Adding rubberhose style control to a section of arm/leg is either not dynamic (just crank up the ease values on the bbones) or laborious (as in mancandy’s rig, with at least a lattice, curve, a bunch of extra bones and constraints, some modifiers, etc.)

I hadn’t planned on rubberhosing Gilgamesh, but one of the animators recently expressed that bending limbs ever so slightly can be used to enhance poses even on fairly realistic characters, so he would like the control. I whipped up a quick script/operator to do it, called Raymond Curver so now all I have to do is to select a bunch of verts, then select a bone I want to rubberhose, then run the operator. A quick demo below:

The script is going to be released soon, but it does depend on quite a bit of tube conventions and a bit of knowledge of our pipeline and scripts. This should improve after the project is over and I have time to generalize our tools.

Hi folks, this is a 30 minute explanation of the main rig features, intended for new and continuing animators on the project. It has pretty bad audio (recorded on my phone, with lots of noise and uhms and aahs) and also has been shrunk and compressed quite mercilessly. That being said, it just explains the various features of the rig to be handy for our animators.

I didn’t see any reason not to make this public, so I’m putting it on the main blog:

You can download here: mp4, ogg, or webm in case the in-browser thing doesn’t work.

Today on our way into the Drome from a nice Sunday run+swim, we encountered some unlikely arrivals: a cluster of bright yellow mushrooms growing in the potted plant outside the studio. For your enjoyment:

Pics taken with my mobile phone. What do you think, should we eat them? . Now I wonder if we should use the mushroomer for mushrooms as well as the other things we want to grow/animate with it. If mushrooms can grow in the studio environment, they can live anywhere, including subway stations.

Since Dimetrii just posted his eye material and texture, I thought I’d show this quickie test of the eye rig – missing such things as eyebrows, eyelashes and that insane little membrane on the inside corner by the tear duct.

The rig features two directional controls, a track-target and an on-face widget, that can be used separately or together, a pupil dilator, controllable eyelids that mimic muscle motion but also have a limited vertical track with the eyeball, and an even more limited horizontal one, and a deformational lattice that allows the non-spherical eye to ‘push’ the skin around it. I may add a shrinkwrap to the inner eyelid to make sure it stays on the surface.

Finally, I’d like to thank everybody who, in an idle moment, took a video camera to their eye and posted it on youtube. Viva la crowd-sourced reference!

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)

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

Hello 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!