Welcome riggers!

Before going on to the final character rig, I found it prudent to do a few small tests. I’m planning on doing a layered approach to the face rig, with some basic deformer based (armature/latice/curve/meshdeform/etc) controls for major motions on the ‘bottom’ layer, and more specific facial expressions on top. The latter will probably be blend shapes, but I haven’t decided completely yet.

For the jaw, I wanted the ability to rotate the jaw freely (as well as push it back and forth) where rotating down results in opening the mouth/lips, and rotating up results in squashing the lips/face, no interpenetration. I mulled a few ideas, but finally decided on combining an armature deform (this could get a replacement in the final rig) to open the jaw, and a lattice deform to squash it, blending between the two based on the jaw angle.

The final result is a bit more complicated than that; I couldn’t find an easy way to blend modifier influences, so I settled for having both modifiers always on, but blending the influence of the bones that do the deformation based on the angle of the jaw. There is a slight risk here: two non-multimodifiers in the stack on top of each other might look bad splitting the deform, but the result in this test wasn’t too bad.

I present you with a quick video capture of the result:

Download link

Keep in mind this is just a test! for a real rig, a lot of refinement would be needed to create pleasing deformations; more complex rigging than just the jaw and head for deformation, more constraints, better weight painting, more careful placement and design for the bulge lattice, correction shapes, etc. However, for a test, this is showing some promise- though I would be more comfortable if I could use multimodifiers and blend the influence of the modifiers directly.

I’ll post more tests as I go along. If anyone is remotely interested in the .blend file for such a simple thing, let me know, I’ll be happy to upload it.

Last note: If you are on a mac and cannot view the video, download XiphQT. If you are using Windows download the Ogg codecs for windows . Firefox, Opera and chrome users should be able to view the video directly in the browser (as should Safari users with XiphQT installed). If it doesn’t work, just use the download link instead.

On Thursday, March 25th at 5:30 we’ll give a presentation at the Hampshire GLUG (GNU Linux User Group) in the East Lecture Hall on campus. We’ll screen the teaser and Elephants Dream, talk about Open Movie projects, about the CG Incubator Space and Tube. I plan on showing images and video from the production (including sikrit unreleased stuff!!!! )

Being me, I’ll probably end up spending some or most of the time showing some Blender 2.5 goodies, especially where they affect our production- so those interested in using Blender for their own work, or users of older versions who haven’t made the switch and want a first time look might enjoy.

If you live close by, please come, the event is open to all (not just members of the glug) and we even have free food, provided by Fresh Side Cafe in Amherst.

So, we’re going to the Libre Planet meeting this weekend in Boston  (we being Bassam, Fateh, Pablo and Jarred.) Mainly we’ll be attending talks, working on Tube at the hackfest, helping out with the event, meeting people, catching up with friends at the event and in town, etc. We’ll see at least one regular of our irc channel in person for the first time (hey chris!) If you’re reading this, and going to the event, come say hi

What we’ll likely be working on: Rigging and scripting rigs in Blender 2.5, Concepts in Gimp, Animatic in Gimp and Blender.

Oh and this is Pablo and Jarred’s first visit to Boston/Cambridge. Any tips? Things we shouldn’t miss?

Today was the first day of the season that we cycled into the studio. It’s magnificent taking the bike path during Spring and Summer, as the area is covered in forests and farmlands, and is a very inspiring way to start the day. Well energized, we’re back at boarding for myself and Pablo, while Bassam continues with the animatic and Fateh works on the script and schedule. We leave you with some photos of the cycling route during the Summer.

Official website: http://www.inkscape.org

The main issue with Inkscape is the ugly theme that came by default. There’s no too much tweaks needed for Inkscape but at least we can get almost the same look and feel of gimp — a dark and tiny theme which is Very Fine and don’t make you feel uncomfortable to use it on OSX. As in the Gimp post, all these things also work in Linux and Windows so maybe you should give a try to these kind of hacks!

Ugly, big and too light gtk theme:

Well, as I said recently, you cannot install a theme in Inkscape, But if you do the following you can get a nice and dark theme! Get this file -> Clearlooks-Quicksilver-OSX and unzip it, into a new folder called themes, into the Inkscape App folder:

OSX: /Applications/inkscape.App/Contents/Resources/themes/

(continue reading…)

At the Bit Films blog, our compadre Chris Perry has posted multi-stage details of his cool project to create a Digital Cinema Package for The Incident at Tower 37.

