Widow and Tube, the non identical twins

Over the course of the production there has been this knowing amusement that there are two films in the works that are very similar yet at the same time, vastly different. Tube is a project that was started by Bassam Kurdali, which started around the same time Widow did, in fact back when we were working with the Animux team, Mark had introduced me to him via IRC and actually got to take a look at some of our work for Widow in the early stages that was not revealed at the time. We looked at his too and were slightly amused that both of our films related to a tunnel, a subway tunnel.

Over time as we worked on our films in our own time, there was the train. Now mind you, I like our train, our train is nice, however the train for Tube, well it had this steampunk thing going on and looked pretty wicked. Either way, again there was that similar yet vastly different thing going on.

By a weird strange cosmic freak chance though, we both used a Python script that creates walk cycles for ….. a spider  small multi-legged shelled creatures
.

“Spiders” auto-walking and flock simulation for blender from Josh Wedlake on Vimeo.

Which we now have the fix for, thank you Chris Monson as we too were stuck with a non functioning rig, now we can use it again. While we still will be using the original rig for shots as well, the walk cycles will be a lot easier to do again with the fixed code.

So how is it that two films, who’s directors have never looked at a script of each others work, manage to come up with the same environment, same vehicles as well as use the same code to animate spiders  small multi-legged shelled creatures.  Mind you this is no dig on him or his project, in fact we fully support Tube and hope it does well. This is just a brief comic relief of how this imitates the movie industry itself.

Think about it, Ants and A Bugs Life, Finding Nemo and Shark Tale and of course all them penguin movies. It is a stretch but you get the idea, sometimes things like this happen and in all reality it is sort of fun, it’s like a friendly competition (of what who knows) or nod of recognition. I for one will be adding some sort of reference to Tube now of course, not sure what, or for that matter where.

Regardless, here is to Bassam and Tube, may your project bring you good fortune.

Aqsis 1.8 and RIBMosaic undergoing testing

Aqsis 1.8 testing

The Aqsis team has officially gone into Phase 1 of the upcoming 1.8 release, this means that they have solidified the feature set and goals, now they are in the process of fine tuning it as well as fixing any bugs. It will only be a matter of months before the next release is available for download, however for us it is only a matter of compiling the source (not that nobody could not before) and giving it a test run. Since 2009 we have been using the latest source of Aqsis for our rendering, this serves many purposes and one of them is the testing and feedback. This release is a very special one though is that it has the GI code in it, which means that rendering takes on a whole new turn and lighting will have to be redone in order to take advantage of the new code.

Point Based Global Illumination

Point Based Global Illumination is a method of using points on a surface to calculate lighting effects such as ambient occlusion and color bleeding. This means that the film will take on a new look, as well as process, since we will be using the new rendering code, however it also means a lot more work has to be done to the pipeline as shader code needs to be updated and the existing lighting will need to be reviewed and most likely changed.

Chris wrote a blog post here http://blog.aqsis.org/2011/06/point-based-global-illumination.html , which explains more from the person directly responsible for this addition to Aqsis.

RIBMosaic testing

Jeff Doyle has joined Project Widow’s support team to help with the technical issues related to RIBMosaic, this makes it easy for him to work out problems that we are having with it. Being on the support team he can devote more time to the things he needs to do in his own way, while at the same time being notified of issues via Shotgun, this also allows him access to the private SVN server that hosts our assets.

One of the main issues so far is how RIBMosaic is not able to work with Linked files, in our case this means everything in every shot. So this has been a major block in that area, however since we are in the animation phase we do not need to worry so much as it would be if we were in the rendering phases.

Sorry for the lack of progress updates, the last few months were quite stressful, with a death in the family and the subsequent dealings and a move, things were put on the backburner. Now as daily life gets more stable and smoother progress is starting again. Stay tuned for more updates .