Hello!
Gentoo's official logo originates from a Blender file [1] created by Daniel Robbis over 8 years ago. He used Blender 2.04 and Python 1.6 at that time. When rendering that .blend file with Blender 2.49b (or a more recent version), Blender does not apply the reflection texture needed [2] to give the metal look that you know. I don't know why that is. All I know is that Blender does find the file: it's not about the location. Trying Blender 2.04 binaries on a Windows VM, it turned out that Blender 2.04 is still able to render our logo as expected. In my eyes rendering our logo should not depend on a proprietary operating system or binary blobs. The source tarball of Blender 2.04 is hard to find (if available at all), the available sources of 2.03 [7] are incomplete. Binaries of 2.04 [8] are 32bit only and crash on startup on my system. The earliest source tarball after 2.04 that upstream offers for download [3] is Blender 2.26. That version does not compile with GCC 4.4 and turns out to be home with Python 2.2. In hope that this version would be able to render our logo in the way that Blender 2.04 did, I tried fixing compilation against GCC 4.4.5. That worked [4]. The need for Python 2.2 became clear when all of Python 2.4, 2.4 and 2.6 made it segfault in Python related code instantly. Therefore I tried bringing our old Python 2.2-r7 ebuild to life. Smaller changes like -fPIC were needed but it wasn't too hard. You can find the Python 2.2-r8 in the betagarden overlay [6]. In the end I could do sudo eselect python set python2.2 to compile and run Blender 2.26 and make it render g-metal.blend (after adjusting the path to the reflection texture) with metal look in a resolution of a few megapixel on transparent background. I have the impression, that the rending is the same as of Blender 2.04. However, this is not a good long-term solution. For instance Portage doesn't operate under Python 2.2 so an ebuild for Blender 2.25 is a tricky thing to do nowadays. Among the options I see is the following: A) Find out how to render g-metal.blend with recent Blender (2.57b at best) to give pixel-identical results to Blender 2.04. Needs an advanced Blender user ideally. B) Port Blender 2.26 to a recent version of Python. Are there any other options? What do you think? I would also like to encourage you to reproduce the process I described to spot any problems I overlooked. Thanks for reading up to this point. Best, Sebastian [1] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-src/gentoo-web/blend/g-metal.blend [2] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-src/gentoo-web/blend/metallandscape1.jpg [3] http://download.blender.org/source/ [4] http://git.goodpoint.de/?p=blender-2.26.git;a=summary [5] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/dev-lang/python/python-2.2-r7.ebuild?hideattic=0&view=markup [6] http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/betagarden.git;a=commitdiff;h=a3712c45dee61717cbc09b39ff868af7a3ccaa89 [7] http://download.blender.org/source/chest/blender_2.03_tree.tar.gz [8] http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.04/