We have received a gallery of fanart images made by Anastasia Majzhegisheva. The author’s age is 14 years old (!) and she brings her own vision of Morevna.

Hey, it’s been a long time! Let me share some quick news with you.

If you remember, in November I have planned  a lot of stuff to be done by February. Unfortunately, none of the outlined tasks are completed by the moment. That means we are not ready to launch the new episode of Morevna now and this initiative will be postponed for a few months.

But that doesn’t mean we were doing nothing on that period. In fact, our efforts gone into unexpected direction. We’ve been put into the situation that forced us to concetrate on developing the technology which allows to produce simple character animation in the very short time. This development resulted in the special character template for Synfig. It is based on the stickman template, but introduces such featureas as IK emulation, library of reusable elements and mimic controls. In the video below you can see it in action.

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This year I would like to attend the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) again. The event will be held in Madrid on 10-13 April. The good news that the main Synfig developer – Carlos Lopez Gonzalez – is going to be there. My plan is to have a productive meeting with him, including the coding sessions.  Also I would like to give a talk/workshop about the character animation in Synfig.

Important: Unlike the previous year, this time I have to ask for sponsorship from the community around. If this campaign will succeed then my travel will be possible.

Attendance of LGM last year gave me a great impulse for Synfig and Morevna development. I believe meeting Carlos and working together during the days of LGM will give even more impressive results. So, if you like the idea of me participating in LGM event, then your support in funding my travel is much appreciated. Thank you!

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Hi! Here’s another post for our Russian-speaking audience. This is my interview given to Julia Velkova at FSCONS in the day right after the release of Morevna Project Demo. It turned out to be “anything-going” talk about Synfig, opensource, animation and of course Morevna Project.

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Today I’m happy to announce the new release of “Remake” – our automated rendering system for animation projects. This version brings some minor improvements and a lots of bugfixes.

This version should be used if you would like to rebuild Morevna Project Demo from sources.

Download remake-0.5-1.noarch.rpm
Download remake_0.5-1_all.deb
Download remake-0.5.tar.gz

The changes to mention:

• The “-w” and “-h” options allows to force rendering resolution from command-line, overriding default project resolution specified in remake.conf file.
• Improved parallelization control. Now it’s possible to set number of jobs to be run in parallel (“-j” option) and set the maximum amount of threads used by each job (“-t” option). Also it is possible to set the maximum load limit using the “-l” option which allows to control the amount of jobs depending on the system load average.

For details on those options see the Man page.

This is going to be the last version of “Remake”. From now on I’m going to concentrate on rewriting the tool into the Python language and most probably it’s not going to be called “Remake” anymore, since I found that there is another tool with the same name exists already.

That’s all for today. Happy New Year to everyone! ^__^

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Here’s some Behind-The-Scenes video for our past Donations Campaign. Wanted to publish it for a long time. I guess watching this makes sense for our Russian-speaking audience only. But well, anyway. ^__^

Hello everyone! Long time no see. ^__^ I am investigating various options for publishing the Morevna Project Demo on DVD media. There are lot of services on the web that offer a DVD production and even custom USB Flash drives. But really it’s very hard to choose, because I haven’t experience with any of them yet and I need to be sure about the quality of the final result. As an alternative there is an option of publish-on-demand services from TrepStar and Amazon’s CreateSpace. It looks very attractive, because together with production they handle all selling and shipping routines.

But the best option for me would be to find a service which can produce a custom pack containing the DVD disc + custom USB flash drive + Book.

Any advice on that? Does anyone had an experience with DVD publishing? Any  particular service to consider?

So, we have reached our first milestone by releasing the Demo. Though, it’s not time to relax -  there are still a lot of odds and ends to finish before we can proceed with the production of the next episode. Here I’m going to outline our main priorities for the next two months.

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Today I would like to share my plan how we will make the whole Morevna Project happen.

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When preparing my talk for FSCONS, I planned to make it a journey into the project history. Unfortunately, I was unable to keep it within the time limit and that made me felt unsatisfied. This is why I’ve decided to write all my thoughts on that into a separate blog post here. Also it’s a good chance to put into a single place some historical/documentary videos that were buried in the blog history and to recall particular events happening during the last few weeks, as a huge part of them wasn’t covered in my week reports.

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