OSCON wrapup

Hey Folk, Quick one since this isn’t really a production topic. I’m back from OSCON where I gave a talk about Tube. I talked a bit about the (very short) history of open movie projects, the motivations of making tube and some other topics that would in themselves make a nice post. I also showed […]

OSCON wrapup

Hey Folk,

Quick one since this isn’t really a production topic. I’m back from OSCON where I gave a talk about Tube. I talked a bit about the (very short) history of open movie projects, the motivations of making tube and some other topics that would in themselves make a nice post. I also showed some hitherto unseen work in progress shots, and demo-d a bit creating a crowd scene with the autowalking. Some of the ideas that I came to the conference with (about making open movies mainly) are probably best saved for their own post.

Due to the ‘giving a talk’ effect of preparing up till the last minute, I ended up missing pretty much the first half of the conference, and sat out most of the last day doing Tube stuff – I thus didn’t get to attend that many of the talks. Those that I did sit in were interesting – though some were not quite open source in topic. I was very interested by the panel on software patents, and I’m rather enamoured of Bradley Kuhn’s idea of a ‘free software patent troll’. I’m not sure this would work, but it’s fun to contemplate.

I also did an interview during the conference with Linux Format, and another with O’Reilly media:

During the week I met with several new and old friends, including some of the past and present Tube crew! Chris Webber (of mediagoblin fame) who coded reference desk (part of the mini-demo) and Oscar Baechler, who rigged a bit earlier in the project, and now returns as an animator. In the weekend following the conf, I took a train from Portland to Seattle, and met with our assistant producer and previous production manager Liz Ellis, who’s now launching a web series, also in the free culture vein, and with Oscar (again) and Nathan Vegdahl, who continues to be fabtacular.

I managed to destroy my achillis tendon (again) running a 5K, and then getting lost the next day and wondering around Portland for 3 hours. I took a lot of taxis after that. I also quite typically did not take a single photo of the conference itself, nor of any conference related activities. Here are a bunch of random snaps (mainly in Seattle, though a couple are in Portland). I’m not sure how I feel about that bus.

[nggallery id=39]

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SoftIK revisited

I’ve done some prior experiments in Soft IK, but shied away for it in gilgamesh because the rig was getting too complex for it’s own good, and because I couldn’t find a satisfactory way of solving it in blender 2.5 and above (my 2.4 solution depended on py constraints). Since we have great drivers in […]

SoftIK revisited

I’ve done some prior experiments in Soft IK, but shied away for it in gilgamesh because the rig was getting too complex for it’s own good, and because I couldn’t find a satisfactory way of solving it in blender 2.5 and above (my 2.4 solution depended on py constraints). Since we have great drivers in 2.5/6 series, I thought I’d try it that way. The result is below:

I’m guessing only seasoned animators will see the difference. From left to right we have:

  1. normal, non stretchy IK
  2. soft, non stretchy IK
  3. normal, stretchy IK
  4. soft, stretchy IK

Ik softness basically takes  care of the ‘pop’ at the knee so common in IK when going from straight to bent (or vice versa). This works out because the speed of that joint non-linearly increases as we are close to straight. Good sources here and here (softimage blog). My solution for non stretchy is exactly the same as that blog post- plugging the equation into a driver. For the stretchy case it was a bit trickier and they diverge, but the mathematical result is the same.

I’m not publishing the .blend yet, nor can I use this as is in gilga because the solution depends on driving a bone within a bone inside the same armature; until I find a workaround or blender will successfully handle this case in the dependency graph, this solution causes lagging and errors (there are python frame update handlers here double calculating the rigs to make them behave)

Once I get this working I’ll publish a simple .blend.

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Week before OSCON

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 […]

Week before OSCON

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.

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pipeline changes

  This is a slightly technical detail kind of post- the kind of geekery you’d be interested in if you’ve heard of revision control systems, GIT, Subversion, etc. It doesn’t seem to have to do a whole lot with 3D graphics, but managing files is always going to be an issue in a project of […]

pipeline changes

 

This is a slightly technical detail kind of post- the kind of geekery you’d be interested in if you’ve heard of revision control systems, GIT, Subversion, etc. It doesn’t seem to have to do a whole lot with 3D graphics, but managing files is always going to be an issue in a project of any size.

Since the tube kickstarter campaign ended our team has swelled to 25, and most of them are not located at Hampshire. (Iincidentally why I haven’t blogged for so long- keeping the project running with an expanded team was a greater than full time job) Even a while ago, it was clear that SVN (aka subversion) was not a great fit for most people, for a bunch of reasons:

  1. You have to download the entire project (roughly 8 Gigabytes!) the first time you use it. Slow internet connections and bandwidth caps make this impractical for some.
  2. Not everybody is ‘technical’ – updating and committing is several, potentially error-prone steps, sometimes involving the dreaded command line 🙂
  3. GUI front ends are platform specific – different docs for different people.

Animators previously used what we called ‘production packages’ : we used blenderaid to pull out dependencies and make a zipped bundle of all the file the animator needed, this was:

  1. impractical to do updates on rigs/etc. while an animator was working
  2. hardcoded to anim files (though I could have fixed this)
  3. needed to ask the animator to send back work in progress for lighting tests.

So we found sparkleshare ! Sparkleshare can be best thought of as a dropbox clone with a git backend. A while ago I looked at it, but it only had a linux client; now that it gained windows and mac clients, we migrated from the production package way to sparkleshare, and away from blenderaid to the blender python api. Now we have the following advantages:

  1. one click (on my end) to create a package for *any file* in the production tree – with a choice of including or excluding image files, and the possibility of adding more files easily to the same package.
  2. user on the end has to click twice, and enter two bits of information.
  3. end user experience after that resembles dropbox. updating rigs means just dropping them into the share, and we can get wip files at any time without having to ask.

Is it perfect? we found some issues (where else) on Windows, where there was no SSH client available (luckily one of our interns- Arindam Mondal) figured out how to use Putty and wrote an extensive Howto , and we also found that Windows XP is not supported. I’m frankly stunned that anyone is still using XP though 😉

 

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tube in the press and more

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 […]

tube in the press and more

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:
valley advocate cover and images
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!

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