We’re happy to announce a new round of summer internships through bitfilms on Wires for Empathy aka the tube open movie project.
Read the details in this document – it should contain everything you need to know, deadlines, how to apply, etc.
In brief we’re going to be working on two exciting main areas, timelapse animation and lighting. In the run up to the internship period I’m working on documentation for our lighting pipeline and timelapse animation workflow and tools – so if you’re into lighting with cycles, would like the chance to work on our color-managed lighting pipeline, or if you like the idea of animating things changing over time, or modeling snapshots of aging objects, this could be a good fit for you.
At SIGGRAPH we premiered the trailer for the Blender community and revealed the title of the Tube Open Movie project:
Wires For Empathy
Tube is a name we have gotten attached to, but it was only a provisional title and serves us still as the designation for the project (the way that Elephants Dream is also known as Orange). Wires for Empathy is a more evocative title that hints at the themes of this fairly abstract film. During the weeks running up to SIGGRAPH, the local and remote crews were working hard polishing these (and many more) shots and getting them rendered in time. We hope you enjoy our short trailer!
We are getting really excited to show all the incredible animation and amazing render tests coming off the farm. And even though we don’t want to let *too* much slip before time, I know Bassam is planning an update with some teaser images and production notes pretty soon.
Today I’m happy to share news of MediaGoblin, a libre software “publishing system” for images, video, audio and more that friends of Bassam’s and mine are building. It’s a single replacement for Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, and similar that anyone can run (like WordPress), but federated to keep files under user control. It’s very extensible, with support just added for 3D models now suggesting an alternative to Thingiverse. But I’m especially excited about MediaGoblin because it will establish the core functionality we can use to implement a lot of cool ideas we’ve had during Tube production for a collaborative platform that also fills the huge need for a solid asset management pipeline, a kind of super-Helga with some interesting properties. We’ve been talking to a bunch of developers about putting together a free software project after Tube, in which there’s been a lot of interest, and I have a thought that we could get studios to pool resources instead of each rolling their own and occasionally making a dead-end free software release.
A few weeks ago at the Blender Conference, we were talking with the renderfarm.fi developers about how, together with their distributed rendering, and these fairly near-future pipeline/collab possibilities, it seems like a lot of big pieces falling into place. MediaGoblin is worthy in its primary goals, but of especial interest for providing much of the functionality we’d need, plus perks like federation that we’ve dreamed about. Coding with Will Kahn-Greene, formerly of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the project lead is Chris Webber, until recently a developer at Creative Commons, and also a Blender user who did the anim in the excellent Patent Absurdity doc. And as part of the Tube Open Movie, Chris helped build pipeline scripts as well as our Reference Desk tool, one of the programs inspiring the new asset branch in Blender.
Today MediaGoblin has a nice write-up at Libre Graphics World, concluding:
If you are concerned about having full control over images, videos and audio records that you put online, you have just a few days left to support development of MediaGoblin — an awesome free software project that decentralizes media storage.
If you are a VFX or animation studio, or even a 3D printing company, you have even more reasons to support the project. With initial support for 3D models (STL and OBJ) MediaGoblin has a great chance to grow into a scalable digital asset management solution that is free to use and modify.
Finally, if you are a developer who’s good at Python, MediaGoblin could do with your contributions.
** Donations are tax-deductible in the US and also support the Free Software Foundation, which hosts the campaign.
And thanks for anything you can do to help this awesome project by passing the word!
Hello everybody! I’ll be going to Portland/Oregon and OSCON 2012 where I’ll be giving a talk about tube and meeting up with various great people- including tube contributors Chris Webber and Oscar Baechler. chime in if you’re going there, and let’s have tea.
This week was quite full. we’ve got a beautiful anim team who are going through their shots (perhaps I should post some snippets?) and we are now at only 17 shots left for character animation. (not counting assigned shots that are in progress) This might mean we will make our goal of getting 90% of the character animation done by the end of the summer… we shall see.
This was also the week of infinite recursion! Two blender crashers turned out to be due to infinite recursion errors in our files, to whit:
- we couldn’t link anything into one file without crashing. Joshua Leung found that one by looking at the backtrace – turned out we had a file with a group duplicator inside its own group.. tsk tsk.
- instantly crashing files! this is because newer versions of blender can’t cope with nodal materials that are referenced in their own groups. I found this one by looking through the bug tracker.
The rest of our team haven’t been idle: we have more progress on lighting , new effects in some shots using various techniques, such as dynamic paint, smoke, modifiers and careful keying. Our new sparkly pipeline is (mostly working) and we’ve introduced it to our new anim team. Since this is a rush post, I’m going to copy ton and post a few random images, with no explanation 😉
next week might be slow, because of oscon, but I’m hoping we’ll make more animation progress, add a couple of small rig enhancements, get some new shots into animation, and continue our work on models and layouts.
Calling all students (18+), recent graduates, and professionals wanting to ply their 3D skills in libre software:
It’s that time again, internships open at the very cool Bit Films Animation Incubator at Hampshire College, Massachusetts. (Now semi officially known as the ‘Nerdodrome’)
Helmed by Chris Perry, formerly of Pixar and Rhythm & Hues, the program draws together a number of interesting projects and a lot of talent, so although the internships are unpaid, it promises to be a very stimulating and fruitful space.
The official internship period runs from Monday October 3rd, 2011 through Friday December 16, 2011. Applications are due (via email) no later than Friday Sepember 23rd, 2011 at 5pm (EDT). We understand that this is short lead time for those needing to make visa and travel arrangements. Because the project is ongoing, the internship period is flexible; if in doubt, apply!
Although it may not provide as immersive an experience, we are open to considering applicants to a remote internship. Remote interns would join the already global team using our web-based project management software, SVN, and IRC.
Please read *carefully* the open positions announcement and FAQ! Have more questions? Email fateh [at] freefac [dot] org.
- Affiliated Organizations:
- Blender
- Bitfilms
- Hampshire College