Hi folks! as you may know, we made our kickstarter minimum goal *2, at roughly 40k usd! Not our ‘full funding’ goal, but really close 😀 , I’m sure Fateh will have more to say on that. Thanks to all the wonderful people who donated, and who campaigned and shared the project. You make this movie possible.
In other news, we made the local press. The Valley Advocate, a wonderful newspaper, has an article about Tube, Urchn, Bitfilms and the goings on at the nerdodrome in both their print and online editions.
We even made the front page! So cool to see gilga in a different medium:

In other news we’re working on various things; more animation and lighting, a bit of rig tweaks, and some logistical issues are taking up our time- mainly getting ready for the summer interns, and finishing up on the aftermath of the funding campaign. More next time!

Heya folks, Fateh and I just posted a video update, it includes a small behind the scenes peak at production during the past week. Check it out!

Just yesterday we launched Tube’s first major campaign, with the goal of raising at least $22K as a bare-bones budget for this production phase. After only one day, backing has surpassed our expectations — already we are halfway to the target! And with further funding we can work faster, make greater claims on the time of our amazing crew, hire additional artists, and finish Tube in 7 months with even more impressive results. Big love to everyone who contributed, in whatever form — THANK YOU! If you can, please spread the word and help us turn this campaign into an inspiring precedent.

Check it out at Kickstarter!

WebM version coming soon.

Since Cycles is the ‘new hotness’ we naturally don’t want to exclude using it for our renders. However, Cycles lacks some features and support that Blender internal has; such as SSS, volume shaders, strand rendering, particles, A.O. and probably more. In order to use it at all we’re going to have to combine our renders, and we need a good way of managing this.

One side of this is the compositor: you can put a Cycles scene into a file, an Internal Scene, and then render them both from a third, compositing scene, that pulls in renderlayers from both. So far so good, but! if you have have objects linked into both scenes, what to do about materials? Cycles materials and Blender materials are different… or are they?

Turns out nodal materials are our friends, because they can contain both Cycles shading nodes and Blender internal nodes… nifty, right? so all you have to do is use nodes in internal, and then both will work.

If you feel like you need more in depth explanation, check out the video tutorial below, and download the included .blend file.

EDIT: New .blend file! includes solution to the emission problem: download here