Missing in current builds of blender 2.5 is the venerable ctrl-c ‘Copy Attributes’ menu, that copies attributes from active to selected objects (or bones in pose mode). Partially because I miss the functionality, and partially to start learning the new (awesome!) py api, I took some time to try bringing the menu back, both for pose mode and edit mode. The result can be seen here:

It was remarkably simple to add, just a couple of operators (one for the object mode, one for the pose mode) and a couple of menus to call the operator with the right option. I’m sure a bit more familiarity with the API could result in even less code for this. You can download the script here , save it in your scripts folder, then make the following changes to your keymap:
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Earlier this week Jarred escaped departed for his hometown in South Africa for winter break. He’ll be sorely missed by all of us in the drome, both tube and caldera team. The good news is we expect him back in mid-January, and we have located a suitably sized grindstone.

And another one’s down!

I mentioned we were contemplating a switch to 2.5 ( we are experimentally using 2.5 right now with minor ‘dips’ back in 2.49) in a previous post. We thought it would be fun to show some of our ‘versus’ tests until we stick with one or the other. First up: Bump mapping. We used the exact same .blend file in both versions, no cheating.

The .blend is here

Genesis
Having volunteered to organize the submissions and jury selection for the Suzanne Awards at the 2009 Blender conference, I felt that the awards would be ‘naked’ without at least a short intro animation and some interstitial title holders between the entries. This had to wait though, since in addition to Tube I had to finish a job for a client. My initial concept was to do a short intro of paning shots against an industrial background, and then do a series of short 10 second shots for the interstitials, each one ‘discovering’ an unlikely critter or group of creatures living in between the wires, tubes and mechanisms.

Concepts
Fast forward to two weeks before the conference- I’ve muddled through accepting submissions, arranging them, and getting them to the judges- albiet a little late. The judges are still not ready to vote, but I’ve finally got the free time to make and direct the intro. To this purpose I recruited three people from the tube team, Kursad Karatas (modelling/animation/concept) ,Jarred De Beer (Modelling/Texturing) and of course Jan Morgenstern (music composition and sound). I appropriated some of the props from tube and created a new project svn, with a slightly nasty directory layout intended to work with farmerjoe if needed. Our concept ‘techno-mess set with critters’ was an ok starting point. Kursad found some nice reference from 12 monkeys, and the idea of using screens with actual video on them was born. The appeal here was that the video would be faster to get into shots than animated critters, and that it could provide narrative/motion interest to otherwise static shots.
We set out at a relatively sane pace, getting elements in, honing the concept, slowly assembling the shots. Our initial concept (without the TVs) called for lots of little critters living in the technomess, revealed in some sort of nature-show documentary style. I made some concepts that focused on keeping the animations really simple (plant inspired critters) and Kursad added a few color/animalistic concepts to the mix. We worked in mypaint, using mypaint’s ‘infinite canvas’ feature to add and add, resulting in a document that was over 7k pixels wide. Here’s some scaled and cut up images from the concept document:

Before laying out the shots, I went (again in mypaint) and made some really rough sketches to get a basic concept/storyboard going. The idea here was to create a rough skeleton so I could communicate to the rest of the team where the whole thing was headed. I also wanted Jan to have something to look at to help him plan the soundscape, since he was going to have very little time to compose the music for the piece.

Building Assets
After the intial creature concepts were made and we came up with the idea of the televisions, we decided to keep blender-y things the TV screens. The idea was to have a progression: closeups of eyes (seeing), then hands (doing), hands on keyboards/mouses, blender screenshots, and finally clips from the movies themselves. For the interstitials, we would just have the title and creator of each movie on screen, with various critters on the set watching it, or just existing. Kursad, Jarred and I got down to brass tacks in blender, and we populated our SVN tree with sets, props, and creatures.

At this point our pace was still fairly sane, and as the asset-bucket filled up, we could specialize: Jarred focused on texturing the sets, Kursad went from modelling to animation, and after modelling I spent time on rigging and building the shots.
A fun aspect of this project was the 2D assets. Initially I would stalk and corner people I knew into being camera subjects, but then I asked one of the animators who haunts the ‘drome if she would borrow my camera and do more. She got me about 3 times the amount of footage I needed in one night.

The problem with the video was that it was too clean and friendly, not the nasty grungy look I wanted for the movie. We fixed that by creating a comp in blender and ladling in noise, grunge, vignette, horrible color distortion, lens distortion, chromatic abberation.. and degradation via blurring and sharpening.

Needless to say, having a bunch of video textures in our svn quickly made it huge, and I still had the headache of how to add a different image to each screen in a controlable, linkable way.

