Hello from Sofia / Bulgaria!
I’m here teaching at Tosmi two blender classes back to back, and having a great time. We had a great Siggraph experience, Jarred, Fateh and I spent many hours driving to the conference, hanging at the blender booth, meeting all the groovy blenderfolk (you know who you are!) and then midnight hacking on the teaser.
After returning back home, we had a scant few days to re-do some of the glitchy bits, make a ‘director’s cut’ teaser, render, and then rush out here to the EU before encoding it for your viewing pleasure.
Without further ado I present… the second teaser:

Credits go to Gianmichele (character animation) Jarred (massive amounts of textures, modelling, and matte painting), Jamal (modeling and materials), Jan (awesome music and mix), Thomas (awesome SFX), Colin Levy! (who kindly tweaked the comp on one of the shots at the blender booth), Kursad (texture painting) and Jean-Sebastian (modeling). Thanks to Chris, Fateh, and the folks at the animation meeting for the great feedback/ideas/critique. I did a little bit of everything, and am responsible for anything bad. (edit: can’t believe I didn’t mention redo’s awesome roach concepts)

Oh and finally, for the masochists: a high rez ogg video link : HD teaser2

PS: I’ve of course updated the media page with the second teaser.
EDIT: added .mp4 version to the video for safari users

Jarred, Fateh and I just got back (by car) from Siggraph/New Orleans. We had a great time meeting CG and Blender people, including tube contributors Jason, Sam, Martin and others. Still exhausted from the drive and with a lot of catchup to do.
We finished the teaser and showed it on the exhibition floor; however, 4 a.m comps and renders deserve a second going, I’ll be making a ‘director’s cut’ before posting it online.
So, be expecting posts about siggraph, the teaser, and rigamarule updates coming soon.
cheers
Bassam

With impeccable timing, our main production server decided to go to sleep last night. For now, this means no SVN, Helga, file sharing or rendering… it is a dark time for the project.
Luckily we have Chris taking care of us, he’ll take a look today and assess the damage. If it seems bad, I’ll migrate our work to an off-site location.

To those of you who have been nagging me about switching to a distributed VCS all this time.. well, yes, I guess this is a good use case- though to be honest, it’s the first time I’ve wanted one.

I’m pretty sure there are backups/etc. And indeed, we have all our working copies as backup, so, we are delayed, but not defeated!! muahahaha!

EDIT: Looks like Chris ( Perry ) reset the server and it’s back up again… no clue as to why it went down though.

Well, it’s been a hectic week here, going from nothing to something in no time has been fun. We’re still working till the last minute on a 40 second teaser (was planned for 30, but… ). It’s a bit of a challenge since we didn’t have anything textured, don’t even have concepts for some key parts of the movie, let alone models.. nevertheless we’ve pulled together an animatic with a few shots from the film, and are now rapidly animating, texturing, modelling, lighting, and comping.
Kursad volunteered to do quick textures for the cockroach- this is fast work and not up to his usual quality standards (but great work nonetheless). Kursad uses Modo and Zbrush quite a bit, as well as Blender- it could be an interesting side-effect of this work to create documentation about integrating Blender into other pipelines, in terms of import/export, applying modifiers and copying texture maps and weights.
The animatic was made this monday, and since then I’ve populated SVN with shots from the animatic, complete with basic camera layouts for detailing. Now it’s (just!) a matter of pushing things through to completion.
Jarred and I have spent some fun times walking around, examining the material properties of concrete and rusted metal, and snapping lots of texture-shots. He’s busy gimping and projection-painting away, making everything look generally awesome
Jamal is modelling details (wires, lights, signals, etc.), you’ll see his work in most shots of the animatic.
Gianmichelle is animating a nice character animation shot.
Thomas is getting together sfx for the soundtrack.
There’s still final animation, lighting, rendering, compositing, sound track and music to do, as well as the final edit… so back to work for me.

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Rigamarule is a collection of scripts and templates that aims to be a rig-retargetting/ autorigging tool for Blender. It can be used in conjunction with or independently of Blender’s Etchaton bone sketching/retargetting tool.

Rigamarule works by applying scripted rules to bones’ edit positions/orientations (and other properties of bones, rigs and other objects in the future), thus constraining the armatures’ rest position to it’s geometry / joints. Rules can be added by riggers to extend the functionality of their templates, though rigamarule aims to ship with a fairly complete set of default rules that take into account most scenarios.

In its current incarnation rigamarule works only for single-armature rigs, and does not take into account action constraints or drivers. The first lack will be fixed by upgrading rigamarule in the future, the second can be remedied by adding appropriate rules.

You can see a preview movie of the scripts in action here.

Rigamarule is in use for the tube project (for which it was developed) and for the Richmond 48 Hour film Project.

I’ll be posting really soon a video tutorial that shows how to use the scripts with the included example .blend.

The download can be found here, or in the downloads section of this website.

Be sure to check the README file in the package, hopefully this can be a beginning for a collaboration between Blender riggers and python/ C developers to create a robust and versatile autorigging tool for blender.

Big thanks go to Martin Poirier (Theeth) for his ongoing technical assistance, code, and reviews.