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.

The Tube Project’s Team wants to share with the community an video that show how is the life at the Nerdodrome and at Northampton. We are very happy working here toghether and we’re sure that you will figured that out after seeing the video!
So, that’s it! Check the video and make a comment!

We had a issue with the soundtrack of the video, in the first version I put a song without taking care about the copyright and license of it. So Fateh advice me that I should try to look for copyleft music on the internet, and I must say that it’s wasn’t an easy task!, but in the way to find the song we found a lot of sites and resources related to free music or copyleft music.
Here’s a few links that we want share!:
Jamendo
musicleft.net
nomag
sounds, loops, effects and more:
freesound.org
And again, thanks to The Art Punk Band to share the song that we use in the video.

Also we must say that all the video was edited in the blender 2.5 sequence editor.

Seems to be problems with Live Streaming so, here’s the link to download the video in .ogg format (Ogg/Theora). Only 4.2mb.
behind_the_chaos

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

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:
(continue reading…)

For some the calendar is based on the sun; for some, the moon. For we of the Tube project, the calendar is loosely tethered to the inscrutable workings of the Hampshire College academic year. Hosted as we are by its Computer Graphics Incubator Space, the project has fallen under the influence of local rhythms. In the crunch to get ready for the ambitious schedule on which we embark with the start of this new term, the blog has fallen a bit quiet — so there is a backlog of cool developments to relate!

Tube is in part an experiment in distributed collaboration, with a team spread all over the globe, but we also have a great and growing cluster of people collected at the “drome”. Look out for numerous additions to the ‘team’ page, including several satisfying adjustments to the chromosomal divide. We have also been very pleased to welcome Jarred de Beer back from South Africa for a second stint, upgraded from Intern 3D Generalist to Senior Vice Volunteer. And in more good news, yesterday his travel papers came through, so Pablo Lizardo joins us next week from Argentina!

Before things really heat up around here, Bassam and I took a little holiday to visit family in the UAE. On the way back, a long layover in Amsterdam allowed us to drop in at the Blender Institute where the Durian open movie is underway.

Ton kindly made us coffee and invited us to Durian’s morning meeting. They are hard into the grind, and we wish our brave compadres all the best with their fantastical enterprise!

Updates about the exciting progress of our own work will follow soon, stay tuned.

Hi,

I have created another small free models pack. They are under CC licence again. You can use them in your personal, commercial projects without worrying about any fees. For more details and possible restrictions please check out the included .txt files. The only main restriction on these models is that you cannot sell these models under yoruname or someone else`s name.

Here is a supposedly funny render that depicts the content.

Here is a turntable

Free Female and CellPhone Model (Blender scene) from freeartsculture_kursad on Vimeo.

For more details you can check out my sharing page.
http://share.plecxus.com

The girl model
http://shup.com/Shup/250527/Femail_Share.zip

The old clunky cell phone model

http://shup.com/Shup/250528/t300.zip

I was pretty excited about this, so I had to post the new version of 2.5. It now has a splash screen with a cool picture of Sintel from Project Durian. Go check it out for yourself with the new version.

Also: I was just informed that emulate numpad is back in the latest revision for all you notebook users (myself included).