How are the diagrams in recent Releaselogs created?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hello,

It would be very helpful to me to understand how the flowcharts in the more recent Releaselogs are created. For example, the image of the DAG diagram and the image entitled “Object update events in Blender” in the Releaselog “Blender 2.40 alpha”.

Both of these images show a flowchart with soft drop shadows. If someone could please give me explicit instructions as to how these diagrams were created, esp. the soft drop shadows, I would be very grateful.

I’ve been experimenting with Inkscape, but so far have been unable to generate similar soft shadows with it.

I’m working on a number of non-profit projects, and products for folks with disabilities and Blender has been immensely helpful to me in the design process.

I realize this request is probably outside the usual topics here, so please feel free to re-direct my request if necessary, and please accept my apologies if this is not the appropriate forum for this topic.

Thanks!

– Paul

2

A quick but perhaps costly solution is to get a mac :wink:

Those diagrams were created with Omnigraffle which is a mac only app for doing such charts bundled with every Os X

the shadows are automatic.

the version bundled is 3, not 4.

Visio on windows is able to do roughly the same things

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Thank you very much, LukeP!

Omnigraffle looks like a very nice app. Almost makes me wish I could afford a Mac…

Soft drop shadows are on the todo list for Inkscape I believe, and there’s a kludge for getting a similar effect with it now, but it appears to be kinda’ ugly.

I may have to fire up my ancient version of Visio to see what can be done there. If anyone else has ideas for another solution, I’d be grateful. Otherwise, I’ll try to hack something together to get me by for now.

Happy Blending!

– Paul

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If you want a free flowchart program . . . try dia

http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/

And for windows binaries

http://dia-installer.sourceforge.net/

5

I use Inkscape for this sort of thing, then blast over to the GIMP to put the effects in when I’m done. It would be better if it were dynamic, but inkscape is pretty okay regardless.

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Thank you jaycun. I hadn’t checked for a Windows version of dia. I’ve installed it and it looks pretty nice as well. I’d used dia on my Linux machines before, but it’s an older version.

As overdone as it may seem, I was actually interested in an easy of way of using soft drop-shadows. Only because it would fit in nicely with the overall style of the current presentation I’m working on. I don’t believe dia supports this feature at this time.

From what I can tell there’s no easy, cheap (free) flowchart solution for soft drop shadows on Linux or Windows quite yet. I may try using Inkscape with the inkscape-shadow.sh script technique…

@mrmunkily: I happily agree with you – Inkscape is very nice. If the Inkscape shadow script path is too painful I’ll take your suggestion and use GIMP.

Can’t wait to get back to Blender after this is all done!

– Paul