Well, it’s been a hectic week here, going from nothing to something in no time has been fun. We’re still working till the last minute on a 40 second teaser (was planned for 30, but… ). It’s a bit of a challenge since we didn’t have anything textured, don’t even have concepts for some key parts of the movie, let alone models.. nevertheless we’ve pulled together an animatic with a few shots from the film, and are now rapidly animating, texturing, modelling, lighting, and comping.
Kursad volunteered to do quick textures for the cockroach- this is fast work and not up to his usual quality standards (but great work nonetheless). Kursad uses Modo and Zbrush quite a bit, as well as Blender- it could be an interesting side-effect of this work to create documentation about integrating Blender into other pipelines, in terms of import/export, applying modifiers and copying texture maps and weights.
The animatic was made this monday, and since then I’ve populated SVN with shots from the animatic, complete with basic camera layouts for detailing. Now it’s (just!) a matter of pushing things through to completion.
Jarred and I have spent some fun times walking around, examining the material properties of concrete and rusted metal, and snapping lots of texture-shots. He’s busy gimping and projection-painting away, making everything look generally awesome
Jamal is modelling details (wires, lights, signals, etc.), you’ll see his work in most shots of the animatic.
Gianmichelle is animating a nice character animation shot.
Thomas is getting together sfx for the soundtrack.
There’s still final animation, lighting, rendering, compositing, sound track and music to do, as well as the final edit… so back to work for me.

Rigamarule is a collection of scripts and templates that aims to be a rig-retargetting/ autorigging tool for Blender. It can be used in conjunction with or independently of Blender’s Etchaton bone sketching/retargetting tool.

Rigamarule works by applying scripted rules to bones’ edit positions/orientations (and other properties of bones, rigs and other objects in the future), thus constraining the armatures’ rest position to it’s geometry / joints. Rules can be added by riggers to extend the functionality of their templates, though rigamarule aims to ship with a fairly complete set of default rules that take into account most scenarios.

In its current incarnation rigamarule works only for single-armature rigs, and does not take into account action constraints or drivers. The first lack will be fixed by upgrading rigamarule in the future, the second can be remedied by adding appropriate rules.

You can see a preview movie of the scripts in action here.

Rigamarule is in use for the tube project (for which it was developed) and for the Richmond 48 Hour film Project.

I’ll be posting really soon a video tutorial that shows how to use the scripts with the included example .blend.

The download can be found here, or in the downloads section of this website.

Be sure to check the README file in the package, hopefully this can be a beginning for a collaboration between Blender riggers and python/ C developers to create a robust and versatile autorigging tool for blender.

Big thanks go to Martin Poirier (Theeth) for his ongoing technical assistance, code, and reviews.

We’ve been having a lot of lightning here recently – just a bike-ride nuisance, we thought, until one fateful morning in June. We entered the studio to the familiar yet oh-so-delicious smell of burnt electronics.
A power surge had quite selectively attacked one computer in the lab… you guessed it, mine. Our resident IT guru diagnosed it as ‘fried’ and he was absolutely right; the motherboard had basically detonated in one corner, and two capacitors had literally blown themselves off the board and ricocheted around in the case. Pictures:

The strangeness off it is, other than the motherboard, nothing else (CPU, Power supply, HD, RAM, etc.) was damaged… the thunderstorm/surge theory seems to be borne out by the fact that 4 or 5 machines went up in smoke in the same period of time, and it stopped with the installation of surge protectors everywhere. Still, I’m quite amazed that I’m sitting at pretty much (one motherboard swap later) the same machine, typing this post.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BASSAM!!!!!!

It was Bassam’s birthday today (22nd).
We love you man, thanks for all the great work and inspiration. It’s been and continues to be a fantastic adventure! we’ll certainly be partying you into the next few days

“Why was he born so beautiful,
Why was he born at allllll,
He’s no bloody use to anyyyyoonnnneee,
He’s no bloody use at allllllll!”

*pops the champagne*

As the project goes on, we’re putting links to various items in our blog; rigs, scripts, etc. This is only going to grow, and I don’t fancy the idea of them getting lost in a blog post somewhere on page 432… the obvious solution is to make a little download area to keep it all together.
Stay tuned for the end of this week, I’m looking to make a mini-release on the download page!
Oh.. The url for the download page is in the navigation bar (I hope) and just in case it isn’t: right here.

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.

We’ve been working on some fluid sims to try and achieve some interesting effects for the film.

Here are some of the results…

The technique for Mancandy is to use him as a control object. Deforming modifiers are applied above the fluid-sim modifier, it seems to work well. The fluid comes from a duplicated version of mancandy, in the pose from frame1, without any of the deformers of course. Mancandy had to be made manifold, as control objects will not work otherwise (Suzanne won’t work either in her default state). The control object doesn’t seem to like shape keys though, which are removed from mancandy. The AttractionForce Strength was set at 0.2, and animated to 0 from frame 88.

This is a test with Spheres animated in a funky way, they are sphere meshes under the same object, as it takes aaaaagggesss to bake anything with more than one control object, it seems.

This is similar to the above. The control object here is skinned to an armature, there is a bone using one of Bassam’s nifty magnet scripts.

This is slightly less interesting, it has a curve deformer on a mesh which is whipping around.

Here are some of the simple props we’ve been working on. There is a reason we have so many different styles of benches. One reason is that train stations that evolve over time accumulate many different styles of furniture and decorations. Hence we have four different bench styles so far and some other different style props. They have no materials yet, only some stand in colors.