Constant V (Venster/Vitrine)

Ami Bruxellois, ne loupe pas l’occasion ce vendredi jeudi (18/06/2015) d’aller voir la vitrine de Constant. Tu y seras bien reçu et tu pourras même y boire un verre. De plus, c’est juste à côté du Verschueren, si jamais ta soif était trop grande.

Constant V - uHbench

Je t’invite à y aller, pour découvrir Constant et pour y pêcher un petit manuel afin de construire toi-même un banc public à partir d’une palette. Tu pourras même t’essayer à la fabrication puisque du matériel sera prévu sur place.

L’atelier sera chapeauté par la main experte de Barbara Janssens.

Constant V (Venster/Vitrine) est une série d’exposition dans la vitrine de Constant. Les objets, les dessins, les vidéos, les installations et les expériences exposés sont sous licence libres ou ils ont été créés en utilisant des logiciels libres.

Constant V (Venster/Vitrine) is een reek tentoonstellingen in de vitrine van Constant, De kunstwerken variëren van Open Source objecten tot video, design, en artistieke experimenten met vrije software.

Constant V : uHbench
Expo: 18 – 28 juni/ juin 2015
Perfo + drink: 18 juni /juin 2015
CONSTANT, RUE DU FORT 5, SAINT-GILLES

Libre Objet : Digital creation and fabrication workshop

libre-objet-workshop-design-september-banner

Next weekend, 27 & 28 September 2014, together with the Libre Objet collective, we will be hosting a digital creation and fabrication workshop in the makerspace called Microfactory in Brussels, Belgium.

This event is part of the Design September festival and has been selected as one of the best activites to attend by the magazine Vif/Weekend.

The purpose of this workshop is to experience designing products using only free and open source software and then make them using the tools offered by the Microfactory (3D printers, laser cutter, CNC machines,…).

We plan to introduce 4 different softwares, corresponding to different needs:

We will also be introducing the concepts of open source product design and free licensing.

The number of participants is limited, but we still have a couple of seats left. So if you’re interested, don’t wait and send an email to hello [at] libreobjet [dot] org to book a seat.

Blender-Brussels november report

We’ve passed more than a year since the first free *cough* monthly *cough* Blender workshop organized by François Zajega and I. And since I put myself into taking notes during the the last one, here’s a quick report of what was discussed and achieved.

Morning time is for coffee and “show and tell”. Since François and David had both attended the #BConf for the first time, we took the opportunity to get their feedback on this major event in the Blender community. Here’s what they had to say.

With an overall positive feeling about the conference, they pinpointed the fact that it was about only one software, without any discussion about the operating system it runs on, and that it was also about finding solutions, methodology and good practices and how everyone runs Blender to achieve their goal. They also were surprised by the variety of profiles attending the event. From university researchers to 3D professionals or amateurs and even sales representatives, the main crowd although mainly revolved around education. And as with any free software conference, feeling part of a community is a great source for motivation boost.

On the downside, they were a bit deceived by the inequalities between the different panels, asking themselves if there was any screening at all. They were also a bit skeptic about the location of the event. More rooms with a focus on topics is on their wish-list.

To end this conversation, I asked if they had to remember only one presentation, which one would it be:

François chose Shitego Maeda’s “Generative Modelling Project”.

shitego-GMP

And David: Helmut Satzger’s “How to render a Blender movie on a supercomputer”

After that and for the rest of the day, we jumped into some Blender manipulation. For those who don’t know about our workshop yet, we focus on Blender from a coding/scripting perspective. This time, we wanted to explore Blender from the command-line with the goal of finding a way to extract useful elements out of a .blend file (without opening the Blender interface).

$: man blender is your friend, of course.

$: blender --background --python myscript.py is the way to start a chrome-less Blender with some custom python script filled with bpy api goodies.

With this still, it took us about a frustrating 2 hours to figure out what is clearly written at the end of the manual: “Arguments are executed in the order they are given.” Which means, you have to call your .blend file BEFORE the python script that will act upon it.

After that it was just a matter of reading the api docs to come with a ~40 lines of code script that does the extracting trick well enough to call it a successful workshop.

