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 .

Blender Upgrades in the pipeline

Blender 2.57 RIBMosaic 0.1.1 Aqsis 1.7 Pipeline Test

One of the only reasons the pipeline has stayed in the old version of Blender was stability. As of right now that pipeline is considered production proven, actually there is a studio that uses Blender, RIBMosaic and PRMan to create animated cartoons. Project Widow has also been using this same system, simply for stability, however now that Blender 2.57 and RIBMosaic 0.1.1 are in a better state of development, we are beginning to upgrade the pipeline to these tools.

Project Widow is about pushing the edge, at first that was the stable pipeline, which over the course of two years has gone from an experiment to production capable. At the start of production the tools that we had to our disposal were not as built up as we wanted and over time they improved. So much so that this small studio in Costa Rica is using the legacy RIBMosaic in their pipeline, has their team trained on RIBMosaic and is producing cartoons with them. In light of this, plus our team is getting more adapted to Blender 2.57, the upgrade was needed to test out the next generation so we can raise the bar again. While we are now not the first to produce such imagery with these tools, we are however the primary test subject and as such need to kick it up and get cracking on the new tools.

Aside from some issues, it went off without a hitch, as this was planned for some time now, it was just a matter of time when the tools were stable enough for the transition. Of course this means that the shading and lighting data needs to be redone but since the shader source already exists for the current shading pipeline, that too will be a seamless transition. All that we need to do now is provide feedback for Jeff Doyle on RIBMosaic as well as the Aqsis team for the developmental 1.7 builds. While on one hand the shading pipeline is still sketchy, the transition from shader fragments to shader pipelines in RIBMosaic are proving to be a bit complicated, so it will be some time before the shading pipeline is considered “stable”. This happens. Plus we are still trying to just animate the damn short first, then worry about the rendering end afterwards. So work already has been done to convert the easier animated scenes to the new format, this involves removing the legacy RIBMosaic from each scene, not an easy task both time wise and emotionally as the amount of work that went into developing the pipeline took a toll, now only to be dismantled and rebuilt. Such is life in the world of code right??

One of the cooler features of the upgrade is the automatic feed through the compositing pipeline, so all Aqsis renders can be fed through that portion of the pipeline on the fly. Not an amazing feature but Blender is using Aqsis as an internal renderer now. That is something that many in the community have been wishing for many years, now it’s actually here. How the final composite workflow happens in still in the planning stage, so that alone will take up a good chunk of R+D.

Over the week quite a bit of testing went on in the pipeline, mainly to see what RIBMosaic is capable of at it’s current state, as well as learning the “new” way of doing Blender to Renderman. It has come a long way, in fact this is what we have been imagining for years now, just the ability to use Blender as it is and not to use a different window just to set up Renderman settings, options and variables. While there is some issues to deal with, such as the XML pipeline workflow, not to mention shaders are not being found, the actual export and rendering at a basic level functions fairly well.

On the Shotgun side, there are pages that are linked directly to the bug trackers of RIBMosaic and Aqsis, we usually don’t make bug reports on Blender because for the most part there are thousands of other users that provide enough reports, plus the majority of the bugs we encounter are not Blender side. If we do encounter such a bug, we make the special report but they have been very few and far between. Much of that falls on Jeff Doyle as he has a much better grasp at the code and what to look for, he is the primary developer after all and would encounter them long before we do. While we do have an internal ticket system on Shotgun, much of that is devoted to the actual pipeline for Widow, any really deep technical issues then get raised on the official software bug trackers.

In all the pipeline upgrade is going smoothly, though time consuming and we are really happy to see that we are able to undertake it despite the headaches and irritations. We never actually thought we would be working on Project Widow still so the thought of being able to actually render the problematic issues of the previous pipeline (such as animated curves) might come to a reality now.