f r e e f a c

Hey folks, I’ll be in Thessoloniki, Greece, doing a teacher’s workshop for TOSMI, where I’ll be teaching in two blender courses this August. After that I’ll spend a few days exploring wherever chance and curiosity take me in Greece (I hear it’s a nice place )

If any blenderheads are in Greece and want to meet up, let me know, I’ll be there till the 9th of April.

hehe, now I’ve got your attention

I’ve been working with some talented folks doing preproduction on a new short movie project. (‘major’ might be a stretch). We’ve past script, storyboard, and multiple animatic stages, and now are just about done with concepts and ready to start production.

As we do so, we plan to blog our progress/technical details/scripts/ideas/desktop images/etc, and we would love people to read and comment, and  perhaps join the group and help.

Most of the people on the team are already known in the blender community, artists, coders, musicians and writers. Since this is an internet project, and we are playing it somewhat by ear, there is a chance people might jump on at different times. We’ll post an introduction to new members if they join up, but for now you can read the team page.

There’s a lot to tell about the project, but I can’t do it all in one blog post, so it will have to come out in installments on the production log. So, without further ado, let me introduce the tube film production blog.

When I made the Mancandy FAQ for the Blender Institute, we licensed the content as CC BY (the audio as CC BY NC) – mainly because the Blender Institute is committed to free/open code and media, and not in the business of making closed content. The value of something is enhanced (I think) every time someone uses it for a new and unexpected purpose.

Still, I thought that other than educational value, the video on the Mancandy FAQ was (intentionally) rather silly, and probably not versatile enough for lots of re-mix/re-use.

So you can imagine I was pretty suprised when I was contacted by Steve Lyon, from the noprofit accessibleevents about using some of the animation (under the terms of both the CC and CC NC licenses) for use in a video about Sexuality After Spinal Cord Injury (please note this is the work in progress video)

As a final addendum, Steve has informed me that he is working on another video about a boy with spina bifida; if anyone has time or content to help with the project, it would be wonderful to put together to show how the birth defect evolves – so anybody interested in helping out?

A little known fact about blender is that you can use it as a handy little flipbook/seamless animation player by launching it with blender -a filepath/filename (where the file can be an avi or the first in series of pngs /jpgs /etc) This is the same player launched when you click “anim” from the 3D interface.

Recently, Kursad – relatively new to blender and linux but not to 3D, asked me about:

1. a nice seamless player on linux (blender -a and djv) , and:
2. how to change framerate on the blender player.

I searched for docs, but didn’t find any, so I asked Ton on IRC for the source file for the player ( it’s playanim.c ), and I also looked at the output of blender –help. This is what I found out:

From blender –help:

• blender -a -f  fps fps-base filename.extension gives you a starting framerate – I think fps-base should be set to 1 unless you want ntsc where it is 30 and 1.001 (the default is 25 1)
• blender -a -p  x y gives you a coord for the lower left corner of the window
• blender -a -m prevents buffering (reads each image from disk- you probably don’t want this?)
• You can also use -s startframe and -e endframe

Looking through playanim.c gave me the following things you can press while the player is playing:

• a toggles skip/noskip frames
• p toggles pingpong mode (plays forward then back etc/
• shift / key displays info in the terminal
• / plays at 5 fps
• left arrow goes a frame back *
• shift left arrow goes to the first frame *
• right arrow goes a frame forward *
• shift right arrow goes to the last frame *
• down arrow goes back 10 frames *
• shift down arrow goes back 1 frame and prints info on the window *
• up arrow goes 10 frames forward *
• shift up arrow goes 1 frame forward and prints info on the window *
• dragging the left mouse across the frame scrubs the animation (the left is first frame, the right is the last frame ) *
• shift = key does something I don’t understand (presumably adds a pause frame) and prints pause: number of times you pressed it
• = key speeds it up
• shift – key works the reverse of shift = key
• - key slows it down
• numpad enter pauses (like return)
• not quite sure what numpad . does
• numpad 1 plays at 60 pfs
• numpad 2 plays at 50 fps
• numpad 3 plays at 30 fps
• shift numpad 4 plays 24 fps
• numpad 4 plays 25 fps
• numpad 5 plays 20 fps
• numpad 6 plays 15 fps
• numpad 7 plays 12 fps
• numpad 8 plays 10 fps
• numpad 9 plays 6 fps
• numpad + zooms in
• numpad - zooms out
• esc quits

Another nice option is djv (  http://djv.sourceforge.net )

* these options pause the player in addition to their stated effect

The blog is back!

Sorry for the long hiatus- we just switched hosts in anticipation of uploading much more content, and the backup / restore / configure cycle just took a bit longer than we thought. great new things coming soon!