The Final Countdown
All this work took us to two days before the conference, the day I was supposed to get on a plane and go to Amsterdam. I simplified the intro down to just four shots, and decided we would make only one interstitial video, and only vary the text for each film. Before I left, we all updated our SVN folders, and I told Kursad and Jarred to only touch shots one and three, while I would work on shot seven and eight (numbering correct). That way, I could work on my shots during the flight and not clobber anyone else’s work. Between airport stays and having two batteries on the flight, I managed to get about eight hours of work in on the flight over, a record for me. I solved the problem of getting the video on the screens; all the screens are the same, and I used a combination of object ID, UV distortion node, and renderlayers to map a different image to each screen.
The grungifying and embedding of the real videos inspired using the tv’s as a device to transition the shots; instead of dissolving from pan to pan, I would go ‘through’ the TV image. In addition, I could grungify the 3D work as well, and get some of the blenderwork ‘on tv’ in addition to the video.
After arrival in Amsterdam I went to the Blender Institute where I was joined by Pablo Vasquez (venomgfx). He volunteered to help, and we spent a day and (almost) sleepless night finishing up the comps, getting all the elements into the shots, rendering, adding titles, etc. Somewhere in there Pablo managed to put together the interstitial shot.
In the meantime, Jan lost most of his harddisk in a backup-gone-wrong incident, and we thought that this would be an excersize in silent film. Luckily, he used a backup tool, spent 20 hours cursing, and actually got back his data. I sent him half rendered/half OGL versions of the teaser, and he got us back a music track just one day before the festival.
In the final few hours we finished up our renders, clumsilly comped over render errors we had no time to fix, spit out all the different text interstitials, and assembled all the movies and the intro into a giant playlist. I quickly shoved my laptop in my bag, and made my was as fast as I could from the institute to the conference. I arrived exactly two minutes before the festival schedule, and I believe we started the movie about 10 minutes late.

Liftoff!
So, here’s the video that played at the festival. I’ve spliced together the intro, one of the interstitials, and the final credits screen. It would be pretty cool if we could find a way (vimeo? youtube?) to make a playlist of the entire show. If anyone has a suggestion as to how, let me know in the comments. In the meantime, enjoy the video:

AfterGripes
We didn’t have time to render at HD, and didn’t have time to include many assets and narrative elements that were intended to make the viewing a little more layered and satisfying. Kursad made quite a few more animations than were shown, and there were even critters made by Kursad, myself, and Chris Webber that never made it into rigging and animation; one of the critters was supposed to be riding the camera in the scene, and get viewed over close-circuit TV. In addition, some comping and rendering errors crept in that we didn’t have time to fully fix.
Nonetheless, I’m pretty happy with how far we got in such a short time, and the cutting, though painful, was needed to get the thing done in time for the conference. Next time we’ll take one more week

I’m in the middle of considering whether switching tube to 2.5 is a good idea or a terrible one; on the one hand, there are many goodies there that would make our lives much, much easier, and more planned on the durian timeline; tops on my list are the new animation system, impoved python api, and the planned improvments to the library/linking/proxies system, and later down the line, all the render improvements and speedups.

On the other hand, Blender 2.5 simply isn’t ready at this point in time for a production this size; too many things aren’t done (even in the above list) and even some 2.49 stuff still isn’t ported. In addition, there are crashes, hangs, segfaults, you name it… not a safe thing at all. In order to make this transition make sense, we have to commit to a ‘durian +1′ schedule: that is: take Durian’s schedule and add one month.
Benefits of this is I really don’t have much scheduling to do! i’d take advantage of Ton’s excellent organizational abilities, in addition to his (and the rest of the team’s) new code. Downside is that Durian is a bigger project, and I don’t think I need the entire production time of Durian to finish tube… we’ll see.

To make things even harder, Aligorith (Joshua) has just added a great new feature on the durian wishlist.. spline IK.. making it even more tempting.

Jamal and I have made builds on our machines with the new spline IK in them. Be aware that Jamal switched his 2.5 build to use the new cocoa port to 64 bit, so he’s making (lets see if I get it right) a universal binary which will use 64 bits on 64 bit machines. Both are available in the downloads section of this site.

Just a quick reminder to fellow blenderheads that the deadline is loooooming, check the announcement here . I’ve been helping out organize the submissions, so I thought it would be a nice reminder to the readers here to send their potential award winning shorts lickety-split.

We made an SVN repo for Rigamarule, to track changes and invite outside contribution and eyeballs.

You can find the repo at: http://projects.freefac.org/rigamarule/

to check it out:

svn co http://projects.freefac.org/rigamarule

Current plan is as follows:

- small fixes for rescaning marulez.py, resetting stretch-to bones rest length, and example .blend templates.

- better template error handling

- new rules based on tube needs

- port to 2.5

- better interactivity

- add support for external deformer/rig objects.

I’m also inviting external contribution, so if you’re interested in the project let me know and I’ll give you an SVN account.

Even though tube is not a ‘traditional’ narrative, there are elements of narrative in it – themes, structure, character, etc.
It’s of a high importance that everything comes through and works; that the audience can care about the character, that the themes are not so deeply buried that they are completely opaque, and that the flow of events is graspable.

The current animatic suggests to me that viewers unfamiliar with the epic tube is based on are going to be too challenged to piece together the narrative structure, and might end up feeling left out. Having such an epic work to base on allowed us to make great visual ‘flights of fancy’ unfettered by a traditional stucture, but I think that we must do both- have a great visual piece and still engage ‘cold’ viewers in the character and theme.

The good news is that this is the best time to do story changes: production has not begun yet and changes are practically free (they will become increasingly more expensive once we get into production). So now is the time to get radical. Nothing is sacred. Everything is permitted.

I’m chuffed to announce the beginning of fateh’s traditional ‘Birthweek’ celebrations.. There will festivities, merriments, sweetmeats and the traditional “defenestration of the salmon” in honor of the glorious occasion. It is said that on the day of her birth, miracles happened: the blind became sighted, new stars appeared in the heavens and processed cheese turned to the finest cheddar.
So happy birthday, and thanks for saving the story (among other things)