Highlights

In October, I worked on a number of writing, editing, project history, and archiving projects. I also finished up some minor animation fixes needed for our pilot episode. I got some inspiration for a simpler architecture to break through my block on the LIb-Ray project. And I created some promotional video loops based on the existing “turnaround” animations I have for the six adult principal characters for Lunatics.

Production

I was a bit stuck on the LA-6 animation, which involves untangling some problems with the NLA animation strips. So I decided to take a break and work instead on solving several minor animation problems elsewhere in the episode. This was mostly successful. I might revisit LA-4-C: the shot of Georgiana slipping into her acceleration couch on the Soyuz. I collected the rendered results into a video for review:

I also worked on the positioning for the camels to get them to show up in the “reflection world” scene for TR-2-A, the exterior shot of the train from early in the episode, where the camels are meant to be seen in reflection from the windows. I was not happy with the plane reflection I would have gotten from ray traced mirror reflection from the windows, so I had rigged a fake reflection effect using a separate camera and scene. However, “link rot” of the Blender file wound up losing the correct camel position and animation. I also made change when fixing the incorrect scale in this very early shot. I’m still working on it, but I did make some progress: I at least as able to see the repositioned camels.

Documentation

Perhaps because I broke through a little bit on Lib-Ray, I was able to finish up Lunatics Project History, Part 4: Fixed Media Publishing and start on Parts 5 and 6. I also did some planning for the rest of the series. I’m not sure how many parts there will be, it seems like it will need more than seven, at least.

I started a draft on the Lib-Ray “Mitaka” Architecture, but have not quite finished it yet.

I also discovered that I had YouTube and Vimeo embeds in the Patreon Newsletters that I wrote for most months from September 2014 to April 2016, which are now broken because those videos have been removed.  I have migrate most of my videos to PeerTube, leaving only a few important ones on my YouTube and Vimeo accounts (also, with the recent acquisition, it seems likely that I will be closing my Vimeo account altogether, soon).

I had been thinking I would just leave these newsletters in their present form, but after realizing I would need to edit them anyway, it seemed silly not to go ahead and migrate them into this Production Log. So I did. I’ve now converted all of them.

IT

I now manage a general purpose Hometown Fediverse instance at RealSocial.Life (“Hometown” is a shallow fork or custom build of Mastodon, with a few useful extra features and minor cosmetic differences). This instance was originally started by Amanda Quraishi and was a kind of user breakout from Facebook, although it hasn’t been completely successful for that (many of the users went back to Facebook or moved on to other instances or platforms).

Maintenance had been lagging a bit, so we hadn’t been in touch with the hosting service in quite some time.  On October 20th, the instance went down. So I logged into the hosting service account and filed a support ticket. Disturbingly, I received no response from that ticket, and I still haven’t. Furthermore, I noticed that some tickets I filed related to the changeover when I took over the site several months ago also had no responses. I don’t mean they refused them, I mean there was no response at all. In fact, I’ve had no interaction with the service at all that couldn’t be an automated script. As a result, I started wondering if anyone was active at the service at all!

So I did everything I could to get backup data, “in case”. And I started shopping for alternative hosting. Unfortunately, there are a lot fewer options for hosting Hometown. I could probably migrate to a stock “Mastodon” platform, but I’d prefer to stick with Hometown. I have found a few options, which I’ll follow up with later.

In any case, the site came back up on the 21st. Still no acknowledgements or explanations at all. So, I’ve pretty much made the decision that we’ll migrate the instance as soon as I can set up a good home for it.

I also took the chance to follow a lot of my RSL followers on my alternative Other Catitude account on MSTDN.Social. It’s not the biggest, but certainly one of the larger Mastodon servers, so I expect it to remain quite stable, and I get along pretty well with the owner, Stux.

Promotional

Since I was using the Mastodon accounts more, I decided to play around a little with better promotional materials I have some turnaround animations for the six principal adult characters: Hiromi, Rob, Anya, Josh, Allen, and Sarah.  Technically, they are not normal “turnarounds”, but rather “fly arounds”, with the camera rigged to move in a loop around the character. This makes it a little easier to animate the camera slightly, and I did, with the characters acting as if they can follow the camera with their eyes briefly as it passes. I made regular videos from these before, for use in promotional and behind-the-scenes content, for example:

What I did this month, though, was to create a much simpler vertical-format video of each of the characters turning around, such that Mastodon would loop them. The trick is to render them without any audio codec. Mastodon then treats them like a “GIF” (in fact, it labels them “GIF”), despite really being in MP4 video format.

Learning

When I did finally get back to working on the NLA Editor problem, I realized I had been suffering from a misconception. Because it is near the “Track” Panel, I had thought the extra pair of operator controls in the NLA Editor was for the NLA track, as opposed to the NLA strip. But this didn’t seem to make much sense, because neither has a null or override setting, so how would you allow one to supersede the other?

But it turns out that the other operators aren’t for the current NLA track, but rather for the “Active Action”, which I believe is the action currently showing in the Dope Sheet or Action Editor window. This makes a lot more sense, as this animation is combined “on top of” the NLA strps, so it makes sense for it to have settings for how to combine the animation.

I still need to apply this knowledge to fixing the LA-6 Soyuz interior character animation, and then to setting up the SF-1 Soyuz interior shots.

October 2025 Production Timelapse

Production-related activities for this month

Video Logs

Video Log 2025-10-19: Lib-Ray Mitaka

Video Log 2025-10-31: Finishing October

Publications

Lunatics Project History – Part 4: Fixed Media Publishing

Lunatics Project Timeline 2009-2015

Annual Summaries

Monthly Patreon Newsletters

2014
2015
2016

 Share this post on social media.