Hey folks!
We’re working on principal character animation currently, but as I look forward, I see the need for simulation coming up, we currently have a load of papers, some being manipulated by the main character, some floating around. She’s also got clothes, and hair.
Some of this can be animated, indeed, I’ve already animated the paper in several shots, but some of it could be simmed, and furthermore, we might find a way to combine the two.
Paradoxically, producing good results with simulation tools requires lots of expert time! Parameters are not always intuitive, and usually require feedback and re-tweaking, and set-ups that allow linking/combining sim and animation are hard to do.
So here’s an official shout out call for expert simulators (not dissimulators ) to come join the team.
You can email or just reply in the comments if you’re interested.
Cheers
Bassam
Calling all students (18+), recent graduates, and professionals wanting to ply their 3D skills in free software:
Applications are open to join Bassam’s team this spring for the production of Tube, hosted by the very cool Bit Films Animation Incubator at Hampshire College, Massachusetts.
Helmed by Chris Perry, formerly of Pixar and Rhythm & Hues, the program draws together a number of interesting projects and a lot of talent, so although the internships are unpaid, it promises to be a very stimulating and fruitful space.
For applicants to Tube, there is a possibility that housing can be offered.
The official internship period runs from February 7, 2011 through May 13, 2011. Applications are due (via email) no later than Monday January 31, 2011 at 5pm (EDT). We understand that this is short lead time for those in need of making visa and travel arrangements. Because the project is ongoing, the internship period is flexible; if in doubt, apply!
Although it may not provide as immersive an experience, we are open to considering applicants to a remote internship. Remote interns would join the already semi-distributed team using our web-based project management software, SVN, and IRC.
Full Bit Films announcement and FAQ. Questions? Email fateh [at] freefac [dot] org.
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Hey everyone, this is my first post since I’ve been back in England! In these dark depths of winter I really miss the summer I spent over in the US as a Bit Films intern; nice weather, good food, great crew. Since leaving the states I’ve been hard at work at college, and on various other projects, but now and again I get enough free time to work on Tube. Something which has been on my to-do list since B-Conf is feasibility tests for crowd simulation and auto-walking, and combinations of the two.
I’ve always struggled to set up Blender’s boids sim exactly how I needed it for ground based creatures (trying hard not to give anything away about the film here!), especially in the case of collision critical simulations when its important that two bodies don’t get tangled up together. Coupled with this I know that for Tube we will need more direct control over the ‘boids’ and being able to explicitly direct them and override the ‘boid brain’ is a must. On top of that we need more than just fly, walk and sleep actions. It seemed that rather than trying to strap something on the back of Blender’s built in boids, it might be easier to code something more specific (and more limited in scope) for a few scenes we have to animate, so I started out on a now heavily WIP crowd sim.
There used to be an auto-walker script for blender 2.4x. I came up with my own algorithm before finding it, but did end up mimicking a few of the features (leg sequencing for one) though my implementation had to be completely different because of the way the rest of my code works. It only walks, as such, not runs, yet…
A couple of weeks ago I tested out the code and rendered a couple of demo crowd shots. Then I got completely carried away and implemented a few special effects using PIL and the ‘scribbler’ algorithm, and generated sound from the fcurves of hundreds of marching spiders. The project uncovered a few pitfalls and some more work still to do before the crowd sim is production ready, but enough of the worrying, here’s a demo video!
“Spiders” auto-walking and flock simulation for blender from Josh Wedlake on Vimeo.
Here’s the video on youtube where the compression is slightly nicer at the larger sizes.
Read MoreWe currently have a bunch of folks ( Tal, Jarred, Malefico and Jason) with assigned shots, but still looking for more. Today Lee and Pablo volunteered on irc, but it turned out neither is right now capable of getting the entire SVN…. with all our file dependencies this seems like a problem, right? wrong!
