We’ll miss you dearly my friend.

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.

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)

While Bassam’s been away we’ve been playing with concepts for one of the sequences in the movie. It’s been quite entertaining. Hmmm. The idea is to flesh it all out for storyboarding so we might move quicker into production. It’ll be a nice challenge.

Have we mentioned there’s Pun club on Thursdays at noon? We’ve also been doing improv acting on Wednesday nights.

Pablo did the nice colourful ones.

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*

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.

Echoing what Jamal said, this is probably the most exciting thing i’ve ever done. I’m highly impressed by Bassam’s use of Blender, and seeing that he can be distracted so easily we get to nag him on it all day long! What i’ve found most respectable, is his unbiased knowledge of 3d apps in general. He’ll compare on a deep level, advantages and disadvantages of Blender with respect to a multitude of 3d applications. This gives us a true-to-heart placement of Blender in the 3d industry, which is very relieving.

Jamal and I were thinking of using this perspective to address those on a similar level to us. So we can all get a practical viewpoint on Blender for those intending to make a living in the CG industry. Personally, I had been bitten by the Blender bug, and it resulted in studying animation. The predominant applications used during this study period was Maya and After Effects. We were paying a lot of money for the course, and so time was dedicated to learning as much as possible in those programs, which I believe was a very good thing. Nearing the end, when we were starting to look out for jobs, however, it created a ton of anxiety. How was one to successfully marry a passion for Blender with their livelihood in 3d? I didn’t have an approach to solving this. There were few studios who had Blender, and fewer you could learn from.

In steps financial crisis, along with graduation. Now we have serious anxiety. Even though we’re applying to 3d studios, there just isn’t any work. There was some relief here, I wasn’t the only one not finding work. The entire class couldn’t find work. Maybe this is a good opportunity to freelance in Blender? We don’t have experience yet, but at least it would be legal. In follows Tube, and i’ve ended up here, sitting next to Bassam (HOW cool is that!), being exposed to Blender in just such an environment.

It’s like a living dream. One through which we can share in some experience of hope. For other ‘interns’ in the same precarious boat, we’d like to take notes on what we learn here with Bassam. In order that we can all learn from them.