As I wrote some time ago, it’s purpose to automatically track changes in your project files and update rendered footage where needed.

“Remake” is released under GNU GPLv3 and available for download here.

There’s also nice tutorial about its usage.

For more information please visit project homepage.

We are successfully applying the principles of free software development to animation production, and for that reason some people used to think that those processes should be followed completely, but I think this is not correct. Let me point to some differences between the two activities.

The result of the software development process is a software package. Any software package is a tool, which helps a person to produce something – to do it faster, better, or even just to make it possible. Though it is the result of someone’s work, software is still a means to achieve some other result. So, to fill its purpose, software must be easy to use. It’s usage should be intuitive, or, to put it another way – predictable. Predictable behavior of software is good, unpredictable behavior (caused by bugs, crashes, non-intuitive UI, etc) is bad. That’s the key point.

Developers decide when to release a new version of software based on how stable (read “predictable”) the software is at the moment. The user can always try the unstable development version if he wants. He risks getting unpredictable (bad) behavior, but he doesn’t loose anything by trying, because later he will get his better (predictable) version anyway.

On the the other hand, an animated movie is a product of the entertainment industry. Entertainment is a way for a person to fight the daily routine. People watch movies to kill their boredom. To defeat boredom, to kindle interest, to attract viewers, a movie should be unpredictable. Unpredictable is good, predictable is bad. Do you see the difference?

Now, let me go a little further. In a good movie every little piece, every little detail works to build the final impression. Nothing is meaningless, everything is important. If a person stumbles onto the unfinished, “development” version before the author’s conception is implemented, his impression could be spoiled just because he watches something that hasn’t reached its climax yet. And that can’t be fixed. Because even if he watches the finished version, there is some chance that it will strike him as uninteresting, because he has already got his “dose of unpredictability.” That’s why the “release early, release often” rule doesn’t work for animation production. And it never will. Because of the different purposes of software and animation products.

Imagine if someone will render raw data one month earlier before the release, publish it, and spoil the impression for many watchers who will think that they are watching finished work. By keeping repositories in private mode we are leaving for ourselves the right to decide when the movie is in its finished state, which is critical for an animation project.

At the same time, the private mode of the repositories is kind of fictional. Anyone can get access to the sources at first request – just read “Contributor’s Guide”. Why such a weird scheme?

Well, the production of animation is quite a specific process and understanding the workflow and policies is necessary to be able to contribute. From that point of view, the “Contributor’s Guide” plays the role of some kind of bootcamp for a newbie contributor. Instead of rushing into the repository, he gets familiar with the structure, rules, and workflow first. I think that’s a good strategy.

So, that’s my thoughts and reasons. I hope I have explained the situation. Also, I would like to know what is the opinion of my readers on that question.

Last time I have a lot of work with Synfig Studio. Making Production Cuts video and directing some external Synfig animation projects lead me to the idea of improving morevnaproject’s rendering system.

Currently the rendering system is based on pure “make” and works the same way as typical build system used to compile Linux software: you write rules in special “Makefiles”, describing how to compile (in our case – render) your files. Also those rules contain dependencies between all your sources. That’s very cool – “make” utility tracks the changes in your files and when you tell it to rebuild/re-render your project, it looks if any of the dependent files changed or not and invokes build/render procedure only if the change happened. Very cool. It saves a lot of time and efforts. You don’t need to remember which files need to be re-rendered if you have changed something essential (like bike model or – eww! – lightning template). The bottomside is that Makefiles are quite complex for ordinary user, you need to maintain all dependencies by hand and keep them up to date. For small projects it’s too time consuming to set up make infrastructure. It’s very unlikely to expect that average user will study make rules and use them in the daily work. Sometimes you just need to quickly setup directory tree, do your work and archive (or trash) result when everything is done – and all that int 2 or 3 days – there’s no time to write all those rules.

Projects like automake and quickly lead me to the idea is to have a “bridge” application between pure “make” and the user. It should generate Makefiles on the fly from user request and then let “make” to do the rest of the work. That can be achieved by introducing a set of conventions about the directory structure of the project sources and developing the tool itself. Most probably the result will look like some kind of project template accompanied with control application. We plan to make it available to community for reuse in any other animation project.

I still not sure about the name for the tool. I am going to call it “remake”. Any other ideas? At this moment I can tell that the idea is implemented at 70%, so we still have some time to think. BTW, realization of the tool lead us to some project restructuring – expect changes in repositories soon.

List of dependencies (1) transformed into Makefile (2). In the final version dependencies will be detected automatically.

About further evolution of this idea. It can be a web frontend for git configured for animation content. That should include generating snapshots for commits, diffs for animations and automated rendering. That’s totally crazy idea – I’m aware,  that I have no hardware resources and, most importantly, no time to implement it in nearest future.

More about used software (most probably I should have name this post Random Software News, eh-heh-heh). As you know, morevnaproject is closely related with development of Synfig Studio. We had hard times since we started web infrastructure reorganization at synfig.org and there’s still a lot-lot of work to do. Most of things are still messed up, but we keep moving. Released 0.62.01 version promises to be much more stable than previous one as it resolves some annoying issues.

There’s another valuable step made related to Synfig – we have started writing official documentation. Of course it consumes much time (again), but it’s strategically important to get more users into Synfig, build solid and growing user community and thus, have more contributors for Morevna Project. We plan to release documentation in three media formats – online, pdf and printed book.

