Suzanne Awards: Scripts

This year the Suzanne Awards have a new category: scripts.

Attendees of this year's Blender Conference will have the chance to vote for their favorite candidate among five contenders. These were chosen by a jury during an irc session on Sunday 17, October, based on suggestions made by the community.

The only condition to be eligible was that candidate scripts should have been worked on since last year's conference and, naturally, be compatible with the Blender 2.3x series. But being this the first time the prize will be given, it was very hard for the appointed jury to select only 5 nominees among so many good scripts out there. Only when the jury agreed to take into consideration not only a single script from each author but also the overall contribution from them, a decision was reached.

So, at least this year, instead of "best script" it was decided that we should award "best script contribution", as a way to recognize the great work done by all our fellow script writers since Python was embedded in Blender, years ago. A great benefit of this decision is that there is a healthy mix of complex plugins, useful tools, importers and exporters among the many works of the candidates, exactly what the jury wished to achieve.

Here are the nominees, in no particular order:

BEST SCRIPT CONTRIBUTION SUZANNE AWARD

And a little bit of information about them:

Alan Dennis:

Alan, or RipSting, created one of the very best and most used -- and useful -- plugins for Blender. Fiber 2 covers a vital need for serious 3d modelling and rendering software: it allows artists to easily add (animated) hair, grass, fur, etc. to their 3d models and scenes, giving them a lot of options to control how and where these mesh "fibers" will be, like presets, fiber guides, auto uv (cards), use of info encoded in vertex colors, simulated wind influence and script-linked animation. Version 3 is already being developed and recently RipSting also released BPG, a GUI (graphical user interface) designer application for Windows to make it easy for Blender Python script writers to create guis for their scripts.

MakeHuman team:

MakeHuman is a quite impressive, professional looking project by a dedicate team of developers (managed first by Manuel Bastioni and now by Z0Newton, please check the link to read about all members). The script lets users model varied and realistic male and female humanoids at various ages easily, via additive morphing, by starting with base models and tweaking parameters to define specific body features. A new version should be released soon and the project is going strong and aiming high, with plans to include skin and hair procedural shaders for the YafRay renderer, besides generation of manga-styled 3d models, hosting of a sub-surface scattering (sss) script project and a displacement mapping script available at their site.

Jean-Michel Soler:

Most probably the most prolific bpython script coder, jms has written a great collection of scripts, from useful tools to mesh modifiers and generators, importers and exporters and so on, besides being a very active and helpful member of the community. Povanim is a feature-packed exporter to the Povray and MegaPov (Povray with many unnoficial but very good patches) open source renderers and so connects two of the most popular 3d tools in the world: Blender and Povray. Recently Jean-Michel wrote Path Importers (SVG, PS/EPS, AI, Gimp 1 and 2) and the Texture Baker, a tool suggested by Theeth to export Blender's procedural texturing of models as uv-mapped images. HotKeys, UVPainter and Dispaint are three other well regarded and known examples. Links to many more scripts can be found at his french Blender tutorial page.

Anthony D'Agostino:

One of the most important and demanded features for 3d modelling software is a way to convert data to / from other file formats from modellers, renderers and game engines (should we write that ten times in bold letters?). Scorpius has made a considerable contribution in this area with his IOSuite for Blender, with importers and exporters for Lightwave, Lightflow, Nendo, Off, Radiosity, DEC raw, TrueSpace and Wings 3d, plus export for Videoscape and import for Pro Engineer formats. Scorpius also wrote tools for displacement mapping, backface culling (removal of faces not seen by the camera, to reduce render times significantly), torus generation, etc., available from the same link of IOSuite.

Stefano Selleri:

Blender World Forge (BWF) is a script to create fractal terrains, another vital tool used to generate convincing landscapes with mountains, valleys, craters, peaks -- or even whole asteroids or planets. It's well designed, with good mathematical background, many options, presets and good documentation. Stefano also wrote a very useful and popular mesh modelling tool, the Knife script (recent upgrades co-authored with Wim Van Hoydonck). And this year he also introduced the Blender Analytical Geometry (BAG) plugin, a script that creates 3d geometric surfaces (ex: sphere, torus, spiral, coil, shell) from mathematical formulas. Users can add new math functions, with freedom to define the coordinate system used. Stefano's scripts can be found here.

The creation of this award clearly testifies how important scripting is in Blender. We would like to thank all who participated suggesting candidate scripts and specially the script authors. There are only five indicated here, they surely deserve it, but we all know that there are many other talented script writers who have developed great bpython scripts and could as well have been indicated.

Good luck to the 2004's nominees!

PS: the members of the jury were LOD, Martin (Theeth) Poirier, Nathan (jesterKing) Letwory, Stephen (stivs) Swaney, Willian (IanWill) Germano.