Blenderaid to the rescue! The new python api seemed made for the task, so I quickly wrote a really dirty script that goes through the production, finds the dependencies (via the blenderaid api) and then uses the normal python affordances to copy files into a new ‘package’ for the animators.
bonus is I can skip non .blend (read: textures) and out of tree (read: temporary background images) really easily, thus keeping the package even smaller.
I’ll just pasteall this one since it’s a quickie:
http://www.pasteall.org/18436/python
Read MoreHello world!
Since we’ve been so quiet it’s time for a little mini update of where we are at! Animation just started, with Jarred and Tal taking the lead, but we’ve got more shots/animators assigned, so I expect some speedup there.
Modelling is continuing – we’ve gotten to a ‘non blocking’ stage, but there is still more to do . We’ve also not yet gotten the final character model and rig yet, animators are working with a proxy.
We’re also 15 shots closer to finishing… because I just removed 15 shots from the animatic 
seriously, this is a big deal, and makes the first act almost (there are a couple of shots I’d like to change) completely ready for animation. Geppetto worked well (with a few edits for python api changes) and the changes took very little time. Oblig. Screenshot below:
See you all in 2011!
Read MoreHey folks, just a quick update here- some of you may have noticed spammy google chaches for the site, and some nasty redirects on non existent pages. It appears spammers somehow managed to modify some files, resulting in spam pages depending on the useragent (which is why google cache shows the spam but browsers don’t). We’ve found the offending files, changed passwords, locked down access, reinstalled wp, etc. and think that we have cleaned up. I don’t think there was any payload in form of viruses or trojans to PCs browsing the site. We’ll keep our fingers crossed and a close eye to make sure things are back to normal.
I suppose it could have been worse. If you do find anything suspicious, please let us know.
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I’m a huge fan of Blenderaid, a great way to manage your blender projects. You run a small server that is capable of crunching through your project, finding all objects, dependencies, etc., then point your browser to it and get a graphical overview. You can look at individual files, see the names of objects/materials/etc., rename them, view dependencies, fix broken links, and now check and update SVN status etc. etc., all from the comfort of your browser window. I’m using the Python 3 version, which for me necessitated installing PySVN from source, since the Ubuntu modules are Python 2 only. Other than that, I had a smooth install; I’m looking forward to continuing to use this version and further goodies in the future.
Some cool things you can do with it:
- Find errors in your project globally without having to check each file one by one in blender- and fix them (could benefit from batch tools so you can do multiple at a time)
- Create ‘bundles’ of files, e.g. to send to an off-site animator who doesn’t have SVN access, by quickly seeing all the dependencies of a given scene file. This can be done by hand right now, but I’m pretty sure it could be scripted fairly easily.
- Make sure your files are up to date, track problems with SVN visually
- Rename models/assets, find out where they get used, etc.
- Probably a lot more
Blenderaid could change the way we work with SVN for projects – instead of checking out several gigabytes of production data, each artist need only check out exactly what they need– saving time, local disk space, bandwidth. We could use it also to have versions of assets and switch (optionally) some scenes to use newer versions or to continue working with the old.
I’m hoping to have time after tube to experiment with blenderaid in conjunction with helga, or alone, and to have server-side installation as well as the local one. This could be the key for large-scale projects in blender, big thanks to Jeroen and Monique for writing it, and I look forward to seeing how it evolves.
Quick note from Jeroen: the python2 version saves time by removing the need for additional compiling, and should work without any problem. (I was under the mistaken notion that Blenderaid’s python version had to match Blender’s).
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I’ve often wanted to have lines for ‘rule of thirds’ in the Blender Camera as a composition aid – I’ve got countless blend files with little no-face meshes parented to cameras (that have to be moved or scaled whenever I change the camera view angle). Granted this problem could be solved with a driver (That might not update – driving on camera angle is not dependable yet), but I got tired of ad-hoc solutions.
