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! ^__^

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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( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Last week an important milestone was reached – we have managed to close all white gaps in the Demo. That’s it, all backgrounds are in place now.

Though, some of background images are still pending for overpaint. There are seven of such left at the moment. I’m sure Nikolay will finish them before the end of this week – that will be our next milestone.

Among other achievements, we also have finished the work on shot 07 – a very complex shot where we have 3D turning camera. In such case we cannot directly do overpaint for backgrounds, because camera is floating in 3D space and background is always different. So we  took existing overpainted image and unwrapped it as UV-texture right onto 3D model of battlefield. I was very worried about the result, because I wanted this shot to fit seamlessly with other 2D shots. Also, I wasn’t sure that single overpaint texture will be enough and we expected to draw additional overpaints for particular camera angles. But at the end it turned out that one texture is enough and after some neat compositing the result looks very well for my taste. I’m very happy about it. ^_^

Unwrapping overpaint into textures

Talking about Blender, I have to mention that when we migrated to Freestyle-enabled Blender we hit a strange issue – one particular file started to render upside-down. I wouldn’t pay much attention to this, since I always can flip the image during compositing. But then it turned out that on some systems (our main rendering server, for example) it renders fine, with no upside-down effect! After some investigation we found that the problem with incompatibility of different versions of OpenEXR library. So, our blender builds are fixed now, you can get them from software page, as usual.

Another thing to mention about software – is there someone out there who uses Remake (our lovely automated-rendering system)? Please note that we made a bunch of important fixes to it during the last few months and you are strongly encouraged to use development version. Most probably the new version will be released together with Morevna Demo.

What’s next? I’ll keep working on compositing, bringing the whole animation to the equal color feel and adding lightning effects. Also I will keep polishing the animation, fixing issues and adding the particles effects. Another target for this week will be doing extra work on 3D vehicles. That’s the plan. See you next week!

Finally I’ve got the video with my talk about Remake at LGM! Unfortunately the screen wasn’t recorded, so initially there was only my talking head there. But I’ve tried to reproduce everything what was happening at the screen during the presentation and combined with video. So I hope in this shape it makes sense now.

My English is pretty crappy, so here’s the presentation with all supporting text: lgm-remake-slides.pdf

I am proud to announce new version of “Remake” – unified build system for animation projects. “Remake” is an utility that automatically tracks changes in the project files and renders them.

Download remake-0.4-1.noarch.rpm
Download remake_0.4-1_all.deb
Download remake-0.4.tar.gz

This release delivers a number of major improvements and bugfixes. See full list of changes below.
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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 render footage.

Download remake-0.3.tar.gz

This time we have delivered a number of major improvements, and “3″ in release number have some symbolic meaning – among rendering of Blender and Synfig files we got support for rendering third type of animation – Pencil, we got new rendering mode that allows to get stereo 3D output and finally files of mp3 audio format are supported as well.

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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

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.