This month we entered an updated version of our preview trailer into the 2015 Blender Animation Festival (the “Suzannes”). Writer Rosalyn Hunter and Producer/Director Terry Hancock also put up an in-person exhibit at the first annual New Worlds Institute conference in Austin, Texas. We’ve also begun the main character animation for “No Children in Space – Part 1”, including working out our Papagayo-to-Blender lipsync animation workflow.
Blender Animation Festival 2015
Every year, the Blender Conference is held in Amsterdam, home of the Blender Foundation and the Blender Institute. This includes an animation festival. The “Suzanne” awards are give out at this event.
Although we had hoped to enter the complete “No Children in Space – Part 1” as a short film, we obviously were not ready to do that this year. So, instead, we updated and recut our preview trailer, and entered that:
Updated Preview Trailer, as submitted to the Blender Animation Festival for 2015
We didn’t expect to win, and we didn’t, but we hope that a few more people were able to discover our project this way. Our trailer will continue to be listed as one of the “Running Entries” on the page for the 2015 Suzannes. [ARCHIVE LINK]
We’re still a little weak on our character animation, so the preview didn’t focus on it (in fact, we took out the skipping sequence, because it seemed to be pulling the overall quality down). We did re-render some shots with corrected Freestyle settings, which made those look better. And we added a bit of animation around the “Glory to the Conquerors of Space”, which shows both sides of the wall. You can see the whole 16-second turnaround shot here (we only used 8 seconds of it in the preview):
Full-length 16-second turnaround shot rendered for the trailer (which only uses 8 seconds of this), using the “Glory to the Conquerors of Space” monument set (no sound).
We also added a bit of the tumbling-letters title animation that we created for our title sequence, and a re-rendered version of Georgiana somersaulting on the Moon, right at the very end.
Exhibit at New Worlds Institute Conference
We got a very nice opportunity to put up an exhibit at the first annual New Worlds Institute conference in Austin on the 17th of October. This was a great chance to connect with people interested specifically in space settlement, which is what our show is all about.
This whole conference was put together pretty quickly, and it was especially last-minute for us, so we had to get an exhibit put together in very short order. Terry Hancock converted a damaged interior door, a computer monitor, computer speakers, and a video player into the main part of the display.
We also had a drawing to give away two Replogle Moon globes we’ve had as leftover stock for years. That was very popular with this group, even for some people who weren’t sure how to get it home!
We got some very particular interest from some of the people from Endeavorist, which is a crowd-funding project targeted mainly towards “citizen science” research. We’re still in communication with them to see if there might be some way we could work together.
There was a large variety in talks. All were related in some way to space colonization and settlement. A number of talks about Mars and about the Moon this year. Of course, everyone had seen “The Martian” by now, which was very well-received in this group. A lot of people are excited to see hard science fiction that is really strongly rooted in reality, and also to hear positive and serious stories about space settlement. So we got a warm reception.
We got to chat with Pat Rawlings, who is one of the many space concept artists that influenced our graphical style on backgrounds.
Lipsync with Papagayo & Blender
We’ve completely tested the Papagayo lipsync and Blender Lipsync Importer workflow, and have documented this in two 2-minute tutorials. The first shows the process for loading a sound file in WAV format and synchronizing phonemes for it using the written lines in Papagayo. This ends with a data file containing the frames for each phoneme position:
Two-Minute Tutorial: Using Papagayo to capture phoneme timing for lipsync.
The pure-python Papagayo build we use is available from Morevna project’s software page.
The second part tells how to use the Lipsync importer to convert the MOHO data file exported from Papagayo to mouth movement for our character in Blender. Because we are using the “Pose Library” method for positioning our characters’ mouths, we need to use the version of this library modified by Konstantin Dmitriev. We have a copy of this in our Subversion repository under scripts:
Two-Minute Tutorial: Applying the lipsync from Papagayo to our Blender characters, using the modified Lipsync Importer.
Download the modified script from our Subversion repository:
[TK: replace w/ Nextcloud link after migration]
io_import_lipSync_Importer.py.
Although it is generally easiest to use Papagayo with shorter lines, it’s possible to handle quite long monologues like this one from the Press Conference scene in “No Children in Space”:
Demo of Papagayo lipsync on a long line from the Press Conference scene in “No Children in Space”.
Other News
- Project Team Changes
- Tina Newton has apparently found herself too busy with her new teaching job to continue on “Lunatics!”, so the character animation is back to being done entirely by Keneisha Perry. Fortunately, Keneisha is doing an excellent job. Our only concern is how long it will take with just one person working on that. Travis is continuing to do excellent work on sets. Chris Kuhn is working on a new Blender book for Packt Publishing, so he’s pretty busy, but we’re still in touch.
- Rendering Hardware
- We’re still considering options for building, borrowing, or bargaining for hardware to render final animation on. We’ve considered distributing computing, renting compute servers online, or building a cluster, and building still seems like the best long-term solution. On the other hand, we might need to find a short term way to do it.
- Project Developer Openings
- There are a number of things we need to improve about our workflow and digital-asset management back end. It seems likely that we will need to do some development or at least scripting. We’ll be posting details soon, but it would be very helpful to find interested people with PHP and Python programming skills and some knowledge of the appropriate interfaces, including Blender’s “bpy” API, the Render Space through-the-web API, and WordPress. Anyone familiar with the “Blender Asset Management” project being developed as part of the Blender Foundation’s “Gooseberry” (“Cosmos Laundromat”) project could also be a big help.
- Character Progress
- In addition to animating, Keneisha Perry has also been making fast progress on the remaining characters, and we are nearly complete for “Part 1” at this point.
- Newsletter Catch Up!
- This is the October newsletter, even though it’s actually coming out in November. So we’re going to be releasing another newsletter almost immediately!
We’re also going to start a new feature, which is serializing Rosalyn Hunter’s novelization of “Lunatics!”
Until Next Time!
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