Heya folks, Fateh and I just posted a video update, it includes a small behind the scenes peak at production during the past week. Check it out!

Just yesterday we launched Tube’s first major campaign, with the goal of raising at least $22K as a bare-bones budget for this production phase. After only one day, backing has surpassed our expectations — already we are halfway to the target! And with further funding we can work faster, make greater claims on the time of our amazing crew, hire additional artists, and finish Tube in 7 months with even more impressive results. Big love to everyone who contributed, in whatever form — THANK YOU! If you can, please spread the word and help us turn this campaign into an inspiring precedent.

Check it out at Kickstarter!

WebM version coming soon.

Turns out commenting has been broken for quite a while, with mainly only spammers being able to post
I’ve ‘fixed’ this with a really, really ugly hack, but at least you should be able to comment now. Phew!

EDIT: It appears they are not fully working, only for logged in users, we’ll investigate.

EDIT EDIT: Really, truly, comments should be running fine now. But please let us know if you experience problems.

Since Cycles is the ‘new hotness’ we naturally don’t want to exclude using it for our renders. However, Cycles lacks some features and support that Blender internal has; such as SSS, volume shaders, strand rendering, particles, A.O. and probably more. In order to use it at all we’re going to have to combine our renders, and we need a good way of managing this.

One side of this is the compositor: you can put a Cycles scene into a file, an Internal Scene, and then render them both from a third, compositing scene, that pulls in renderlayers from both. So far so good, but! if you have have objects linked into both scenes, what to do about materials? Cycles materials and Blender materials are different… or are they?

Turns out nodal materials are our friends, because they can contain both Cycles shading nodes and Blender internal nodes… nifty, right? so all you have to do is use nodes in internal, and then both will work.

If you feel like you need more in depth explanation, check out the video tutorial below, and download the included .blend file.

The Blend file has been uploaded to Blendswap, here! By the way, don’t forget (as I initially did) to keep your render resolution the same in all files, or all hell with break loose(tm)

Hey folks, a bit late on this one, but Spring internships have been posted on bitfilms. If you are interested in spending in spending a few months working on lighting, modelling, crowd sims/other simulation or animation (or a combination of the above) have a gander at the doc and send your resume/reel/cover letter in! we’d love to have you on the project.

Good news for the modellers, btw, is that we’ve been tuning/tightening our modelling pipeline. I intend to post on that in a week or two once I’ve formalized the last details, so it should be easier and smoother to get your modelling chops into final shots.

I promise my next post won’t have an exclamation point on the end

Looks like Tal’s preview of the autowalking got posted at BN! Nice post!

This blog has been a little quiet of late but the project is quite healthy. We’ve been working hard on animation and refining our modelling pipeline to allow modellers an easier time contributing to the project. Tal and I have nailed down most of our technical hurdles in the autowalker/crowd side, which is a huge relief (those shots were always a bit of a scary looming task) and we think we can finish these shots with a great deal of fun.

stay tuned for more posts, where we share our current progress… and some news!

On a long term/distributed project, there’s often a flux of new, leaving and returning artists. Here’s a quick list of who’s active right now (In addition to me, who’s doing a little bit of everything and a lot of some things):

Producers + project management:

• Fateh Slavitskaya and Elizabeth Ellis powering along.

Animators:

• Chris Bishop is our animation supervisor, an amazing animator and teacher- well suited to the role of supervisor.
• Jarred de Beer (previously an intern) is still animating like mad, working on 2/3 of the most difficult shots in the first act.
• Virgillio Vasconcelos Animator, professor and author from Brazil- really great, and great to work with.
• Tal Hershkovich is doing lots of roach sim and animation.
• Carlo Serra Summer intern who’s working on a nice action-y shot.
• Sarah Laufer Mad talented animator! She’s tackling a very challenging shot.
• Francesco Siddi (previously a modeller/intern) and recent blenderwiki developer.
• Luciano A. Muñoz Sessarego who I met at TOSMI and is a great animator and all around fun guy.

Modellers:

• Dimetrii Kalinin (One of the nastiest modellers I’ve seen) – he’s backed up by his brother Michael, great concept/2D artist and animator.

Sound:

• Thomas Vecchione is currently doing temp sound for the animatic;
• Jan Morgenstern will then evaluate the result, looking for music opportunities – the two will collaborate on the final sound mix (Thomas = SFX, Jan = Music)

Fall interns:

• Samantha Luo : Samantha is a UMASS student with good Blender chops: 3D Generalist
• Andreu Cabre: Another Blenderhead, Andreu is trained in graphic design, and self taught in 3D: 3D Generalist with a focus on pipeline issues.
• Roberto Roch: Our other nasty sculptor/modeller, Roberto will be working on polishing assets to get final models in shots.
• Karen Webb: Our only animation intern, she’s new (ish) to Blender but a fast learner
• Samah Majadla: Mt. Holyoke College student and lighter from Caldera,  3D Generalist on Tube
• Christine Stuckart: recent grad, recent Caldera intern, like Samah she is starting as 3D Generalist with no prior Blender experience.

Since my last post I’ve decided/discovered I’ll be giving more classes soon:

I’m holding a two intro to Blender training session in ASH (Adele Simmons Hall, Hampshire College) 126 on Tuesday and Thursday ( Oct 4th and 6th) 5ish to 7ish. plans are for a small group  (there’s a projector and computers, but also students working on projects at the same time). If you’re in the area and wish to attend, please let me know via email or comments so I can gauge space requirements.

We can also do a sneak, spoilery peek at Tube afterwards.

But if you’re not around, don’t despair! I’ll be giving an animation masterclass (fancy!) at the Blender conference in Amsterdam. It’ll cover production workflow tips from Tube and other projects, both riggingish and animationish. No spoilers, but I’ll probably be using Tube production rigs.

Hi folks, looks like I have some news! first of all, I’ll be teaching two Blender workshops at the always excellent Tosmi ( Training in Open Source Multimedia Instruments) The first Course (Oct 31st-Nov 5th)  will be co-taught by the excellent Miroslav Brozovic (freelancer, instructor and Croatian Blender community organizer) , while the second (Nov 7-12)will be co-taught by the well known Sebastian Koenig, well known for his many tutorials and work with camera tracking. Going from past experience, it will be an extremely intensive and fun. For more information, or to sign up for the courses, head over to tosmi.org .

  The second bit of news is that I will be attending Blender conference Oct 28-30! This was a little bit of a last minute final decision (I changed my mind a few times) but I’ll be there. Looking forward to meeting Tube artists ( Tal Hershkovitch will be giving a talk about using the G.E. for crowd shots) and all the other Blenderfriends

Just a fun little image that happened when looking at a shot from the wrong camera angle. Polishing off an annoying shot (stacking dependencies of hands/paper/cockroach is not terribly fun, though the results can be)