Some words about Synfig’s future. Of course it will be bright, happy, etc. But I’m not about that. I want to share another crazy idea popping into my head recently. Probably most crazy one. Often I watched a people coming to IRC asking how they can do interactive animations with Synfig like flash ones. Those requests used to irritate me. From the start Synfig was developed for high quality animation production, not for cheap web animations. Synfig’s visualization is slow, the animation needs to be rendered, rendered animation is huge, adding interaction to rendered video is a big problem… But time passed by, Synfig is changing, we got opengl branch… And suddenly I have realized: hey, why not? ^__^ If we will get opengl optimization, then we will get realtime rendering and that means Synfig’s files can be visualised on the client side. All people will need is the browser plugin.  Now, let’s imagine Synfig developers will add just a single new feature – a hyperlinks. Now synfig animation is not just an animation anymore, it’s hypertext!.. err… hyperanimation? Then suddenly from animation package Synfig turns into web authoring package. It is powerful for animation, it is free, it’s WYSIWYG, it’s format is readable like HTML – Synfig can beat flash here… maybe even HTML? Who knows…

You may notice that we had very few commits in out git repositories last time. The reason is that most artwork produced goes into drafts. I haven’t managed to find time to integrate them into git repository, but you can watch some of them on the wiki. These days I’m spending much time trying to improve my drawing skills. watching artbooks, especially Gainax ones – like “Groundworks of Evangelion” and “Gainax Artbook”. That pursuits my learning very well.

That’s all my thoughts for the moment. Stay tuned!

On May 31, 2010 new version of Synfig Studio was released. You can download it from the packages page.

Major reasons to upgrade:

• Reworked Motion Blur layer.
• Better SVG import
• New functionalities of Normal Tool
• Improved rendering to avi when using ffmpeg target
• Fixed issue with tablets and other input devices at first run
• Fixed issue with remembering windows layout

More info

In previous versions of Synfig Studio implementation of Motion Blur layer was quite incomplete. It was impossible to control count of image duplicates used to produce blurred image. That was making impossible to use Motion Blur with high aperture values for the fast moving objects. Those issues were fixed by adding more parameters to the Motion Blur layer. Now it’s possible to control every aspect, including blur detail and transparency. Also, there are three types of algorithm available to choose.Normal Tool is renamed to Transform Tool, as it now can be used not only for moving ducks, but for rotating and scaling too. Hold CTRL or ALT for that. Use SHIFT to constrain rotation or scale.

New ffmpeg prameters dialog allows to choose from the full range of codecs supported by ffmpeg and set bitrate of encoded video.

The new version also resolves several annoying issues.

Synfig Studio 0.62.00 had a nasty bug related to the status of input devices set at first startup. That bug prevented mouse cursor from moving in the workarea distracting many new users. This bug was fixed in the new release.

Another annoying bug was about the windows placement in Synfig Studio. For several reasons it wasn’t alway correctly restored at startup. This bug was also fixed.

That’s it, enjoy the release!

I haven’t wrote much on this blog last year, but for me it brought a lot of experience and was full of amazing discoveries. I met outstanding creative people, here I want to name two of them who just strike me with their talent and passion to work on the project – Nikolay Mamashev (I miss your helping hand!) and Terry Hancock (your work on screenplay is invaluable and your ideas are always outstanding!). The way you both understanding this project is always amazed me, I’m proud that I know you, guys!

Also I would like to thank everyone who keeps watching our progress, send me their feedback and supports me – thank you for being here all that time. Show is going on, Happy Birthday, morevnaproject.org!

I want to say a big thanks to all contributors and especially to Terry Hancock aka Digitante who has been working on the translation with great dedication and has made it progress this far.

The next important step is polishing up the English dialog. I’m thinking about using something like Pootle for that purpose. It looks like this is the only open-source solution for that kind of task, or am I wrong? After we get good English text for the dialog, we can use the same tool for creating fansubs in other languages. And of course, having English and Russian translations for the characters’ lines is a significant milestone, because at this point we will be ready to record voices. Most probably, that won’t happen earlier than the demo release, but hey, who knows? ^__^

Download video

Here are some reports about Ubuntu @ Anime Boston 2010:

• DoctorMo’s Blog – AnimeBoston: Why Are We Here?
• The Silent Number – Thank you for Ubuntu’s success at Anime Boston 2010!

The Beautiful Queen Marya Morevna: Production Cuts by MorevnaProject is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

^_^

The Ubuntu Massachusets Local Community Team is making an ambitious effort to bring anime fans to the world of Open Source at the  Anime Boston 2010 convention. At their booth in the dealers’ room they plan to hand out Ubuntu LiveCDs and copies of the Ubunchu Manga, do some cool demonstrations, perform live installations and… whoa! They’re going to promote the Morevna Project and its production tools!

From my personal experience (as part of both Linux and anime communities) I can tell that for some strange reason anime fans have a natural aptitude towards Open Source and vice versa. It’s a good step to make them closer and this event may have a great impact on projects like Morevna, because the more anime fans will use Open Source tools – the more prospective contributors we have around. ^__^

The event is entirely community funded and they need your support. Please visit the event homepage for details.