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)

Well, first of all, I’m gonna to introduce my self: I’m Pablo Lizardo from Argentina, to be more accurate I’m from here! sooo far away!! As Fateh and Bassam told in the latest post, I was accepted as intern to “work” for the next 3 months in this awesome project called “Tube”

I came just six days ago, so all is new for me, luckily all the people in the team and at the hampshire college are great and really kind. So there wasn’t problems with the adaptation time. Before I start talking about the project, I want to make a special mention to Bassam, Fateh and Jarred who give me all I need, and are always asking if there’s all going right!

Well, do I’ve mentioned that the town/city (Northampton, MA) is really beautifull? i think not! All the buildings and houses are like the movies

Another little thing to mention is that all has a lot of patience with me , because my english is really bad XD, I guess that get laughs at my back! But i think that i’m learning a lot, so i think that in … 3 months I’ll be ready to communicate with english people

Lets talk about important things! The food is really strange, I miss the argentinean food! but I must adapt to this new forms of eat! I feel lucky because I came with Yerba Mate.

From the first day I start to work in the Nerdodrome,It’s a very nice place where a lot of cool things happen!, There’s also a project called Caldera which is produced in the same place, fortunately here we have a lot of new computers to do all the work together without disturb to anybody.

In the project, I’m mostly dedicated to draw some boards for the animatic. So I’m doing a lot of 2d stuff, sometimes i have things to do in 3d but not too much. I don’t have problem with that because I love to draw and make sketches!

Here’s some images that I did in this few days. Keep on touch for more blog updates!

- Pablo

Hi

I have had little time to make my early template model for the Gilgamesh character. This is a template model that I will be using to finalize her. At this point I have not pushed the features much since I am mainly worried about the general feeling and the topology of the model. We will probably create multiple versions of her to test out different styles that is why it is very important that our template model is extensible. At this point the model needs some anatomical corrections, some fixes since it is an early progress model. But I am not worried about them much now.We will have some time to fix them later.

As you can see my base mesh does not have any topological concerns, things like edge loops are not pronounced in the model mainly because those kinds of concerns would limit your workflow and might get in the way especially during sculpting and testing out proportions. It is always best to start out loose and slowly build up along the way.  What is very important is the looseness and lightness of the model. Once we have a satisfying looks we can always find many different ways to transfer all the details  and structures over other models.  Blender offer variety of them.

Fabulous concept artist Redo/Superbad/Juan Angel has been cranking away at Gilgamesh drawings, working towards nailing the final character design. In response to his fresh batch, the consensus, as far as I understand it, goes something like,

\m/_  ( ^ _ ^ )  _\m/

Clearly, we are excited to be getting so close.

The character’s development is part of a funny secret history of the Tube project that Bassam left out of his introduction. If challenged on its revisionism, being enamored of post-modern hijinks, Bassam will claim that the alternate history is entirely framed by the word “somehow” of his first post. Like Shahrazad, I promise to divulge the story nested there — tomorrow, so to speak — but I will need visual aids, a chalkboard and some mad cartoon science.

3D animatics are very good for roughing out camera angles and motion, whereas 2D animatics help bring the focus back to the character (eyelines, facial expressions, emotion, interaction) much better. To get back to the feeling of the movie, I wanted to do 2D animatics and focus on what the character was doing, but still have a way of roughing out and testing shots.

Each shot was done as one or many drawings either on paper/tracing paper or in gimp, with the backgrounds seperated into layers, allowing for limited animation in the sequencer. For tricky shots I resorted to UV projection of sketches onto blocky objects in seperate blend files. Then I edited everything together in the sequence editor. For speed, I kept a bunch of the old 3D animatic shots around, since they didn’t have to be redone.
To rough out the shots in 3D I built a ‘blueprint set’- a sort of 3D proxy in blender, and a simple 3D block character. Then I linked these into a blend file with one scene and 2 screens: sequencer and 3D view. ctrl-arrowing allowed me to tab back and forth.

I wanted to place a new camera at each shot and use a camera changer script. Unfortunately, the existing camera switcher from project orange no longer worked, and I wrote a new one- at first it had very bad performance, until I realized that blender often skips frames while scrubbing: you can’t just look for a marker at the current frame, you have to look for the most recent marker before and up to the present. This worked really well, so I added a button in python that added a camera at the current viewport with the typed name and a marker at the current time. this allowed me to go back and forth quickly from set to storyboard, adding cameras for each shot.

In case you’d like them, here are the scripts: add_shot.py and camswitch.py

More shots from the storyboard/animatic have been added to the media gallery.

Tube had one false start before the team effort. Based on an early script I decided to go it alone, and started work on preproduction. For the animatic I used blender, mainly because I wanted to plan the shots in 3D. Some of those shots are still there in the current animatic, though the overall structure of the movie has mutated considerably. As you can see, the animatic was structured as a ‘typical’ blender project, with a lib folder containing linkable groups (in this case set/character/other simple proxies) and textures. All the shots were in one sequence directory with blends numbered for shots (the ‘crap’ in the blend title stands for ‘crapimatic’- a reminder to myself not to do something too polished at this early stage.
(continue reading…)