Well, somehow I managed to make this a page and not a post when I wrote it, and just noticed… so here it is again:

quick blog from a (wirelessly connected!) train from amsterdam.
in bug 17902 (which he fixed) ton made some quick tips about making raytracing less slow- mostly common sense, but I thought I’d capture them here in case they don’t get noticed on the bugtracker:
” Tips for using Blender Octree well:

• exclude anything from being “traceable” if it doesn’t *cast* shadow (it will receive) like floors
• make sure the bounding box of the total environment is small as possible (you had a curve lying around far away in bottom)
• use larger octree resolutions on bigger scenes.”

Probably old information, but it is rather helpful, so worth repeating.

This version of Mancandy is for use (as the versioning suggests) for the upcoming blender 2.48. from now on, I’m going to keep mancandy versioning aligned with blender versioning to make it easy to answer which version with which.

Changes from 2.0:

• (compatibility) Bones thighbend.L/R, calfbend.L/R, forearmbender.L/R, bicepbender.L/R,Neckbend and any other constraints with local/local space have the offset button checked. This fixes problems with forward cycling introduced with constraint refactor in blender 2.46 (this is really just a workaround, my hope is that offset bone and constraints will play nicer in future blender versions)
• (compatibility) Action constraints, e.g. on eyebase.L,jawfan and jaw, have had their values changed to the “right” target rotation min/max. Previous blender versions required inputing incorrect numbers for correct behavior, when this was fixed (again in 2.46) action constraints on the mouth and eyes broke, resulting in a lopsided expression. This should now work again.
• (new feature) Bone groups introduced: This is rather hackish, done just as an example, but there is now a “left”, “right”, “torso”, “mouth”, “cheeks”, “eyes” and “benders” colored bone groups, to allow a bit better 3D view and action editor organization. This just an example, it’s trivial to add new groups, change the colors, etc. Have fun!
• (new feature) Bone Wire toggle activated on controls: it is no longer neccessary to change the proxy armature draw mode to “Wire” in scene files; the bones will automatically display as wireframes.
• (new feature) Group Layer visiblity: the Mancandy Group Layers are only visible in layer 2; this means that a- linked mancandy only shows the mesh, and b- I could unhide everything in the library file. Now people wishing to use mancandy without linking won’t have a “where did the armature go” moment, and people wishing to link will still only see the mesh (and the proxy armature when they add it)
• (fix) Made everything selectable again in the library file: making empties/curves/etc unselectable proved to be more trouble than it was worth, causing many trips to the outliner.
• (new feature) IK constraint improvements: deleted kneerotIK.L/R, armrot.L/R and the rotational IK constraints on thigh and upper-arm bones, instead using pole vector on the arm and leg IKs, with new bones as targets: elbowIK.L/R, kneeIK.L/R . This is better behaved, and allows more posing flexibility. Note this causes a slight need to tweak old actions, as the knee and elbow positions might need fixing.
• (new feature) IK/FK switching improvments: removed MCdriven etc actions from the library file (it is no longer needed) and the objects IK_FK.L/R IK_FKbase.L/R. IK/FK switching now uses the bones IKFK.L/R which are parented to bone IKFK_parent (so you can place the controls where you want them). In brief, the controls drive copy rotation constraints (not IK constraints) on toparm.R/L, lowarm.R/L and hand.R/L to a new chain in Armature layer 12 toparmIK.R/L, lowarmIK.R/L, and handIK.R/L. you no longer need to fiddle with special actions to do IK/FK switching, and all your animation will be contained in the same action.
• (fix) Protected all bone layers, not just the visible ones.
• (didn’t fix) slight misalignment of foot.L/R and of the roll of knee_stretch.R; you can fix it in your own downloaded versions, but changing this would break too severely many walks.
• (cleanup) Unused actions (and their IPOblocks) such as MCdriven, MCdriven.001, Action.001, etc have been removed from the file.

Mancandy 2.48 should be the last version to go with the blender 2.4 series. Next version of mancandy will be for versions 2.50, and incompatible with older rigs (I can finally fix those misalignment problems) but hopefully, much much better.

Please test! other than the noted differences (the elbow and knee rotation controls, and the IK/FK switching, this version should work fine on old actions), and for sure should have no problems in new files, so long as you are using blender 2.48 (any of the rc versions will work for now)

Oh yeah, a download (mancandy 2.48! ) link.

Edit: since blender 2.48 got released, and I didn’t find any bugs (at least no new ones), I’ve decided that this is mancandy_2.48 official; as a result, I’ve renamed the download link,but if you already got 2.48_rc1 you don’t need to download; it’s the same file.

Some nice people invited me to give a blender demo for the software freedom day event in Boston. Here are the details as I know them right now:

Date/time: Sept 20th, 11:30 to 12:20

Location: encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Ave, 5th floor, Boston, MA 02111
http://www.encuentro5.org/

Topic/contents: A general intro to blender (no advanced animation or rigging demo), with a bit of blender history and such thrown in at the end.

So, if you’re in the general area, come on down! There should be a lot of interesting talks/demos/etc at the event, and all us blenderheads (and anyone else) can always do a mini blender geekout session after or during.

This week’s post brought to you courtesy of the folks at Spark Digital Entertainment, the letter “R” and the color purple.