http://thebeast.harkyman.com

At the end of August, I’ll be doing the web release of The Beast, in 720p HD. There will be downloadables, a crummy YouTube version, and a nice streaming HD version on Vimeo. When it’s time, it’ll get it’s own page, as well as a link from here and the main Blender forums, just to make sure that no one misses it. I’m down to re-working the titles in HD. The animation itself is re-rendered, and I only have to finish the titles and pump the whole thing through the final compositing network, which takes several hours.

I’ve just gone back and read some bits and pieces from the book, and it’s such a different experience from writing or revising it on screen. I’ve found that while I’m writing something, I think it’s great. Then, when it’s out of my hands my confidence in the voice and material falls by several orders of magnitude, and I’m convinced it sucks and will be the object of ridicule. Finally, when I dare to crack the cover of the finished piece, I read a little and find myself saying “not bad… not bad…” and even “that’s pretty good…” in some places. Thus it was with The Essential Blender, and hopefully how it will be with this

The real test, though, is when people in the target audience finally get the book. Despite accusations of arrogance from time to time throughout my life (It’s just confidence I tell you!), I know enough to realize that I’m not the one who will ultimately declare something I write anything better than “good.” That can be done by others, and only if it deserves it. We’ll see next month!

However, the Connect to Server option available from the Gnome desktop isn’t reachable via command line, it seems, or really mounted anywhere, so I could access the other machine across the network with it. I had to go to the command line, where a “mount -t smbfs …” command did the trick. One for two. Oh well.

Anyway, I’ve found that I’m not only impressed with Blender’s rendering speed under Linux, but it also seems to make significantly better use of my graphics card (nVidia Quadro FX 550) than Windows ever did. Scenes that were frame skipping while panning in 3D on Windows are just cruising along. I tweak some of the first shot’s animation in Linux, and the response time when working was so much better, I’ll be booting into Ubuntu for animation work from now on.

I’ve also started working on the tweaking and re-render for the August release of The Beast. The production version of the animation is finalized and on the book’s DVD. However, over the next month and a half I’ll be spending a little more time on the animation itself to give it another round of refinement. Also, I’m rendering in HD at 16:9 (the production version is NTSC 4:3) and have updated the lighting and compositing pipeline for a better outcome. The overall sound will be getting a remix by the music’s composer.

In my quest to reduce render times, especially now that I’m going HD (1080p), I decided to try out the always-stated fact that Blender renders faster under Linux than Windows. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 (64-bit, using wubi) on my laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM), and after using Envy to install the proper nVidia drivers, found that it was true. An HD frame (1920×1080) from the opening shot renders in 1:50 in Linux, but takes 2:55 in Windows XP. Same computer, dual booting. Yikes. That’s crazy. I’ll be installing this on my main workstation, too. That’s going to drastically cut render times.

On the topic of The Beast,  I think it’s going to be a great learning tool. It’s not unbelievably complex like Elephants Dream was or (I’m guessing) Big Buck Bunny is, and I’m hoping the files and techniques will be accessible and useful to everyone who reads the book. In fact, a lot of the stuff I did in the animation were purposefully done in order to provide a teaching example for the book.

I’m getting frames back from the render farm as I work to clean and finish the animation for the 2/3 of shots that haven’t yet been rendered. There are some neat effects and some fairly simple but effective compositing setups for putting together scenes. It’s a lot of fun!

So, instead of using the cloth sim, I’m just including the skirt inside the mesh deform cage for the rest of the body, which gives good enough deformations in testing.

I’d still like to use the cloth sim somewhere in the animation just for fun, but there’s no where that it really fits.

The book (Animating with Blender: Creating a Short Animation from Start to Finish) is about half written. Also, I have time on a small render farm donated to The Beast, which exposed a bug in Blender’s strand distribution method. Child particles were generated differently on different processors, meaning that non-homogenous render farms couldn’t be used for animation with particles. Brecht just fixed it this morning (Thanks!) so rendering on the finished animation files can commence!