current value and 50% above . If the percentage exceeed minimum and maximum values of the full range, then it will default to minimum and maximum accordingly.

There is a "help" gui page that offers a summary help for quick reminder of the functionality. "Template" page is empty as templates are yet to be implemented. "Simple" page has the old enable disable checkboxes which I have replaced them as enable / disable switch buttons (enable / disable randomisation for a specific group of parameters ) along with a general percentage that for convenience also exists in percentage page.

Did 3 minor updates, one fixes a nasty bug that did not allow the script to load on startup as addon and another one where for some reason the register_module functions fails in future builds from graphicall,org after the official 2.58a from blender.org . I have replaced it with register_class() for each class i use so it should work now and for every future build.

However both problems were critical to the execution of the script so I had to bump the thread.

After a complaint I changed the "mode" button , to a list box to make it more visible and easier to use , blender developers need to fix the menu button (prop_enum_menu()) to make it more visible.

I also reorganised the file structure. Now everything is located in a folder called "gyes" just copy paste the entire folder to your addon folder and you will be fine. Inside gyes/doc you will find gyes.pdf which is the official Gyes Manual. I no longer support wiki as its difficult to work on both (Wiki and Pdf) at the same time , that means that wiki will no longer be updated with latest features. The reason is no longer called "gyes random material generator" is because I decided instead of creating several scripts that do diffirent things, to unite all of them in one add on script that will make installation and activation alot easier, so that means that gyes will be alot more than just a random material generator in the future. I plan to finish a new script every year.

The download link has not changed, remember you can use the same link as it always has the very latest update and I am constantly uploading new updates everyday that I dont report here as often cause I dont want to bump this thread unnecessarily.

Here is the download link => https://github.com/kilon/Gyes

Here is a screenshot of the new mode button

Simple mode :

Simple Percentage Mode :



Help mode :



!! Important Note !!

With the as always helpful guidence of ideasman from #blenderpython I was able to download the source and build the latest blender release. From now on this script will support the latest build release of blender and not just the official release from blender org. So it should work for anyone who wants to use the latest build from graphicall.org . I will keep updating my source and rebuilding blender to satisfy this requirement and will upload the builds to graphicall.org that will come included with my script.

Video Tutorial Random Material Generator - Gyes - Introduction

Just uploaded a tutorial about my Random Material Generator - Gyes which I described in my previous post, hope it clears up any confusion.

Gyes (Random Material Generator) for Blender 2.5

There is little doubt that we live in the golden age of computers, with massive power, flexibility , adaptability.

I look back to my old rusty Amstrad CPC 6128 (1988) with its green monitor, its 6mhz cpu. Yeah you heard correctly not 6 ghz , 6 mhz. Thats 3000 times weaker than a Core 2 Duo at 3 ghz. 3000 times, wow , imagine that.

And of course with hardware comes software evolution, as its software that pushes hardware up in the food chain. Yet , I am always suprised to see how more difficult things have become. With my Amstrad it was a question of inserting the disk , typing the run command and i was set to go, nowdays we got just about a million things to remember to get our computers running.

This applies with making 3d graphics as well, extremely powerful but with a gazillion of options enough to make your head explode to a gazillion pieces.

So I thought instead of being one of those guys bringing another new feature why not just make things easier for the tormented user. And thus i started a Blender script.

Gyes is intended to be a collection of scripts not just one, but for the time being the first one is the random material generator. It does what it says on the box, generates random materials. Of course the goal here is to give a meaning to randomisation cause no user likes completely random stuff. Every user has a goal, a dream , a desire. And gyes tries to put that into the equation.

I released earlier a massive update that started giving options to the user to limit randomisation in the way that user defines. As always simplicity is the goal here. Remember when your mother told you that "there is no magic wand" and you have to do things the hard way. Gyes goes against this rule. If the user wants to make a random "oak tree" material , or maybe the surface of the planet , he does need to understand every single detail on the process of making such materials, all he needs is a magic button and maybe some options. Gyes does not care about the "how" or the "why" it is its role to figure those out, it cares only for the "what". What the user wants ?

I wont explain every single detail about this script you can find loads of information together with a link for download in the thread i started in blenderartists. Click the following link.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?218110-Gyes-(Random-Material-Generator)

Now many people have asked what "Gyes" means. Well if you knew a couple of things about me, then you would know I am Greek and that I love ancient greek mythology.

Gyes was one of the three brother , a mythical deity , extremely powerful, capable of even slaying gods and titans. He and his brothers united with greek gods in the epic battle of the TITAN WAR , where greek gods and titans among other deities batlle in a huge civil war. Those 3 brother were called "ecatocheires" , which in greek means , the one with 100 hands. Because as you might have guessed they had 100 hands. Latter the 3 brother were assigned as keepers of the TITANS when the titans were imprisoned in Tarturus , a prison of the underworld where none , no man , god or any extremely powerful creature could go in or out.

For me 100 hands has the the meaning for 100 scripts , that will make life easier for the Blender user and even 2d artists . I know 100 sounds alot , but not all scripts will be as ambitious as random material generator. Sometimes even simple ideas can help alot. Maybe Gyes will be never finished and frankly I dont care. Its a great excuse to code in python, I am having loads of fun with it and I will keep doing it slowly but steadly.

I hope you enjoy using the script as much I enjoyed coding it. Its far from finished but its already very useful.

Vriareon (first Draft)

Well , I have been coding for fun for more than 20 years now. But I never made any serious app, only messing around, enough to learn the programming languages I wanted. Gwbasic, dbase, clipper, c++, assembly, delphi, java , c# and now python.

