In the second part of the book, the focus is all on animation, starting with a simple ball exercise, and rapidly ramping up into character animation. The first chapter is mainly technical (like the rigging section) in it’s setup: that is, he starts with workflow, then with things like IK/FK switching, etc. This book introduces workflow and technique first, so the focus at start is learning animation in blender, not learning animation in general yet. This chapter is basically an introduction to blender for animators, and I think maya or even 2D animators picking up Blender will spend most of their time here.

After the technically-heavy blender intro, the rest of the animation chapters return to the basics a bit, with lessons in timing, spacing, anticipation, squash and stretch, etc… All those basic animation principles we know and love. The book is good at using blender features to enable animators to get what they need done efficiently, using Blender’s path-drawing features to adjust their arcs, or using the Open GL preview to better see their timing.  As in the rigging sections, the downloads for the book contain Blend files that make it easy for students to get right in with each chapter working on the exercises with no fuss.

The book ends with an appendix with some useful tips on planning, organisation, and terms.

Some criticisms: Even in a good book such as this, I can find some things to crit , but they are mainly small things. In the rigging section, Virgilio fails to warn his audience about the (current) fragility of one setup, when talking about the corrective shapes (an otherwise excellent segment). Luckily, a current summer of code project fixes this problem, so it’s likely that any such warning will be unneeded in the next release of Blender! Another tiny nitpick is that Virgilio uses the term spacing in two different ways, the first time unconventionally (referring to actual physical locations) the second more like the usual way for animators. I feel that he could have picked a better word for the first time. Finally, in the rigging section, I think that a tiny introduction to Python for creating interfaces would be quite good, and give riggers an alternative to the object/bone based sliders in the 3D view.

Conclusion: These are really tiny nitpicks. This book really is good, in fact, I’d say it’s the best animation and rigging reference for Blender yet, and even as a general reference for riggers and animators in 3D applications (since most techniques will be similar in different programs). While I read through linearly from beginning to end, the book also has ‘See also’ segments at the end of each section, that allow students focusing on a particular track, to follow a different path of learning in the book, something I thought was a good idea. I would put this on my ‘recommend’ list, as a book for intermediate/strong beginners, as a Blender reference for riggers/animators from other software,  or as a book for teachers to use as a textbook.

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.

I’m Josh, one of new crew members for tube.  I travelled over to the US from England last week, and I’m here until mid September undertaking cultural studies, and working on the models for the film.  While I attempt to mediate transatlantic differences (such as introducing the rest of the team to Branston Pickle and Marmite, explaining the etymology of ‘bangers and mash’, and justifying why I need a knitted cosy for my teapot), my hosts are offering an American exchange programme complete with drive-in movies, fried dough, Independence Day Celebrations and Root Beer.  In my time away from the screen I’ve been out enjoying the fresh air, beautiful countryside and very un-British weather.  I’ve been running to and from work each day (8 ½ miles each way), and when I had a few hours to spare last weekend I biked up to the Sugarloaf Mountain.

Fresh out of finishing a long and traumatic Architecture degree at Cambridge University, I vowed never to work in the industry again.  My first task in the studio, however, was to design the station roof and columns, and to provide general advice to the rest of the team on all things architectural!  Being British, and naturally strongly resistant to change, I was slightly thrown when I realised the team was working with up to the minute svn builds of Blender.  Back home in my own work I’d been hanging on to the 2.49 vintage with its historical interface not unlike the quirky 400 year old tumbledown cottage I lived in at uni.  2.5 comes with its own breed of glossy newness, an impersonal homogeneity with other 3D apps akin to the monotony of the skyscrapers in downtown LA and a feature set which sprawls on and on like the city-edge of Phoenix, Arizona.

Bewildered at first, I was tempted away from the path of the righteous by the glowing red devil’s tail of Maya on one side and the swirling captivating vortex of 3DS on the other, but eventually I found my way through the valley of darkness.  I still miss many of the 2.49 features which haven’t yet been ported – skinning loops and multi-knife-cuts to name a few, and in my first few days I’ve spent a considerable amount of time filing bug reports, hopefully for the greater good.

There are still some very simple features I wish had been integrated into the new release.  As what Pirsig might call a ‘mechanic of the photographic mind school’, all of my previous organisation and labelling systems have been tainted with a certain amount of… dyslexic logic.  To make life easier for everyone else on the project I have to name every object, bone, group and file according to a strictly prescribed style, not least so our python automation knows what’s going on!  While I don’t mind accumulating road miles on my way to and from Amherst every day, I hate the unnecessary mouse miles blender’s UI demands.  I’ve illustrated one of the key issues (which could be solved by a simple hotkey and under-mouse-dialog) using an analogy that will be familiar even to non-blender users.

