GADE

The time has come for us to adopt a better system for workflow and asset management, and to put it all together into a "virtual studio" system. We want to do that entirely with open-source software, and integrate it well with Blender, Synfig, and the other pipeline tools we use. In this video, I outline the problem and present a plan of the desired solution. Actually implementing it will be the subject of a follow-up video later on.

Three-camera animation test. Footage was rendered in Blender from three camera views of the same animated motion. The footage was spaced-out to allow for process editing effects (dissolves). The final edit was completed in Kdenlive, by overlapping the footage from each shot.

The Blender file contains 5 scenes:

Papagayo is a tool we are using to automate the process of generating lipsync movements to match voice actors. This is a line from our "Lunatics!" pilot, "No Children in Space" as it plays in Papagayo with our own "Hiromi" avatar to demonstrate the sync.

A 23-minute introduction to the Lunatics! Project, emphasizing the project team, size, history, and comparisons to other free-culture / open-source animation projects. Also examines the Non-Photorealistic (NPR) style ("toon-shading and ink") that is used in the production, and the aesthetic and pragmatic reasons for choosing it.

[NOTE (2022): This was produced after-the-fact, using my presentation slides, since we didn't get a good recording of the event]

Acte V - Histoires de virus

Oh mais c’est la dernière émission d’Histoires de virus ! Tant de choses se sont passées en 3 mois !

La jeune Charlotte est retournée au collège avec la sensation d’avoir fait un saut dans le temps.

S O U T E N I R

R E S S O U R C E S

S U I V R E

PeerTube : https://bit.ly/3f5qX1b

T I M E C O D E S

03:17 : Robert, Côte d’Azur, D10

09:00 : Alice, Rennes, D12

#témoignages

Updated fundraising trailer for "Lunatics!" Pilot Project (support us on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/lunatics, more project info at http://lunatics.tv ). Also our 2015 submission to the Blender Conference Suzanne Awards competition in the "Shorts" category.

The trailer summarizes the story from the pilot episode, "No Children in Space" in which the youngest space colonist, seven-year old Georgiana Lerner travels with her mother to join the newly-established first permanent colony on the Moon. The story of this episode is told from Georgiana's point-of-view, as a "hard-SF fairytale", reflecting her youth, but as through children's ears, we overhear the adult story required to get her there. We chose to start with a child's point of view, because we must start from the element of wonder before we engage with the complexity of reality.

Trailer primarily for project fundraising for "Lunatics!" Open Movie Project by Anansi Spaceworks, featuring finished or nearly-finished animation.

Our toolchain is entirely free software, with Blender being the most essential element (and used for all 3D work). Final compositing, editing, and titling was done in Kdenlive. Our 2D art tools include Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, and MyPaint. Some animated textures for displays were created with Synfig.

Credits for this Trailer:

Screenplay by Rosalyn Hunter and Terry Hancock.

VOICES (Appearing in Preview):

MODELS:

MUSIC:

SOUND EFFECTS:

All Project Source Assets (including 3D models, textures, sound effects, and music) are or will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. See http://wp.lunatics.tv/?page_id=12 for production resources.

This is a test of some concepts for animating Rob Lerner for our title sequence. I'm not 100% happy with any of these, but there's some interesting effects.

The "wiggle" effect is created by using two separate animated Freestyle settings and switching between them in the Blender compositor by using a Time input node and a Modulo math filter node.

The effects are standard Freestyle geometry modifiers: Backbone Stretcher, Sinus Displacement, and Spatial Noise, and then toning down the amplitude of the effects.

Finally, there's another alternative, which is to go back to the concept art portrait, but use Synfig to animate the shot.

Collaboration on programming projects has been dominated since the 1970s by "merge-based" version control, which allows multiple contributors to work on a project together without stepping on each others toes. This can be generalized to other "list ordered" data, but handling "graph structured" data like Blender files is not something we have free software tools for.

So artists are still stuck with "lock based" collaboration methods, where only one person can work on a file at a time, even if the edits they are making are cleanly separated. Merging edits requires a person to meticulously check and manually merge changes, which is a lot of extra work that shouldn't be necessary.

However, algorithms do exist (some of them rather recent) for doing this kind of work, and I think it's time we started turning those into a practical tool for collaboration on artistic works.

This is just one small piece of an infrastructure research and development project for the "Lunatics!" open animated series project. I'm going to be posting more of these videos over the next few months. Eventually they will be cut together into a longer project proposal. I'm not quite sure where this going in terms of the big picture, so I don't really know which part will be first in the proposal.

This is also my first "explainer" video using the Synfig 2D animation package. I will probably be making more use of this.

It's been over 7 years since my last "2-Minute 2-Torial", so it seems only right to bring it back for "Twos Day" -- Tuesday, 22-2-22 (ISO - or 2/22/22 or 22/2/22, if you prefer your dates American or European, respectively).

Transcript:

This is very useful in animation workflow, because we often want to use stand-in versions of shots, and then replace them, later.

In this shot, for example, I simply used a drawing and panned across it in Blender

I also wasn't sure exactly how long it should be. I can adjust that with the speed

Later, I went through several versions of the shot, as more and more elements were

These aren't just different shots. In Kdenlive, they are different kinds of shots:

The storyboard animatic may use the "Change Speed" tool to adjust the timing, or

The Open GL animatic previews are usually AVI video files, rendered directly from

And the final renders are usually a series of frames rendered to a lossless

Each of these is stored differently, and you can't simply reload the clip in the

But you can update them easily in a separate Kdenlive file.

Then you use that Kdenlive file AS the clip in the scene you are editing.

With proxy-workflow (which I'll explain in another video), this is just as fast as

It also makes it easy to use special effects, like limited framerates, as I used

The final edit file only sees video, through all of these steps, and it updates

A multiple-camera configuration allows animating a scene just once, and capturing the action with several cameras. Although Blender has a facility for switching cameras during rendering, it does not allow for any overlap for transitions (or to allow for creative changes in the editing phase).