There’s been some radio silence while I dealt with a death in the family, so I’m excited to begin catching up on Tube Project news!

We have a tendency to post unheralded micro-updates and releases in various corners of the internet — on Twitter, G+, Youtube, and at conferences as well as here on our production blog. Bassam has begun video-documentation of custom tools built for Tube in his ‘Add-ons for Empathy’ series (Floating Sliders, Proxies and a Bonus). We’ve hesitated to release our tools until the film is done, when we’ll have more time to maintain them and create supporting materials — but for the adventurous and Blender-interested among you, we are releasing a selection of them as free/open source software.

Playing to his creature strengths, Tal Hershkovich recently finished animation on one of the most challenging shots of the movie — a roach fight!

We’re also happy to have Henri Hebeisen back with us, doing great work using particle systems to develop the title animation.

In October the project had reached nearly 30,000 lines of code — and the same weekend we noticed it, Bassam wrote 500 more to facilitate the timelapse animation. He’s also written a wiki entry explaining it, http://wiki.urchn.org/wiki/Timelapse_tools.

So, onward! Most importantly, we’ve developed a funding plan for seeing the production all the way to the finish. Thanks to everyone for their support and kind wishes =)