f r e e f a c

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

Hi folks, pretty rushed here, deadlines, etc. I’m having a blast- Spark is great (
Rome is pretty nice too, hopefully I’ll get some time to really see it later). I’ll have no time to get to some tasks until late July, so here are some previews:

• Get Mancandy v2.3 here. This version should work fine with blender 2.46 and beyond, when I have time I will test and fully document the small changes, in the form of a new video to be added to the faq.
• Mancandy translation effort: when I’m back I’ll work on proofing the texts for subtitles.. other english speaking proofers: don’t wait for me!
• Website:  big changes coming soon (probably not till August).

More later, including hopefully some surprises.

Bassam

Sparkde is a an animation studio located in Rome that is switching to an open source production pipeline. As part of this effort, I am joining them to help rig and animate an upcoming project in blender. I’ve been busy rigging this past week and a half,  and will be in the studio for the next 4-5 weeks for the animation. The project is for CNIPA (Center for infotech in Public Administration), and it will be made as I said with blender for 3D ( Fedora Linux as the operating system for the studio).

I’m thrilled to go work on the movie and meet the team, including Enrico Valenza (EnV) who worked on Elephants Dream and on Big Buck Bunny. I hope this starts open source filmmaking movement in Italy - after all, Rome, Open City sparked the Italian Neorealism movement ;)

Thanks to the efforts of blender users Jedihi and Drip Stone (and no thanks to my slow proofreading self) a MancandyFAQ translation effort is underway; the first goal is to produce timed english subtitles transcribed from the videos, which can then be translated into many languages (I believe the first two will be Spanish and Chinese). Here is the thread on blenderartists, and here is the wiki (in Chinese). Thanks guys, I promise to do a little proofreading every night.

EDIT: forgot to put the URL for the english language wiki on blender.org. Maybe more transcribers / translators would like to join the effort. I’m really thrilled at this, both as a practical example of the benefits of open content, and because one of my regrets about the original DVD was that it was english only.

I just updated my demoreel to the 2007 reel- it’s very similar to the old one with a few new things, and it’s (sorry) re-encoded from the DVD reel- I couldn’t find my original source project (whoops).

I’m using the cortado applet from flumotion to stream the .ogg source. I’m not terribly sure this is the right thing ™ to do, since I have trouble on my own machine viewing it (audio cuts out sometimes), and I’m not sure how many people can view it. I also have the .ogg, an avi and mp4 for download.

So if anyone reading this knows if there is an intersection of open source/patent free and playable easily on linux/windows/macos way to embed video on a page, let me know! I might end up using flash/flowplayer, or quicktime-style embedding (mplayerplugin can handle this on linux) but there is still the small matter of codecs.

well, I may have gotten a bit overconfident, but after my wordpress install, and having a bit of a lull, I upgraded to ubuntu hardy (still in prerelease) from gutsy.

I’ve gotten mixed results- nautilus is simply screaming fast on ftp shares compared to how it used to be, the intnl clock applet is nice, and network manager/intel wireless drivers are both completely smooth/non buggy compared to how they were.

On the downside, I got exposed to a nasty nvidia bug that causes (with the proprietary driver) random freezes in blender , usually during transform. I fixed this by uninstalling the hardy driver, and installing the latest beta driver from nvidia.. so far so good, I’ll edit this if the problem comes back.

Another downside: keyboard and mouse input are both impaired in hardy, and I have no idea why (very odd)… my wacom tablet still works (phew) but my synaptics touchpad and ibm red joystick thingie both stopped working completely.. the pad on the tablet doesn’t work (expresskeys just exits claiming it can’t find it).. and certain special keys I had mapped to numpad keys on my lenovo keyboard give keyrelease events, but no keypress events.. making them useless (between that and the pad not working, I’m once again sadly numpadless in blender). I hope these issues can be resolved before the release, but I’m not even sure what causes them, any clues, short of plugging in an external numpad?

I just upgraded to the shiny new wordpress 2.5. so far it’s been very smooth- I’m really impressed at how easy it has been to upgrade wordpress each time. If anyone has any changes/difficulties viewing the site, let me know.

Just a quick blog from my hotel in Potsdam, NY- I’ve been invited to give a talk at Clarkson University about animation in Blender as part of a one day digital arts festival. I’ll be showing the Big Buck Bunny teaser trailer, Elephants Dream and Dukduk by Glenn Melenhorst as an example of a blender game. (don’t worry, I will tell them about project apricot as well). I’ll also talk about the Blender Institute, documentation, the open movie workshop series, etc. etc.
For the rest of the time I will be showing off blender, primarily animation features, using examples from my own work as well as Elephants Dream and Peach, but mostly with Mancandy.

