This is a still-very-unfinished test animation of the "Soyuz Rollout" from "Prolog/No Children in Space", the pilot for "Lunatics!" ( http://lunatics.tv / http://www.patreon.com/lunatics ).

Testing parameter ranges and texture development for animated cloud effect used in the timelapse sequences in the "Lunatics!" pilot episode.

This is topical summary of my worklog screencasts for the entire process of creating the Sky Rig for the "timelapse" sequences in the "Lunatics!" pilot. This includes a lot of missteps, but doesn't include research or tutorial training time, although I had to do some of that.

Set to CC By licensed music by Kressof from the album "Turn". (No voiceover).

I plan to record an instructional screencast on how to use the rig and sky model.

SPOILERS!

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Sneak peek at about 5 minutes from the middle of our pilot episode. This combines two sequences with most of the character animation:

In the first, Hiromi and Georgiana tour the town of Baikonur in Western Kazakhstan, where the main Russian spaceport is located (the "Baikonur Cosmodrome").

In the second, there's a pre-flight press conference in which Hiromi answers some questions about her motivations, the flight, and the morality of taking children into space as part of a colony. This is the main piece of exposition in the pilot, which is mostly a visual story.

These are not quite final -- they're cut together from the "check renders" that come directly out of Blender in the rendering process. In addition to the metadata stamps, they haven't had any post-compositing done. It's in the compositing phase that we can fix some common errors like flickering ink lines and bad color balance.

The Press Conference sequence is roughly edited and some animation appears to be muted, which is going to require doing some re-rendering of short pieces of it.

The audio mix is not final.

Credits

Screenplay: Rosalyn Hunter

Character Modeling: Keneisha Perry, Bela Szabo

Character Rigging and Animation: Keneisha Perry

Set Modeling: Sathish Kumar, Travis Souza, Terry Hancock, Chris Kuhn

Voices:

Music

This is a good example of an animation mistake that didn't show up until final rendering. The grass in this shot is a billboard particle system. Normally, they are not supposed to move, and so the "Physics" simulation panel is set to "No". However, in this case, I mistakenly set it to "Newtonian", which apparently causes the grass to fall under the simulated force of gravity, causing a very disconcerting and obvious error in the final render.

However: there were no animation key frames at all in the scene file the grass is taken from (it's defined in a background set); the grass does not appear at all in the GL pre-visualization renders; and the movement was really not obvious in the handful of check renders I ran prior to rendering the shot.

Lunatics Project | lunatics.tv

This is the state of the "Touring Baikonur" sequence in the pilot episode of "Lunatics!" on Christmas 2019.

This is probably the most complex sequence in the episode, consisting as it does of a 2-minute montage of Hiromi and Georgiana visiting the town of Baikonur and then going through the traditions of Russian spaceflight prior to their launch on a Soyuz. The sets are based on real places (with a little artistic license here and there -- it is 20 years in the future, after all).

I was working hard to finish at least this sequence prior to Christmas, but didn't quite make it, so there's still a little bit of GL animatic in here.

Most of it is rendered, but not re-composited. These renders are generated straight out of Blender, in parallel with the EXR renders, based on a default compositing arrangement and without any custom masking.

For final production, I will work from the EXRs, with additional compositing and 2D custom masking, which I can use to get rid of annoying stray ink lines (there's a few flickering Freestyle lines that shouldn't really be there, but they can be masked out with an animated mask during compositing).

ABX is our "Anansi Blender eXtensions", which is our studio helper code. I'm currently working on the core functionality, and one thing I need is to get some context on the file I'm processing so that we can correctly generate names, identify appropriate configurations, and so on.

To this end, I've written a "FileContext" module to get information from the path, filename, and on-disk explicit data files (in YAML format). This applies to any kind of file, not just Blender, so it'll probably be a prototype for a similar module in KitCAT as well.

For ABX, this will be followed with a "BlenderContext" to module to work with data stored inside the Blender file (and probably to copy one to the other).

Montage vidéo de la mobilisation contre la loi Duplomb le samedi 26 avril 2026.

🎭️👹🐲🎉 Carnaval contre les pesticides et la loi Duplomb – dimanche 26 avril dernier à Tours, Indre-et-Loire 🎉🐲👹🎭️

1000 personnes se sont rassemblées à Tours ce dimanche pour dire non à la loi Duplomb et exiger la fin des pesticides

À l’appel de la Confédération paysanne, GABTO, Cancer Colère, XR Tours, centre social Plurielles, réseau des AMAP 37, Greenpeace, comité des Soulèvements de la Terre de Tours, Collectif Santé 37, association Naya, Solidaires 37 et les ami.es de la conf, ce rassemblement a mis en lumière la mobilisation populaire contre un système agrochimique meurtrier.

Sous un ciel printanier, 3 cortèges ont pris vie : 800 piétons, 120 vélos et une dizaine de bateaux ont convergé vers une île de Loire, où un goûter préparé par la cantine La Louche Finale les attendait.

Des prises de parole se sont alors succédées pour dénoncer la loi Duplomb et l'utilisation des pesticides comme un véritable colonialisme chimique, ici comme ailleurs.

Ces interventions ont réaffirmé des revendications fortes : l'interdiction des pesticides et des NGT, l'accès à des revenus justes pour les paysan-nes afin d'assurer la transition des pratiques agricoles, et la réparation des préjudices causés, qu'ils soient sur les sols, dans l'eau ou au-delà de nos frontières.

Ce carnaval n'était pas seulement une fête, mais aussi un acte de résistance populaire contre les projets de loi que l’Assemblée nationale et le Parlement européen s'apprêtent à examiner ces prochaines semaines, projets qui mettent en péril nos vies et nos écosystèmes plutôt que de les protéger.

Cette mobilisation locale s'inscrit dans une lutte plus large, en hexagone et au-delà des frontières, pour protéger la santé de tous et toutes, la biodiversité et nos territoires, face à un fléau de cancers croissant et la destruction systématique des écosystèmes, sacrifiés sur l'autel des profits des géants de l'agrochimie : BASF, Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, et d'autres.

Ces firmes sont implantées proches de chez nous, et nous ne les laisserons plus faire !

Ce carnaval était localement une première étape, colorée et pleine d’énergie collective, au sein d’un mouvement qui ne cesse de grandir et qui se renouvellera en actes pour mettre fin à leur commerce de mort, ici et partout ailleurs.

This is our third trailer and a proper preview for episode one, now that we have enough fully-rendered footage to make it. This trailer features Hiromi more, and includes a bit of the dialog.

We're beginning rendering, although we're still working on a few scenes, and we're now aiming for release early this fall -- will update with a release date once we have one.

Before assembling the Soyuz Flight sequence, SF-1 subsequence, I had to make sure the component libraries were up to date. This video details the fixes I made to the Teddy Bear String Rig to rescale it and make it work correctly with my set.