DCP is the digital cinema distribution format, delivered via hard drives which plug directly into theater projectors. Realizing that “we’re really just talking about some fancy conversions to a non-proprietary format,” rather than resorting to expensive commercial solutions, Chris set out to mine the resources free/libre software offers the independent filmmaker.

Bassam’s small contribution was to cry “FFmpeg!” when Chris wished, “If only there was a tool to automatically output PNGs from a QuickTime movie…”

Check out the climax and how-to, or head to the beginning for Making a DCP, Part 1.

Official web: http://www.gimp.org
Unofficial buils for OSX: http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/Download.html

The main issue with Gimp is related with the gtk port which even when it’s very good, still has somethings in development that you have to solve manually. For Example:

Ugly, big and too light gtk theme:

How to solve it? Get this file -> ProApp_Small.tar and unzip it into your personal gimp folder:

OSX: /Users/……/Library/Application Support/Gimp/Themes/
UNIX: /home/……/.gimp-2.x/themes/
WIN: C:\Documents and Settings\……\.gimp-2.x\themes\

This theme came as default in the Gimp Build for OSX, but it has been modified by me to get tiny icons, less space between the elements, less padding, less margin and more tweaks.

If you want to install the theme for all the users just unzip the file into:

OSX: /Applications/Gimp.App/Contents/Resources/share/gimp/2.0/themes/
UNIX: /usr/share/gimp/2.x/themes/
WIN: C:\Program Files\gimp-2.x\bin\share\gimp\2.0\themes\

(continue reading…)

Bassam’s had his nose stuck in the sequence editor, building up and churning out the animatic. He just got his first beach ball on the mac. As we feed him .XCF boards, he opens them up and churns out .PNG’s from the layers. Some are static shots, others require a few animated frames. The .XCF’s are unsequenced and go into the ‘unsequenced’ folder, which has a child folder ‘pngs’ for the static frames, and a subsequent child folder ‘animated’ for the animated frames. The .PNG’s are being used as image strips in the video sequence editor. The use of the file browser as a library to preview and drag the images in is fantastic.

An issue came in with organising the files. As the edit takes shape, more and more images and strips need to be renamed to slot into order with the sequence. So I broke my face on a script to do that, which most people could write in their sleep. The script draws the list of .XCF’s in the properties of the sequence editor and allows you to easily rename them. It’ll then rename all the related .PNG’s in the subsequent folders and re-link them to the image strips.

You may notice that the filename property of an image sequence is currently locked. Martin Poirier was crucial in pointing the following out:

It’s already somewhat possible to edit sequence data through the RNA api, like this for example:
———-
import bpy

sce = bpy.context.scene
nle = sce.sequence_editor
seq = nle.sequences["Image"]

seq.directory = “/home/theeth/bf-blender/stuff/output_green/”

seq.elements[0].filename = “0050.png”
———-

The last line, however, will only work if a small code change is applied:
Commenting out line 403 ( RNA_def_property_clear_flag(prop, PROP_EDITABLE); ) in source/blender/makesrna/intern/rna_sequencer.c

This should be enough to remap an existing sequence.

DISCLAIMER:
The script is probably not useful to anyone else, and is not very friendly as i’m terrible at scripting. However, if anyone wants to learn from it they’re welcome.

A reporter for the ‘Sophian’, Smith college’s local newspaper, came in to interview Bassam, Fateh, and Chris Perry on the incubator program. It gives a little insight onto how things operate here and touches on the use of FOSS for Tube and Perry’s considerations for software in teaching.

The article can be found here. You’ll notice Pablo in the picture, who was the cause of many e-mail responses.

A few errors to note: Chris Perry wasn’t an animator but a TD at Pixar, Fateh isn’t an employee but a producer and writer.

While Bassam’s been editing the animatic in the sequence editor, we’ve been feeding him with boards and exploring a little with some concepts. A few days ago Pablo did some great designs for the train, and lately we’ve been doing some for the station.

Edited: Added the train concepts.

In the process of editing we found troublesome bug in the sequence editor where animation data gets linked to newly added sequences – this seems to be connected to old deleted strips. In an attempt to avoid this he’s been using a python script I wrote ( based on a suggestion by Colin Levy) that renames all strips with new unique names. This is a stopgap until we report the bug…

sequences rename script.py
(don’t worry, we’ll submit a bug report- it took us a while to figure out exactly what was triggering the bug, but we think we can make it repeatable now)