Hello from Sofia / Bulgaria!
I’m here teaching at Tosmi two blender classes back to back, and having a great time. We had a great Siggraph experience, Jarred, Fateh and I spent many hours driving to the conference, hanging at the blender booth, meeting all the groovy blenderfolk (you know who you are!) and then midnight hacking on the teaser.
After returning back home, we had a scant few days to re-do some of the glitchy bits, make a ‘director’s cut’ teaser, render, and then rush out here to the EU before encoding it for your viewing pleasure.
Without further ado I present… the second teaser:

Credits go to Gianmichele (character animation) Jarred (massive amounts of textures, modelling, and matte painting), Jamal (modeling and materials), Jan (awesome music and mix), Thomas (awesome SFX), Colin Levy! (who kindly tweaked the comp on one of the shots at the blender booth), Kursad (texture painting) and Jean-Sebastian (modeling). Thanks to Chris, Fateh, and the folks at the animation meeting for the great feedback/ideas/critique. I did a little bit of everything, and am responsible for anything bad. (edit: can’t believe I didn’t mention redo’s awesome roach concepts)

Oh and finally, for the masochists: a high rez ogg video link : HD teaser2

PS: I’ve of course updated the media page with the second teaser.
EDIT: added .mp4 version to the video for safari users

For those of us who weren’t at Siggraph (sadly), the Tube trailer was shown at the Blender booth. It wasn’t completely finished, as that is what we are doing right now. Hopefully we’ll have it up and online very soon. But in the meantime, here are a few screens from the trailer. Enjoy!

Jarred, Fateh and I just got back (by car) from Siggraph/New Orleans. We had a great time meeting CG and Blender people, including tube contributors Jason, Sam, Martin and others. Still exhausted from the drive and with a lot of catchup to do.
We finished the teaser and showed it on the exhibition floor; however, 4 a.m comps and renders deserve a second going, I’ll be making a ‘director’s cut’ before posting it online.
So, be expecting posts about siggraph, the teaser, and rigamarule updates coming soon.
cheers
Bassam

With impeccable timing, our main production server decided to go to sleep last night. For now, this means no SVN, Helga, file sharing or rendering… it is a dark time for the project.
Luckily we have Chris taking care of us, he’ll take a look today and assess the damage. If it seems bad, I’ll migrate our work to an off-site location.

To those of you who have been nagging me about switching to a distributed VCS all this time.. well, yes, I guess this is a good use case- though to be honest, it’s the first time I’ve wanted one.

I’m pretty sure there are backups/etc. And indeed, we have all our working copies as backup, so, we are delayed, but not defeated!! muahahaha!

EDIT: Looks like Chris ( Perry ) reset the server and it’s back up again… no clue as to why it went down though.