After breaking free from summers spent as a CAD-monkey in local architecture firms, I now find myself pining for the logical and consistent snapping and tracking systems I was so familiar with from hours spent in front of Rhino, Vectorworks, AutoCAD and the like.  At least the resulting ‘errors’ present in my incapable use of Blender’s snaps often results in a more derelict and aged look!  Here’s a work-in-progress snapshot of the interior of the train which I’ve been working on today, by virtually bashing it up:

That’s all for now,

Josh

First, let me introduce myself, I’m Henri Hebeisen from France and I’ll work as a 3d intern for the two months. I arrived last week after a long plane trip, so I`m still discovering the `american way of live`.Living here seems really great!

I’ve been working on the  project for less than one week now and it’s very exciting to work on it. Everybody is really nice and that’s a pleasure to work here. Bassam showed the animatic last friday, the story is just…incredible!!The final result will be “epic”! (a popular word for blenderheads these times )

So my first task here was to do some tests for a shot Bassam had in mind. The idea was to play with the curves of the metro rail and have nice shapes when the camera is flying over really fast. So as we wanted to have the impression of movement really early, I just did some basic drawings with Inkscape and then projected these drawings on planes in blender.

Using Inkscape was quite useful because it allowed me to do several variations of the curvy tracks fairly fastly, just had to play with layers and positioning curves and

And then back to blender, it became very easy to position the camera, control the speed and so on… Here is a picture of what it looks like in blender :

As you can see, it’s very simple and it’s a good way to visualize the curves in movement.

Once we had a strong idea of what the shot would look like, I started to model the tracks in 3d and made them fit it with the inkscape drawings. Et voila, that’s it!

Recently well reviewed at Blender Nation, check it out!

Blender Studio Projects: Digital Movie Making

What we’ll likely be working on: Rigging and scripting rigs in Blender 2.5, Concepts in Gimp, Animatic in Gimp and Blender.

Oh and this is Pablo and Jarred’s first visit to Boston/Cambridge. Any tips? Things we shouldn’t miss?

DCP is the digital cinema distribution format, delivered via hard drives which plug directly into theater projectors. Realizing that “we’re really just talking about some fancy conversions to a non-proprietary format,” rather than resorting to expensive commercial solutions, Chris set out to mine the resources free/libre software offers the independent filmmaker.

Bassam’s small contribution was to cry “FFmpeg!” when Chris wished, “If only there was a tool to automatically output PNGs from a QuickTime movie…”

Check out the climax and how-to, or head to the beginning for Making a DCP, Part 1.

I came just six days ago, so all is new for me, luckily all the people in the team and at the hampshire college are great and really kind. So there wasn’t problems with the adaptation time. Before I start talking about the project, I want to make a special mention to Bassam, Fateh and Jarred who give me all I need, and are always asking if there’s all going right!

Well, do I’ve mentioned that the town/city (Northampton, MA) is really beautifull? i think not! All the buildings and houses are like the movies

Another little thing to mention is that all has a lot of patience with me , because my english is really bad XD, I guess that get laughs at my back! But i think that i’m learning a lot, so i think that in … 3 months I’ll be ready to communicate with english people

Lets talk about important things! The food is really strange, I miss the argentinean food! but I must adapt to this new forms of eat! I feel lucky because I came with Yerba Mate.

From the first day I start to work in the Nerdodrome,It’s a very nice place where a lot of cool things happen!, There’s also a project called Caldera which is produced in the same place, fortunately here we have a lot of new computers to do all the work together without disturb to anybody.

In the project, I’m mostly dedicated to draw some boards for the animatic. So I’m doing a lot of 2d stuff, sometimes i have things to do in 3d but not too much. I don’t have problem with that because I love to draw and make sketches!

Here’s some images that I did in this few days. Keep on touch for more blog updates!

- Pablo

Bassam kindly invited me to write something about Plumiferos’ release happening this week. It might sound strange to read something about Plumiferos here but in fact it is not.

Some of us in the team, Bassam, Juan Angel and myself were part of the biggest film project done in Blender so far, and here’s the good news: it is finished. And it is showing in the theaters in Argentina as you read. The first Blender made feature film. Ever.

We are very proud of have been part of it

It was because of Plumiferos that I met Bassam, Juan and other wonderful people like Andy and VenomGFX. And for that I’m certainly grateful and happy.

Here’s Juan Angel writing…

I agree with Malefico, about learning from it… The best part of it, instead the experience, the learning (technical and human), and getting new knowledge and skills…

But the best part, as the Plumifero’s director (Daniel De Felippo) told me… was knowing those couple of amazing people… Malefico, Pico, Ivan, Diego, VenomGFX, Bassam!, Andy!, Daniel… and some others too…

Cheers… and some hugs… and here some pics !