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:
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!
Hey 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.
- Affiliated Organizations:
- Blender
- Bitfilms
- Hampshire College