For my latest animation, " Jose’s Dinner", I was using Cinelerra for the 2D animatic. I was working on it while I was at my in-law’s house so I was using the laptop. However, we try to use the laptop as little as possible to keep extend the life of the laptop, so when I got back home I wanted to work on it here. However, the files were in different folders than on the laptop. But, since Cinelerra uses XML files, all I had to do was load the file into Emacs and do a find/replace to replace the old folders with the new ones and it worked! With a binary file that would be impossible since the information is not represented as text!

It can be found here, but in case it disappears, I’ve reproduced it.

Zero and her Origin

Zero, the number said to be discovered Nine times by ancient magicians, was Found again by a mysterious order of Nine modern alchemists, who built One machine after another, until finally One exploded with fascinating results. No fire emerged from its Twin engines, but instead Nine small automata crawled out, Denying the proposition that energy, Seven millenia or more in the accumulation, For most purposes, remains Ever constant, throughout the Three ages of man’s civilization.

Well, these guys came up with a survey that tells you which Linux distribution you should use. I took the test and it predicted all the ones I use (Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian). You should check it out!

This picture:

is now my #1 most viewed photo over this one:

While cleaning up the animation for “Jose’s Dinner”, I was having a bit of trouble with the character’s mouth. I told it to open, but it still appeared closed.

It turns out that when I duplicated him and didn’t use the duplicate, I forgot to erase it. So there was a duplicate right underneath. What I was seeing was the closed mouth of the duplicate inside. It was as though he had eaten himself! Once I fixed this, it explained some of the problem I had been having and now, he was able to open his mouth!!

I set “Jose’s Dinner” to render from beginning to end to test the eye and mouth movements I’ve done so far. It’s almost done, but it’ll probably need another hour. So it took around 25 or so hours to render on one computer. Now I have a benchmark against which to see how fast the renderfarm is. Remember that most of my computers are old POS donated computers. So I don’t know how much it will be able to speed things up. Tomorrow I will probably do a test render with the bouncing ball to see how much more quickly that one renders. I’ll be excited to see the results.

A pretty neat music video was made using Blender and it can be found here. It’s for the song “Machines” by KissKiss

Today I tested my POS Compaq render node (running freeBSD with no GUI) with the same bouncing ball as in this previous post. It took my node 796 seconds to render the same animation. This is somewhere around 1.65 times slower. However, the software should just be throwing frames at whichever computer is ready for a new frame. The node took about 20 seconds per frame on average to render. My Linux computer takes 12 seconds. Here’s where I’m pretty bad at math, but I think this means that a render farm with just these two computers should finish in a little over half the time as just my Linux computer. But I can also throw in my laptop which should also be in the same range. So a 3 hour render should go down to a 1 hour render. (Roughly speaking)

Last night around 2300 I finished up the preliminary 3D render of Jose’s Dinner. Now I just need to tweak up the animation with the fine details such as blinking and mouth movements. After that I just need to create the soundtrack and credits and the short film will be completed. I’m excited about debuting it, so this will probably take up all my spare time (instead of playing games or watching tv).

Jose’s Dinner is what I am calling my first true animated short film. Unlike " Penguin Flight", it actually has a plot! A lot a books I’ve read on animation have influenced the production of this short film. Most importantly, I created a 2D animatic - or animated storyboard. It REALLY helped me to get the timings correct and made the process a LOT less frustrating than it was with " Penguin Flight", where I was always trying to guess how long/how many frames an action should take. As I have no training in animation, my timings might still be a little bit off, but they are MUCH, MUCH better thanks to the animatics!