You can download it, test it and fill some issues if you find any on our code repository. The script will extract, in separate folders, any text, python script, image and/or mesh as .obj and .stl file from any packed .blend file you supply. Put it to good use.

If you liked this, share it and come to our next workshop. Announcement will be made on the BBUG

Workshop #LibreObjet @ RealizeBXL

Design September: Workshop Libre Objet

This weekend (21/09 > 22/09/2013), for Brussels Design September, Mathieu Gabiot, Martin Lévêque, Raphaël Bastide and myself are organising a 2 days workshop to teach designers about free licences applied to product design.

We will introduce our 16 participants to the licenses available and will experience them by modifying and building a libre piece of furniture created by Mathieu.

This is the first workshop from the new collective called Libre Objet. Unfortunatly we no longer have room in Brussels for any other participant. But another one is open in Mons for “Quinzaine Numérique” in the beginning of October.

You are still invited to pay us a visit if you wish at RealizeBXL.

#CLIfe : Command-Line Interface for everything

 
   _  _     _____  _       _____   __      
 _| || |_  / ____|| |     |_   _| / _|     
|_  __  _|| |     | |       | |  | |_  ___ 
 _| || |_ | |     | |       | |  |  _|/ _ \
|_  __  _|| |____ | |____  _| |_ | | |  __/
  |_||_|   \_____||______||_____||_|  \___|

Command-Line Interface for everything

What? Command-Line? Yes. Exactly. That thing with the computer where you see characters flying by just like when Neo found out about the Matrix. It seems cryptic and magic, doesn’t it? People doing this can only do illegal things for sure. Not.

The console, where all those commands happened to be typed, has been around since computers have monitors. And they still exist in modern computing. They come really handy for a lot of things and especially when the graphical interface is going bad or not even there at all.

#CLIfe is a workshop organized by Michael Murtaugh and I to teach you the basis of command-line manipulation, show you how useful (lifesaving?) this can be and have some fun with it. For the more advanced users, the workshop is oriented to CLI experimentations and knowledge sharing. Isn’t CLI a lifestyle afterall?

When? Where?

Saturday, 19 October 2013
Begin(14:00) -> End(18:00)
Variable
80, rue Gallait
Schaerbeek

BYOD = Bring Your Own Device.
All Operating Systems welcome.

(Yes, that means you too, Billies and Appelsientjes).

Need some motivations to come?

You want to resize 1000 jpegs and watermark them in one go.
You want to stop worrying every time your software publisher changes (the order of) the icons.
You think "sudo" is a martial art.
You want to post to Facebook/Twitter/Identica/Tumblr/Wordpress/Blogger without a browser.
You want to know your network settings without making 5 clicks.
You think that plumbing is a computer skill.
Christian Clavier is your DJ name.
You're ready to take the red pill.
You are a poet.

Don’t bring your mouse.

Blender bpy/bge Brussels Workshop 2013-03-29: zoom

Last friday was our monthly Blender workshop and the day before, my attention was attracted by this post on Reddit. Rorts was mentioning this intriguing video “Zooms From Nowhere” by Chris Timms and was wondering how to do something like that in Blender. I thought this might be a good challenge for the Blender bpy/bge workshop since it seemed to involve python scripting.

Well, it was easier than we thought since there was already a script (addon) called “Import images as planes” available in Blender. We then had to figure out how the particle system worked (this is where you praise working on the same project with more than one brain).

Python scripting came later in the afternoon to scrape images from the internetz and feed the particle generator with “interesting” content. (See the googlesucker01.py file hacked in no time by Frankie Zafe)

Final render was baked during the weekend.

All the project files are available on our Github repo, with the necessary explanations to help you make your own “zooms into internetz culture”. If you make any, please send us a link. We’d love to watch.

zoom-scr-01

Blender Brussels Workshop – 21/12/2012

So we had our second Blender Brussels workshop today. The first one happened about a month ago. This time, we spent the day at Constant Variable and talked about the basics of python and its use within Blender. We worked on scripts to generate random meshes and then manipulate them in the game engine.

Here’s a short video of what the output might look like.

If you want to play with the file, download it here. You’re also welcome to join us on the next round, in january 2013. The exact date will be announced later.