Thanks for waiting an extra day this week for your Gooseberry weekly highlights — yesterday we celebrated the biggest holiday of the year: the Dutch King’s birthday! (Which is really just an excuse to have a big party while wearing orange.) Don’t worry, though, there’s some big news here (from VSE fixes to a whole new ending for the pilot) that should be worth the wait!

 

 

The Highlights

 

Blender on Steam

The weekly began with an announcement from regular guest Martijn Berger: if you haven’t heard yet, Blender is now available on Steam! You’ll find versions for Windows, Linux, and Macs there.

 

A New Ending

Mathieu has come up with a new cliffhanger ending for Cosmos Laundromat, with new tornado footage, a new jungle dialog (Tara and Blinky are back!) and a laundromat credits sequence. (Please note that these are placeholder credits for now, and not final. And the jungle dialog, recorded by Mathieu and Sarah as a test, will change, too!) Check out the new ending at 2:45 in the weekly video (or the watch full edit to date in Mathieu’s weekly folder on the Cloud), and then stay tuned to see how this new material develops!

 

Advancing the Animation

Beorn completed 30 more seconds of animation this week, first returning to the shot he worked on when he was in the studio in January:

 

 

Beorn also began working on continuity between the various shots made by various people. You’ll find a before & after-style video showing his work on this (plus the two full animations above) in his weekly Cloud folder.

 

 

Sarah also recorded her entire week of work (and other computering stuff), so expect a tutorial or blog post about her process to follow!

 

Render Time!

In addition to creating the new website for the Blender Institute’s first commercial feature project, Agent 327, Pablo has made some dramatic lighting changes to sheep island to better capture the depth and complexity of Franck’s furry coat.

 

Every character detail is important, right down (er, up) to the eyebrows. Which is why Andy gave Victor’s a little love this week, darkening them a bit, as you can see here:

 

Andy also did some grooming work on Franck, whose fluffy coat he managed to tame a little (getting rid of those odd tufts sticking out):

He even gave some attention to the important characters called “branch” and “grass”, which needed some better motion and interactions. The dupli-instance-based grass he animated using the individual meshes (which lends a somewhat random effect, so is kept subtle). The interactions with the branch he did using a particle-instance modifier (perhaps it should be renamed the particle-array modifier to make it clear it does not actually use instancing), which distributes one big mesh across the surface. Check out a few of his test sims here (“proof of concept” and not final) and in his weekly folder on the Cloud.

Lukas worked with him on these tests and sims, himself testing the wind in Franck’s fur. In the video here (also in Lukas’s weekly Cloud folder) you can see some tests on the wind in Franck’s fur: which needs to be visible but not too turbulent!

 

Then, of course, Andy turned back to the tornado… Here you’ll find the various simulations he’s been testing, including some of Franck running from the colorful smoke, seen from near and far, and ending in the ultimate render to date of the tornado emerging from the washing machine drum (without any missing frames, but still with the extra blue puff that will be masked out).

Naturally, you will also find all of these in Andy’s weekly Cloud folder!

 

 

Finally, Manu also spent some time on the island grass, working on the long-shot views, starting by converting the low-res version Mathieu had made to a high-res version. Then he looked at the layout of the cameras throughout the scene, creating a graphic to represent the positioning in the tornado series of shots. He also made a density graph to show how the grass should be grouped relative to the position of the camera. You’ll find Manu’s weekly Cloud folder, with all of the above, here.

 

New Development

• Antonis has been busy making the team’s (especially Mathieu’s and Sarah’s) wishes come true again this week. The Sequencer will now add images to the sequence as you render. Just tick the “Use Placeholders” checkbox. In the graph editor, you can now quickly select a curve with all of its keyframes by double-clicking. Finally, Antonis worked with Julian to create a patch for the metadata project Julian was working on to store the metadata within the file, even outside Blender. You can now control the metadata output via a new section of the interface (now in Master, too). Watch Antonis demo it all at 15:22 in the weekly video.
• In addition to working with Andy on the grass and fur sims, Lukas made an info tool for caches, which can read any Alembic/cache file and give you an overview of all the data. (Warning: calculating the size takes some time!) See his demo at 48:32 in the weekly video.

---