Future of Animation Tools - Some WIP Thoughts and Ideas (+ the Role of Pose Sculpting in All This)

As a follow-up on my earlier brief discussion about the general direction for Motion Path editing in Blender, I figured that it's probably time to outline a bit more my longer-term vision for the future of the animation tools (mainly in Blender, but also the wider animation industry at large) to give a bit more context/motivation to my earlier comments.

I had originally intended to release this all a bit later once I had a few more key pieces in place, but, inspired by Raf Anzovin's enlightening blog, Daniel M Lara's Easy Rigging stuff, the exciting developments in the VR-based animation space, and also the 2.8 code quest, I decided to put this out earlier.

In this article, I'm going to try to "throw the ball further" (as Emirates Team NZ would say) and take a more comprehensive view of where we need to going in the medium to long term, as well as what steps we can take now.

(NOTE: I originally started writing this article in NZ, but in between preparing a new laptop for travel, and travelling to/settling in Amsterdam for Code Quest, I've only had time to really work on finishing this in the past day or so).

The Dr is In - PhD, BlenderDev, and Upcoming Project Updates

Woah! It's been over 2 months since I last posted anything here again :(

During that time, I've ended up being super busy with various projects/commitments (which I'll outline below). Unfortunately, this has meant that my todo list/postponed-project backlog had to take a back seat again, along with squeezing in time to write stuff here (Note: This post itself has ended up being rescheduled several times already even!). Hopefully I'll finally manage to get enough time to start making some progress on some of the things I've been wanting to do since early March (EDIT: actually, it's been since October June 2016)! Stay tuned...

[Vote for Me] New Video Describing my PhD Research for #150YOD

Blender community batsignal!   

TL,DR: Please help vote for my #150YOD video (deadline is Thursday/Friday midnight, UTC+12)! Every vote counts!


Like, Share, and Vote (link below)

Vote for my video at the following link:

https://www.thinkable.org/submission_entries/k8Way5qO

Voting Instructions (sorry, that it's a bit of a long-winded process):
1. Go to the competition website
2. Click the "Vote" button
3. Register on the site (Facebook or Email + Name + Password)
4. (If using email, check your email/spam folders, and Activate the account)
5. Back on the competition website, click the "Vote" button again.

Note: You haven't voted until the button says "Remove Vote" and your name appears on the list

Grease Pencil Paper Accepted to Siggraph Asia 2015

I'm proud to announce some exciting news! My paper (with pepeland as co-author) about our work on Grease Pencil has been accepted to Siggraph Asia 2015!  Woohoo!!!

Siggraph Asia 2015 will be held in Kobe, Japan from November 2-5.  I'm excited to be attending and presenting my first paper at an international conference :)

Computational Photography - Removing reflections and obstructions from images

This evening, I stumbled across some amazing work that was presented at Siggraph 2015. I'll let the video do the talking :)

Paper/Details

For all photographers out there, this is an awesome development (even if it does need a series of images, or a video stream to function). If you're anything like, me, you'll probably have your fair share of images ruined by unsightly reflection/glare nastiness (my current pet peeve is the sun striking the windscreen from a shallow angle... it's totally impossible to get rid of, from all the ways I've tried!), or maybe there are some shots with some pesky fences in the way...

Now, all that we're still missing is a method to reliably remove camera shake given a single input image (or maybe 2 if we're lucky :). I've got a nice collection of sample images from before I got my 7D that were ruined by that blasted stuff...

Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to get hold of a demo of this code too in the meantime ;)  Hehehe

Siggraph Report/Link - Pixar's Sketch/Silhouette Posing Tools

Some of the first reports are already coming out about the hot new stuff being presented at Siggraph this year. Perhaps of most interest to me personally has got to be the stuff discussed in this FxGuide article though, about the Dreamworks facial rigs and the new tools that Pixar has got in their in-house "Presto" software!

In particular, the most exciting parts of this are the sketch-based and silhouette based posing tools in Pixar's Presto. What probably isn't widely known (but which I have dropped hints about here and there) is that these are exactly the tools that I've been working on for Blender over the past few years. (Truth be told, if I didn't have to do anything else, right now, they'd be what I'd be spending most of my time working on). My first attempt at this was 3 years ago back in 2012 with the Pose Sculpting tools (experience gained from that work is now powering the new GPencil Sculpting tools). More recently, I've been looking into some more powerful/useful "line of action" sketching tools (though this is all still relatively early-stage work, so there's not much to see just yet).

It is done!

Hoorah! At long last, it is done! Yay!

This ended up taking quite bit longer than I'd initially planned, but I'm glad to finally see this in a "complete" form at last. (There are still a few bits and pieces which could do with a bit of polish still, but at least everything that needs to be there is there for the first time ever :D

I told you so - On the course of action that research should often take but isn't taking

When doing research, there are often quite a lot of times when you wonder whether you're heading in the right direction - that you're researching the right things, that a particular idea will/will not work, that that gut reaction you had initially but couldn't put a finger on at the time that the thing you'd spend the next 2-3 months slaving over (trying to fix some of the most hideously fickle UI event bugs you've ever encountered, and hope to never encounter again) was ultimately a pointless and ill-motivated dead-end was due to an issue that in hindsight is blindly obvious yet nobody in the field seems to be able to comprehend it. At. All. Gaaaahhhh!  

OneNote - An Experiment

After holding out against getting yet another copy of MsOffice for over a year, I finally ended up installing Office 2013 on my laptop. Along with this came a copy of OneNote - Microsoft's note-taking / scrapbook / braindump app to rival Evernote and co. Over the past few days, I've been giving it a bit of trial run to see if it might find any room in my workflow...