Today Jarred boarded a plane taking him back home to South Africa. We’re all missing him (and Pablo) and planning for the next time we meet. Some quick phone-camera shots of the dynamic duo this last weekend:

At a Barbeque at Chris Perry’s house:
Last day in the drome:

Calling all students (18+) and recent graduates:

Applications are open to join the team for summer internships, hosted by the very cool Bit Films Incubator Program at Hampshire College, Massachusetts.

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 internship period runs from June 1 through September 3. Please note that applications are due (via email) no later than Monday May 3, 2010 at 5pm (EDT). (EST)

More information at Bit Films. Still have questions? Comment!

What seems like a long time ago I wrote rigarmarule in Blender 2.49. For reference you can check the blog post here and here , or you can check out the project from SVN:
svn co http://projects.freefac.org/rigamarule

Rigamarule is not exactly an auto-rigger (though it can be part of one, or assist one) – it’s rather better thought of as a constraint system that affects rigging instead of animation. To make it easier, we call them ‘rules’ rather than constraints, and it makes sure things in your rig stay aligned and correct no matter how you move the joints around. This allows making fast adjustments to characters, or it allows retargeting a rig to a different proportion character, or it can be used to make templates ‘smart’ for use with etchaton or other template-retargeting system (at which point you do get something like an autorigger)

The problem is that this system was written in Python 2.5 / Blender 2.49. At the time we hadn’t switched the movie to Python 3.1/ Blender 2.5. Our script is now not usable by us! and I do not have enough time budget to do the porting myself.

This is an official cry for help, if we can get some assistance porting we can use the script for the movie, and it will allow future upgrade work to make the script even better, and to further integrate it with other rigging tools to help make the ultimate autorigger for Blender.

Well, after a few weeks working in the concepts and the boards for the animatic, it’s time now to do some modeling stuff, which is REALLY fun! and it give us the possibility to play a little bit more with blender 2.5. I must say that I’m really comfortable now working on it, anyway I use to save the file every big change I made into the mesh, because you know, it’s still a beta release and blender crash -very- often! :P.. we are a little bit accustomed to that 🙂

Also now we are working “officially” with the render branch 🙂 My English is not too good, so I’ll let the image talk by himself! 😉

Also, for a better “sharing” issues between the members of the team, and also for scripting work, we decide to made a convention about how we have to use the layers for the props and for the sets files. Meaby it’s usefull for you too. here is:

We are also putting base materials in the objects using only procedural textures, and we are trying a new way to assign and modify materials, using a library.blend file which have the basic materials for all the files, so we just link the material and any change in the original file is updated in the other files too, nothing fantastic , but for us is kind of useful and fun!.

What else i can say! , well, Jarred is doing layout and he is also scripting a lot and Bassam is doing everything else needed for the project to keep going forward. They’re going to post soon with some massapusset (ask to Jarred about that word XD ) scripting! 🙂

Also we start doing Layout in 3d! YEAHHH!!! 😀 , I’m not able to show you too much, but here is a little sample:

The last thing i want to show is a little test of indirect illumination with the render branch build. Just for play I start to emit light from the light tubes, and here are the results! , (non lights only meshes!)

By the way, all the materials are only for preview and the models are not “final” … we have a lot of things to do yet! Another image to test the variations in the edge of the platform and in the pedestal too. Do you see any repeated and annoying pattern? Tell me please 🙂

Well that’s all for now!, keep in touch, please comment and see you soon! 🙂

Bye!

– pablo