I don’t use the Title safe option that much or at all, so with the help of a trusty text editor (gedit in my case) I hacked a couple of files and now I have ‘Thirds’ instead of title safe for the camera. The internal property is still the same, it just displays differently, so no messing with RNA happened.
If you want the same functionality and are comfortable building blender/applying patches, you can get it here . Usual disclaimers about baby eating and such apply.
Free/Open Source software is nice, isn’t it?
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As always, the conference was awesome- an intense three days of talking, listening, meeting, blending, eating the traditional conference sandwiches, drinking coffee, beer and mojitos, not-enough-sleeping, more blending, etc.
After a sleepless but uneventful flight to Amsterdam I walked into the Blender Institute the day before the conference, only to have Andy pressgang recruit Pablo and me into making the Suzanne festival and award interstitial animations with him. We had a (very sleepy) blast working till the wee hours, and more in the next morning, and I got to go up in the projection booth once again and play the festival off my laptop, thanks to the power of totem/gstreamer and python (for making the playlist). I apologize for the one or two glitches- a couple of the videos needed to be re-encoded for smooth playback, but we somehow missed that in the studio.
Jeroen Bakker showed me his awesome openCL nodes in the compositor on his laptop, running 20!zoom!! times faster than the CPU equivalent. When this stuff hits it’s going to make a mini-revolution for Blender. I’m no longer a sceptic about GPU computing I guess
Wolfgang Draxinger did a fantastic job making the stereoscopic version of Elephants Dream. Great choices, hard work and technical precision- I’m blown away both by the result, which rivals the best stereo work from major studios, and by the amount of work he put into it. He’s planning Big Buck Bunny next, but in the meantime, some snaps of us removing (the unfortunately crumpled) screen after the show:
I met with Josh, Henri, Francesco, Jason, Jonathan, Jean Sebastian, Heather, and recruited Dolf, Tal, and perhaps Luciano, Andy and Pablo for our project. We had a meeting the second day of the conference, which gave me a chance to finally pitch the story and current animatic to the team in person, talk about where we are at in the project and assign some short-term tasks. We also had a presentation on Sunday, mainly about technical issues: rigging, though I did not demo rigamarule- turns out auto-registration of operators had somewhat broken the UI while I wasn’t looking (it’s fixed in current tube SVN). Josh showed off his work on procedural animation, and Henri demoed building scene layouts from library models using our LODing system and the landmark-snapping system created by Pablo Lizardo.
As Fateh has blogged, Tube member Jarred De Beer won the Suzanne Animation award, congrats dude!
The presentation had an unexpected benefit; it introduced the project to new contributors- Thanks Tal
Sadly I missed some people- Malefico has too many conferences on his plate to make it to Blender conference this year, and I was too swamped to meet up with Stani, Python coder and artist extraordinaire.
Finally, I had the honor of working for a bit on Andy and Eva’s awesome stopmotion animation project- Omega- which has some CG elements. I spent a large part of Monday (the day after the conference) rigging an amazingly designed and detailed character Andy built for the movie.
Big thanks to Ton, Anja, Anna, Nathan and everyone who made the conference possible and enjoyable.
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Bassam will soon be reporting on the Blender Conference, and we have a number of cool announcements coming up — but first I want to congratulate our own Jarred de Beer for taking this year’s Suzanne Award for Character Animation!
Jarred was a visiting animator/TD on the Tube project for nearly a year, and is now part of our distributed team working from his native South Africa. During his time here, Jarred attended SIGGRAPH; participated in a 48 Hour Film Festival short organized by crewmate Jason Van Gumster; and with Pablo Lizardo, also did a mini-project for Sintel (in honor of which we privately call the Durian movie, “Backpack”).
Though it would have been a nice personal touch, Bassam couldn’t accept on his behalf because, having pulled the usual all-nighter to Make Epic the awards presentation — this time with CG conceived by Andy Goralczyk — he had to be up in the projection room pressing the space key.
Check it out, yo: Grey Justice takes on the High Bar.
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