Blender Institute Podcast #013 - Puppies

Thanks for answering my question about your tutorial computer. 47:45 "SIMPLE Screen Recorder, its a simple name.... It is what it says!!". So funny. :-) Another fun podcast. Thank you guys.

Love the conversation!

Just a quick comment about the timeline undoing.. as an animator, I totally see the frustration with undo and the timeline. Hjalti's example of jumping back and forth to check a pose, then deciding you want to make a change & having the timeline go back and forth and back and forth and back and... aggh!

The trick with having undo NOT adjust the timeline is that inevitably you will end up undoing something that you're not looking at.. which has the potential for you (as the user) to not realize that you just undid something, or changed something drastic.

This means you could be working away, go to another frame, hit undo, and not realize that you just undid that extreeeeeeeeeeeeeeemly important animation tweak.

It seems like having the software do something that you can't see the result of is a very dangerous thing to do.

So the only solution I can think of would be a notification.. like "Hey! Kick-ass animator! You just undid something on a frame other than the one you're looking at! Here's a button you can click to take you to the frame where that happened!" Then the animator could either say "yeah yeah, I know about it, leave me alone Blender!" or they could say "Holy what-now? let me click on that button that will take me to the frame where that happened so I can see if it's what I want!"

anyway.. just a thought. :)

keep up the great work!

Thanks for the answer, Hjalti, Advocate of the Animators. BTW, that undo problem is present in Maya too.

Are we still gonna see the little VR section of the movie or did I miss the post about it? When you guys are working together on the film how are you sharing the files and assets? If someone is animating a shot while someone else is creating models for the scene I am wondering how you guys worked together?

I am looking forward to the future iterations of the Blenrig(mention of quadrupeds and such) and the video tutorials for it, I have read the documentation and it's probably not as complicated as I am making it out to be but it is a pretty intimidating thing to look at.

I love the work that you guys are doing with the cloud. It makes me feel that with my subscription, I am helping blender to become better. My question is what is your view on motion capture? Is it a cheap way out?

Thank you for your answers.

54:20 Ok, I will think how to solve this...

41:40 Haha, this is so true.

37:55 Sergey, I respect you very much, but you are wrong. Listen to Hjalti, he is a pro at what he does, just as you are at your work. ;)

I used a couple of Cosmos Laundromat's assets and Caminandes' fence for a small animation class at uni last year. We actually learn live action cinema and television but we have this animation class in our 4th year, as a way of learning a little bit of this and that.

I had the idea for this short while living in Scotland for a year, so it felt just perfect to use Victor's rig for it: https://youtu.be/OsgsC5WT9As

I absolutely hate having to undo timeline changes. I work in Maya for school and have created hotkey scripts that turn off timeline undo:

undoInfo -stateWithoutFlush off;

currentTime -edit findKeyframe -timeSlider -which next; (time operation)

undoInfo -stateWithoutFlush on;

It turns off the undo queue, changes time, then reenables the undo queue. I've had to set these up for every time operation I have, which is annoying just in itself. Blender doesn't even have the option of turning on/off the undo queue, so that approach doesn't work here. I agree with Hjalti that time scrubbing/jumping is more like an interface interaction, not an operation.

Oh man!, yes about the back and forth jumping through keys!. just make sure than when you fix it, that you don't lose the hability of getting back a pose that you haven't keyed!

Glad to hear you guys liked our like animation of Koro and Oti!!! I have a question regarding the vector blur node. Sometimes it produces some artifacts, and I remembered you guys had some problems with it during the car scene in Llamigos. How did you fixed it? Thanks!