With three weeks left until Siggraph, we have started production on the Tube trailer to have it finished by the time of the conference. We have around 4 shots completely planned and Jarred and I are now working on one of the detailed sets together.
Since our work will be counting on what the other person is doing, Bassam is working right now on a Verse enabled Blender build for OSX. To my understanding, this Verse enabled build will help us work together by essentially seeing the work of the other person appear live in the file that you are currently working on (that description doesn’t sound like it made sense, perhaps someone can post a better description in the comments). This allows us to work on the exact same file in different parts. So naturally we need to work on communication to avoid modeling conflicts.
Time to get to work!
UPDATE:
We just got verse to work in blender. The limitations seem to be that you can only share mesh data. Blender has crashed on us a few times now when adding modifiers and then pressing tab to go to object mode. So now we’re only testing to see if Verse can speed up our process and help us collaborate on this project more easily. We’ll see how it goes. So far it is really creepy but neat to see meshes in your scene move around live while working on something different.
Interesting to hear you’re trying out Verse in Blender. Indeed, the current level of Verse support in Blender is quite lacking in too many aspects. As you already noted: no modifiers, no textures, no UV, and the list goes on (no animation, no curves, etc).
I guess, although a very intriguing technology, your best shot will be SVN or some other repository and IRC to communicate when new changes are available for the other to get.
I’ll be working on improved Verse support in Blender at some point – together with Jiri Hnidek -, but that day is in the far future still (read: not any time before Siggraph, and neither before Fall, unless someone endows our accounts with lots and lots of positive monnies).
Anyway, success with your trailer!
Hi Nathan!
Indeed, we’re discovering the limitations. The upshot is that the system is extremely fragile – not on the verse server side, that seems to be solid (data there hasn’t ‘gone away’ or crashed once) but on the blender side of things. The verse blender doesn’t look like it changed too much since the elephants dream days, when we tried it for that project.
One thing is clear- if it did work, it could be awesome! right now we’ll probably just share one or two template objects that we are not modelling right now for reference. As you mentioned, we are using SVN for version control- seems to work well if you disconnect from the server before saving your .blend.
I have the distinct feeling the verse experiment here is not going to last more than one day 🙂
Thanks for the well wishes, and it will be very interesting to see what happens with verse in the future.
PS- I downloaded the entire package from verse.org and was pleasantly surprised to find a small package of server and verse clients, all working reasonably well. (though lacking a bit in user documentation)
It would be very exciting to see Verse work completely with Blender. Jarred and I were excited about the possibilities before we understood its limitations.
Just imagine someone working on the lighting of a scene while someone else works on a massive structure. And then you have a another person adding detailed props to the scene. All being live updated on screen right in front of your eyes. And with no crashes!
Ah, I know what I’ll be wishing for once I get that genie lamp. 😉
Oh yearh! get it to work! Please, please, please, please! 😛 I have always bin a fan of Verse. (plus, 3dmax, Maya ect. doesent have the feature)
heh, well, believe me, we’d like to see it work too (and it does) but the blender verse build still isn’t ready for primetime as it were.
I’m glad we built it and it should lead to some fun times at the studio, but I think for now it’s better not to rely on it for production files.
Hi,
yes, It is true. Blender and Verse are not ready for production now, but it is nice to see people still trying to use Verse and Blender :-). … News like this makes me very motivated to redesign and reimplement Verse protocol (look at my website) :-). Yes, Verse is not dead and I’m just working at ACK/NAK command history now :-).
Jiri, nice to hear you are still interested in the project.
For a layman, what is the benefit of ACK/NAK command history?
ACK and NAK commands are low level commands responsible for reliability of Verse protocol.