Testing Unity3D editor on gnu/Linux

Few days ago Unity3D editor support on gnu/Linux reached an important milestone. Thanks to efforts of Na'Tosha Bard and her team, we now have mainline beta builds of Unity3D editor for gnu/Linux operating systems. This has been my long time feature request (Kudos Na'Tosha!).

Now gnu/Linux could become a platform of choice for Indie game developers. Along with Blender for 3D characters design and game environment asset development and Audacity for game audio.

You can download the Unity3D gnu/Linux beta builds in this thread. The latest builds would be in the latest post of this thread, so don't forget to scroll down until you find that last post.

# Download the Unity3D editor .deb package using wget or torrent. 

$ wget -c http://download.unity3d.com/download_unity/linux/unity-editor-5.5.0b1+20160830_amd64.deb
--2016-09-01 19:07:08--  http://download.unity3d.com/download_unity/linux/unity-editor-5.5.0b1+20160830_amd64.deb
Resolving download.unity3d.com (download.unity3d.com)... 175.28.3.10, 175.28.3.16
Connecting to download.unity3d.com (download.unity3d.com)|175.28.3.10|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 206 Partial Content
Length: 2680067522 (2.5G), 718427586 (685M) remaining [application/x-debian-package]
Saving to: ‘unity-editor-5.5.0b1+20160830_amd64.deb’

unity-editor-5.5.0b1+20160830_amd64.d 100%[+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++===================>]   2.50G   446KB/s    in 22m 36s 

2016-09-01 19:29:44 (517 KB/s) - ‘unity-editor-5.5.0b1+20160830_amd64.deb’ saved [2680067522/2680067522]

# Install the downloaded package using dpkg program 

$ sudo dpkg -i unity-editor-5.5.0b1+20160830_amd64.deb 
Selecting previously unselected package unity-editor.
(Reading database ... 697456 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack unity-editor-5.5.0b1+20160830_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking unity-editor (5.5.0xb1Linux) ...
Setting up unity-editor (5.5.0xb1Linux) ...
Setting permissions on chrome-sandbox...
Done.
Processing triggers for bamfdaemon (0.5.3~bzr0+16.04.20160701-0ubuntu1) ...
Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf-2.index...
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.13.3-6ubuntu3.1) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.22-1ubuntu5) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.59ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme (0.15-0ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.23-0ubuntu3) ...

# Start Unity3D editor on command line by typing  
$ /opt/Unity/Editor/Unity

You can track various bugs in this Unity3D Linux Editor forum. There are few of well known issues, such the excessive CPU usage bug (lovely nick-named 'Spock') and here.

Please don't forget to share your experiences with testing Unity3D editor on gnu/Linux.

Blender missing shared library gotcha!

Here is a simple solution to Blender missing 'libavcodec.so.54' shared library on Ubuntu Xenial (16.04.1 LTS) box. There are numerous posts about this problem but very few solutions.

$ blender
blender: error while loading shared libraries: libavcodec.so.54: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Solution for Blender missing library

Let me share what worked for me. Let's try to locate and add the library to ldconf path.

# Install the libavcodec-extra package using apt-get package manager.
$ sudo apt-get install libavcodec-extra-56

# Verify the location of libavcodec.so.54 file path.  
$locate libavcodec.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libavcodec.so
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libavcodec.so.56
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libavcodec.so.56.1.0


# Create a new ldconfig file with proper path to the shared library. 
$ sudo nano /etc/ld.so.conf.d/blender.conf

# Add the following line in the file. 
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/

# Rerun ldconf 
$ sudo ldconf 

# Start blender normally. 
$ blender  

That's all folks!. Enjoy blender.

Free Software for Movie industry workshop at IFFK

The Free Software for Movie industry workshop was conducted this morning as the part of 13th International Film Festival of Kerala IIFFK) 2008. Delegates, film Makers, editors, sound engineers, graphic designers and students attended this event.

Gearing up for the workshop Juan, Anil, Arun and Paul IFFK Creative Director Ms.Paul talks about the workshop Arun introduces Free Software to the participants Anil starts his lecture with the basics of Digital Film making workflow Participants interact after the workshop Blender installed on a participants Windows XP Laptop Blender Basics tutorials shared

Free Software for Movie industry workshop

The Free Software for Movie industry workshop is scheduled for 10:30 am on 18th December 2008 at Hotel Horizon, Thiruvananthapurum (India). This event is organized during the 13^th International Film Festival of Kerala by free software community.

About Free Software and cultural products

Free Software is software that gives users the freedom to use, copy, share, study, and modify. The freedoms also make it possible to get the software free of cost. The Free Software Movement, started about a quarter of a century back, is a global movement today and a number of governments and public and private organisations are opting to use Free Software for their purposes.

The Free Software movement pioneered the various movements for freedom in the digital world -- for instance, free knowledge represented by Wikipedia or freedom of creative works from copyright restrictions represented by Creative Commons. We also see a new form of social production where collaboration becomes more important than competition, where people from different parts of the world co-operate to create digital products including documents, music, movies or software.

Free Software for Media production

Software for movie production, such as video editors, sound editors and animation software are now available as Free Software. Blender, for example, is a powerful tool for 3D animation that is becoming popular. Two short animation films have been created by a group of volunteers under the initiative of the Blender Foundation and released for free downloads.

Digital technology, along with Free Software, is democratizing the media by virtually converting every home into a digital media production house. It's also fostering a free culture where people build and share music, animation and other forms of media. Free software media tools like Ardour and Blender are becoming popular among creative artists. Personalities like Gilberto Gil (Former Culture Minister of Brazil, and a musician) have been promoting free software and the free culture among artists.

Free Software - Revolution In Film Making

Workshop on free software for film making will cover

1. Impact of digital technology in cinema
2. Inevitability of technology for the low budget/zero budget film makers
3. Free software - A comparison
4. Free software - explosion in film making

Speaker Bio

Anil Nair has 8 years experience in film Industry. He was the technical Director of Malayalam Movie "Moonnamathoral" (First Digital Cinema in India). He has been developing and promoting Free and Open Source for VFX, Animation, Editing (off line and On line) and DI. He is CEO Cinesoft systems and services Pvt Ltd in Cochin (India)

New Open Movie : The Big Bunny Movie

Two years ago The Elephant Dream was made to make a point that Free and Open source software is capable of creating high quality films. And once again Ton Roosendaal is back again with a big movie with a enormous bunny. What are you waiting for go and download it here right now
Darn! I'll have to wait until I can get back onto a high speed internet hookup to do that :( .

Big Buck Bunny - Official Trailer from Andy Goralczyk on Vimeo.