Project Widow has suffered some huge technological walls over the past year and as mentioned in other posts one of them has been asset management. If our team was all working in a single location then for the most part our asset management would have been solved a long time ago, however because this production is spread out over the globe the issue had taken many twists and turns. We even tried to develop our own tools for this and found out that it was not as powerful as we wanted it to be. Finally with the SVN server becoming fully operational things seemed to have pulled together and we can continue to work on this short.
Recently the Library Linking issue came about, something we have been working with off and on through out the year but only recently has it become a serious issue to resolve. Quite simply we have been unaware of some of the processes involved with linking certain Blender data. The linking has been sought after for building sets, for each scene or shot. Currently there are three main sets that have various amounts of objects in them, from ALL the environment objects to only a certain amount of them. This is to relieve the amount of work Mosaic has to do, if something is not seen on camera there is no reason to have that object exported. So the Layout design of the sets have slowly been put together, these sets are being built for the particular scene and linking the data would make things work out much better in the end – one reason is that Shading and Lighting would need to completed AFTER animation and our shaders are not fully developed yet. Linking “Scene”s in Blender causes Mosaic data to be constant, which means it cannot be changed – just like any other data in Blender that is linked. Last week this was a problem because it seemed that you could not link just groups of objects, we were not aware of the fact that in Blender 2.49 you need to actually ADD that group AFTER you linked it in. Nathan Vegdahl (of Durian) had explained that little part to me and sure enough that actually worked out as we wanted it to! In fact, the Durian blog contains a video specifically describing exactly HOW this would work, something I have watched several times now.
I am embedding the Durian video post here :
The reason asset management and library linking go hand in hand is because of FILEPATHS and how Blender will read where this data would be. This is where the new tool comes in, Blender-Aid! This nifty tool not only shows you what paths each linked object is referenced but it can FIX broken links. So I tested it out locally on my system to give it a whirl, I am not too sure if this tool can work over SSH or even if it is a good idea to do such remotely. That is what testing is all about, once this gets added to the server we will test it to see if is capable of being server side as well as seeing if it is worth the effort or just have our team work with it on their own systems. Either way this tool is a very nifty thing and will find some great use during the production of Widow for the rest of the time.