[ Brief intro to those reading from graphicsplanet.org: My name is Bassam Kurdali, I'm a film-maker/artist using only free software (mainly blender, inkscape, Gimp on Ubuntu/Gnome/Gnu/Linux ) Mostly animated, but sometimes not. I'm also very interested in Creative Commons, and in exploring ways to do media production in a more open and inclusive way. I directed (and did some animation and rigging) Elephants Dream, which some of you have probably seen/heard of. ]

I have some nice news about Elephants Dream: The curators at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC included it in their new exhibit “design and the elastic mind” (warning, flash link ). Great news, and it does look like a really nice exhibit.

Some people have asked a few questions about the ManCandy FAQ DVD, so here they are, FAQ style:

Q. How much is the duration of the video?

A. Roughly 7 Hours in total, spread out over 38 files with durations ranging from roughly 2 to 23 minutes.
Q. What level are the tutorials?

A. Difficult to say, but not beginner- intermediate to advanced- there is a “basics” tutorial to give an overview of the concepts used in the rest of the tutorials, but it is no subsitute for a solid grounding in blender basics. You should at least have rigged a basic character, or know the basics of using blender, or have a good working knowledge of other applications before attempting this DVD.

Q. Are they animation or rigging tutorials?

A. A bit of both: there are rigging and animation tutorials. The rigging tutorials show how I built Mancandy’s rig- this should help people looking to rig their own characters. The animation tutorials focus on how to use Mancandy’s controls, and how to animate in blender in general. They are more on the technical side, so no subsitute for a good animation book (Like the Preston Blair book, or the Richard Williams book)

Q. Are they “step-by-step in depth” or “overview” type tutorials?

A. Again, a little bit of both: some tutorials show how to build part of the rig or an animation from scratch, and others dissect what is already there.

Q. How soon will I get my DVD?

A. Well, the DVDs have all been printed and started shipping- how soon you individually get them depends mainly on the speed of the mail at this point. They are shipping from Europe (Amsterdam) so European orders will arrive a bit quicker than others.

Q. Will the video tutorials and blend files also be released for free to download off the internet like elephants dream?

A. The content is CC licensed, and as such, can be legaly shared/distributed, even by posting on the net; theoretically, anyone who owns the DVD can do so. The problem is the amount of data: 5.9 Gigs of video is not very easy to host on a reliable basis. Perhaps in the future we could do a lower quality version that is small enough for the web, or use google video (or something similar)

Q. Does it have the trailer that you showed in SIGGRAPH 2007?
I would love to have that in a high res video..

A. If by the trailer you mean the 10 minute “Mancandy FAQ” animation I showed at siggraph, with voice over by Fateh, then yes; this is on the DVD , as are all its blend files. I never intended it as a trailer, but as an integral animation overview part of the DVD.

Q. The video files wont play on my computer. They’re .flv and .ogg - never heard of them before - whats going on?

A. The flv files are flash video (like youtube and google video) and are intended to play in the html interface (index.html will start you there)
the ogg files are an open source/open format, they will play in:
VLC for all platforms ( download the one for your OS here )
If you’re on linux, the ogg files should just play
If you’re on windows, you can play them in media player if you install the ffdshow codecs (open source video codecs) which can be downloaded from multiple sites including sourceforge (just google ffdshow codecs download) and you should be all set.
If you have any more questions, ask them in the comments section and I’ll add them to the post.

Q. Can the mancandy dvd be viewed from a standard dvd player?

A. No, the DVD requires a PC (personal computer) to view the videos. This is due to the resolution limitations of standard definition video, as well as the dificulty of packing a long playing high quality video on a DVD. On the plus side, DVD should work on any computer capable of running blender, so long as you have the right software and codecs (see above)

Q. So, is it just me, or is the DVD missing section 4 and 14. And have two 13’s?

A. No, it’s not just you- I got the numbering for the videos wrong. However, though the numbering is wrong, the videos are all there, and there are no missing or repeated ones. I’ll try not to make mistakes like this for the next time.

Q. Will the DVD work with the newly released blender 2.46?
A. Most of the DVD is still valid in 2.46, however, there are a couple of small changes to be done. I will release a small errata page soon, along with a new version (Mancandy 2.3), and you will be able to continue enjoying the DVD with this addendum.