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.
August 22nd, 2011 at 9:15 pm
Hey guys
mitigating factor: our spider script is for animating cockroaches! there are no actual spiders in tube
non-mitigating factor (but don’t worry): “widow” would make a great title for our movie, it actually fits really well……
scary. also scary since we both know mark.
As an aside: I’m probably rendering in internal, but if I wanted to test Aqsis, what would my best bet be? I’d be looking to support renderlayers, all types of blender geometry, and hair, at the very least (though I could render the hair in BI).
August 22nd, 2011 at 9:51 pm
Ack! Assumed too much it seemed, now that I looked into it fully. Opps!
Widow is just the project “name” so no worries lol.
As for rendering:
Depends on the level of control you would want. Frigges Renderman exporter is akin to the “old” version of RIBMosaic, right before the total recode, which is what we were involved with helping evolve during the last year before Eric left. Now Jeff has taken over and RIBMosaic is rapidly being developed to support all that can be supported. It still has some issues but because of our assets in this short, it is perfect to test since we have some massive sets. So Jeff is taking on some support for us when we have problems, which is a role that Eric had at first as well. We are not too demanding really, as the process is long and time is short during the day with real life issues (work, school, children etc…) but proving to be challenging.
Anyways thanks for the reply
! I should make a note in the post now lol.
August 29th, 2011 at 9:25 pm
I love the train from Tube, so well modelled and so much attention to detail.
Almost makes me want to go back and re-model the one for Widow haha :p