Cosmos Laundromat

Another week, another screening of the animatic — and it’s been whittled down to a slightly shorter 16:20 (though another 1:20 still needs to go). Watch it with Gooseberry team commentary in the recording of this week’s round-up (just below)…or Blender Cloud subscribers will be able to find and watch this and all previous versions of the animatic in the Gooseberry Weeklies folder there.

As always, here are the best images and intel from the week:

The Highlights

 

The New Site

 

Dragonfly Layout & Rigging

Hjalti has been working on the layout for Franck’s ride on the dragonfly. This video shows how the shot has evolved from simple camera positioning to include more motion and finally magical jungle bubbles. As the shots progress, you’ll notice the dragonfly’s movement getting more erratic, based on Mathieu’s request that it “fly more like an insect.”

Expect this shot to go through a lot of development yet. Still to be determined: how Franck winds up on the dragonfly in the first place. (You might have noticed this shot was missing from this week’s animatic.) Stay tuned to the weeklies for the resolution to this one!

In addition to the full animatic (which includes the first version of the shot from the video above), you’ll also find Daniel’s close-to-final rig for the (very flexible) dragonfly on The Blender Cloud!

New Models & Renders

 

 

In Development

Pablo shows how stuff from Cycles can be edited in Viewport, matching it to the world background feature, a work-in-progress by Antony:

(Expect reports about this Viewport project soon.)

Here’s Antony’s own demonstation, showing how the shader can combine nodes in Cycles in realtime:

Also…

• Antony is also working on a patch to get rid of some old, inefficient code for better rendering times.
• Campbell and Francesco have BAM ready to test. The first trial will be this week.
• Sergey has been optimizing server connections in the data center and continuing to delve into the dependency graphs. Expect an article (and a demo) on the latter soon.
• Lukas is working on new edit modes for hair, and in the meantime you’ll find that you can now enter and exit edit mode without issue!

 

Missing People

 

• This week we said goodbye to Sergey, who yesterday returned to Russia to work on his PhD. He should be bringing his one-liners back to the Gooseberry Show again in March, and he’ll still keep busy developing awesome Blender things while he’s away.
• Our fearless leader will be missing from the new two weekly livecasts: Ton’s taking a vacation! While he’s away, Mathieu will be running the creative show and Francesco the office.
• More holidays! We’ll be missing another familiar face at the next weekly: Sarah will return to Costa Rica for 3-4 weeks. Pablo will follow the next week, heading to the southern reaches of Argentina for 5 weeks.

 

This Week and Beyond

 

• Before they go, Sarah and Pablo will work on creating — and rendering! — an as-final-as-possible shot from the jungle world.
• Manu will work on the visual development Franck’s sheep island. Next week he could start texturing/grooming Victor (once Angela’s model is finished), Franck, or other characters.
• Hjalti and Mathieu will continue to work on the 3D layout, working toward a final cut that doesn’t exceed 15 minutes.
• Lukas will keep working on the hair edit mode. Soon he’ll move on to working with port tools, shape keys, and vertex groups.
• Antony will create a Viewport recode proposal, as well as work on custom widgets for facial keys.
• Francesco will spend one day working on the Cloud, and then go back to his BAM work with Campbell.
• Angela will be continuing her Gooseberry modelling work for another couple of months.
• Bastien Montagne arrived in the studio today for 3 weeks of work on the Blender-side asset manager. You’ll get to “meet” him (if you haven’t already) in a blog post this week!

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