Hey folks – long time no blog! we’ll have two today to make up for it.
We’ve been very busy over here, both on Tube and on freelance projects, hence the lack of posts. A new member of the team- the insanely talented Dimetrii Kalinin from Russia is at the studio, modelling like mad.
And now to the subject of this post! we’re coming to NYC for the Blender Meetup at the MongrelFX studio, announced previously on Blendernation. I think it’s going to be fun weekend with lots to talk about, what with Cycles, Blender 2.57b, Tube, etc. If you’re in the New England area, maybe you should make a quick trip! (don’t forget to RSVP at the meetup site)
Author Archive
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
We 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.
Read More
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).
Read More
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?
Read More
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.
Read More
Sorry for the long hiatus! Work happened, but rest assured the project is still going strong. Plenty of stuff has been going on behind the scenes, and I’ll have updates, new members, and more up soon.
In the meantime, I’ll be going to Amsterdam for Blender conference tomorrow! There will be a tube presentation on Sunday at three thirty in the Salon, I hope to see some of you there. I’ll be demoing rig/ scripting work, our summer and current interns (not all of them) will be there, and I will be recruiting interested Blenderheads to the project.
If you read this and you are coming, comment below and we can have a beer/chat/snack at the conference. See you in Amsterdam!
Read MoreThe end of this week should see the initial rig in the hands of animators, and I need a quick intro video to show them what’s in store. I whipped up a quick screencap of (most) of what we have so far. The rig is far from complete – I won’t do fingers and face until the model is finaled, too much can change in those small details. The rig itself is quite ‘smart’ as Rigamarule has been ported by myself, Daf and Josh to Blender 2.5. As a result, moving a joint can auto-update the rig easily, and I can add bones and then ‘place’ them using rules rather than manual transforms. More on that later, onwards to the actual features for animators.
I’ve hopped on the 2.5 rig-ui-in-the-view3D-properties-region bandwagon so popular among Blender riggers these days, though more could be done there.
Nice things that 2.5 enabled is seamless Pivot switching (via Python, rather than the constraint), and not shown in this video, seamless IK/FK switching (without jumping), better drivers, and myriad small features. I’m still waffling on exactly how certain features will look/feel/work, so this is a work in progress, but it should stabilize by Wednesday (time for animation tests)
On to the video:
For a higher resolution version, download this file.
Read More