Morevna Project

Here’s some artwork pieces from the past week:

Ivan's Sisters layouts WIP by Varvara Zaharova

Shot 49 artwork by Eleonora Pala

I am proud to announce new version of “Remake” – unified build system for animation projects. It’s purpose to automatically track changes in your project files and update rendered footage.

Download remake-0.2.tar.gz

What’s new:

• Support for the Blender 2.5x.
• New “-t” option to run multiple jobs in parallel when rendering footage.
• New “snapshot” feature – you can save the current rendering as video file to track your “work in progress” changes. This feature is especially useful when your project is under version control. See manual page for more information.

See also:

• About Remake
• Tutorial

Morevna Project is proudly presents an update of Stickman Template. Stickman Template is used for character animation. It tends to simplify setup when you want to make animation in cutout technique or something more complex.

Changes:

• Now stickman’s parts are automatically stretched depending on the bone length.
• Additional scale and rotation controls for head.

Enjoy!

Download Stickman Template

OK, looks like it’s time to try the new strategy of attracting contributors to the project.

Our previous strategy was based on the assumption that contributors will work directly with the production tree and maintain their working copies using git. Now I should admit that it was quite naive for me to expect this strategy to be the main one for collaboration. At least at this time.

New strategy is the strategy of “calls” – small, extremely specific tasks where multiple people can put their efforts together without deploying full toolchain, described in the Contributor’s Guide. I hope this strategy will bring community closer to the project, let us have more fun and make the Morevna Project more “crowd-sourced”.

This is the first call from the series I plan to make and it’s about drawing.

Read the rest of this entry »

During the process of adaptation of Morevna repositories for the new build system we have decided to get rid of complex repository structure involving submodules. The purpose of using submodules was to have the ability to watch the histories of many repositories in sync. I have to admit now, that “git-submodules” approach is a fail.

Now all repositories are the “same level” – there’s no “super-repository” anymore. The “production” repository is replaced  by the “lib” repository, which is now of the same level as the “demo” one. For the cases when we need “synced” history view, that problem is gracefully solved by “git-subtree” and that results in much simpler structure and workflow.

Current repository users need to re-fetch all data according to new structure. Please wait while we updating “Contributor’s Guide” with new instructions.

EDIT: “Contributor’s Guide” updated. Have fun!

I am happy to announce the first release of “Remake” – unified build system for animation projects.

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.

Terry Hancock wrote an interesting article about translation of Morevna Project’s script: read now.

Sometimes people ask me why do we keep Morevna’s repositories private? Why not have them out in the open the way free-software projects do? I decided to write this post to clarify the situation.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long time since I’m wrote something useful here. Though, lots of things happened during that period and I feel a need to share with you, my dear readers, some random thoughts.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Read the rest of this entry »