So enter Vriareon. Basically its an app for transmiting multipoint envelopes to hardware synthesizers. If you did not understand what I just said, well, its normal if you dont use a synthesizer , software or hardware.

Bottom line is that most synths out there dont ever go being simple ADSR , which is a 3 point envelope , mine will go as much as you want.

Basically an envelops is nothing more than a graph that says to a parameter when to increase and when to decrease automatically. In most cases an envelope is made of no more than 4 points (A,D,S,R for Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release) . Attack is triggerd when a note is played, decays is after the attack, sustain when a not is keep pressed down, and release when a note is released. However in software synths like Absynth, Zebra, Alchemy this restriction is droped, and the user can make envlopes using an almost unlimited amount of points, thus creating incredible deep and complex sounds.

Vriareon uses midi protocol, either CC or NRPN to transmit midi data that makes up the envelope.

Currently the app, implements simple functionality. It support, add , move and delete of points, together with zoom in , zoom out and pan.

This is a video showing the app in action.




The app of course is far from finished, but I am in no hurry either. I want to take my time and make this into a very useful and very impressive app. The ultimate goals is to impement more features than multipoint envelops, but for the time being this is the only goal. Gui is still very crude and it may not seem impressive, but most the basic architecture of the app is almost finished. I have to , as a next step, transmit the midi to the the hardware synth. But its the Gui stuff that will take me long cause I want to build a very felxible gui from zero.

I use python and the python library Pygame, for gui and midi, as pygame has included the pyportmidi library which is very easy and efficient into sending and receiving midi signals.

I will keep you posted with monthly updates of my pogress.

Cython , probably the best programming language in the world.

1. Introduction

So I guess you have heard all those people saying that there is no such thing as the best programming language in the world, only the right tool for the job. And its true , each language has its advantages and disadvantages.

But Cython , makes me make an exception to this rule.

Why ?

Well because it combines the best a programming language has to offer leaving all the negatives out.

2. What is Cython ?

So what is Cython ?

Well Cython is Python. It will accept any Python code , even Python 3 , subject to some limitation because it is an ongoing project .

However Cython is more than python. The first thing making Cython different is that it converts python code to C code. This code can be compiled with any C compliant compiler and produce either an executable or dynamic linked library (Known as DLL on windows) .

ok so whats the big deal ?

Well this alone offers double the speed for python which is fine but not very impressive if you take a look to tools like ctypes an psyco.

The next cool thing is that it allows you to mix C code with python code, so if you happen to code in C it can be the perfect bridge between C and Python. Again fine but it can be done with other tools as well.

However what makes what makes Cython REALLY interesting is that it expands the Python syntax. It expands it in such way to implement C features. One of these features is statically typed variables.

The key word here is "expands" not "replaces" , which means that you can use dynamically typed variables with statically typed variables.

But why we need statically typed variables in python ?

Well the answer to this is speed. To put it simply Cython code taking advantage of statically typed variables, to increase speed from 2 to 1000 times. Yes you heard correctly there are benchmarks that show Cython run 1000 times faster than Python . Here a benchmark that sho ws Cython being faster than C !!!. And if you think that this requires any major recoding , then think again, it only requires putting the name of the type infront of your variable which is nothing more than on or two words.

Remember that Cython is Python, which means that all you write is 99% python you just add a couple of words here and there with no major editing.

Even the compilation process is automatic taking advantage of the onboard python distribution tools, requiring the usual setup.py script.

Cython Advantages

1) 100% Python syntax, making dead easy to use and code with. You can use any existing python code with no change to your code.

2) C speed, cause it supports many of the features of C language making it extremely faster alot faster than psyco and ctypes.There is some overhead because of the conversion but it usually quite small from 40% to 100%. However there have been benchmarks that have show Cython outperform C by 40% which is is not unusual. Usually for statically typed variable except a boost in speed from 50 to 1000 times compared to the same python code

3) you can use any C code any time, just import it and it becomes accessible to your Cython code. Excellent for wrapping C libraries

4) Cython now supports and C++.

5) You never need to mess with C code all happens from inside python syntax.

6) Converts the python code to C code. Well I do not know how useful that is as a few lines of python code turns to thousnads of lines of c code but for those who want to edit code to kingdom come it will be useful. Again I remind you that Cython does not force you to write any C code to take enjoy its advantages.

7) Cython can be compiled to dynamic link libraries that can be imported and used like any python library out there.

8) Has the support of Google , so it is actively developed.

Disadvantages

1) Cython is Python, meaning it will still require python installation and will run from inside a python VM as any python app. I dont know whether this is a disadvantage per se but for those that think that what to consider Cython as a complete replacement to C , must take this into consideration.

2) Its does not offer automatic wrapping for C libaries like Swig , so if you want to wrap Alot of C functions/ Libraries , then Cython is not the best tool for that job , but it may provide support for this in the future.

Sum Up


Cython offers C speed from inside python with a tiny amount of recoding, it can be uses . Bare in mind that it offers alot of C features not mentioned here so the best you can do is visit the website and read the excellent documentation .

Here is the Cython website.

http://cython.org/

Links

Links offering cython benchmarks and additional information

http://prabhuramachandran.blogspot.com/2008/09/python-vs-cython-vs-d-pyd-vs-c-swig.html

http://www.behnel.de/cython200910/talk.html

http://behnel.de/cgi-bin/weblog_basic/index.php?cat=11

http://carlo-hamalainen.net/blog/?p=16

This one is a benchmark that show an almost 1000 times speed up over python but it uses pyrex ,bare in mind that Cython is based on pyrex so the same speed should apply. Also note the C speed it 2.15 seconds while Pyrex is 2.5 that is even less than 40% diference.

http://www.scipy.org/PerformancePython