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.