Today's Top Tip: Workaround for buggy auto-weighting in Blender

If you're using auto-weighting in blender and you come across a complex mesh where it just isn't working - you probably have flipped normals.  Just tab into edit mode and W>flip.  If that doesn't work  my workaround was to build a much lower resolution mesh with nice clean topology for auto-weighting, then use this script which I quickly cobbled together to proximity copy weights.  It will copy all the weights from the source object to the target object, but be warned it will overwrite any existing vertex groups on the target, which you might be using for other non-binding related tasks.

Fake Plastic T-Pose

Jonny's nearly done, just some more work on the hair and cloth collision meshes before texturing, shape building and rigging.

Converting MonkeyJam Files to Spreadsheets with Python

I've timed out the 2D blocking for all 42 shots of my 'Crows' short in MonkeyJam.  Today I realised it would be great to have this accessible as real paper X-sheets which I could print and annotate as I work through the shots in 3D.  MonkeyJam beta's print feature seems pretty unstable and sometimes just generates junk, so I managed to hack together this quick python 3 script which will read the MonkeyJam '.xps' file and spit out a .csv file which you can then open in OpenOffice or Excel (or just open in notepad and copy and paste into a pre-formatted spreadsheet with all the right font sizes, column widths etc).

T is for Topology

...with which I'm wrestling....

Jonny's hands, arms, t-shirt, jeans and pumps meshes all work-in-progress, the most complete of my models so far, with some subtle asymmetry.  The head meshes and the farmer and dog are also pretty far down the line but still messy shape-wise.  Its awesome to have access to the tube project's character meshes as a topology reference, one of the perks of being an intern on the project!  Working in blender-2.57-freestyle - hopefully will have some python shader code going soon!

Crows First Animation Completed

First piece of background animation done!

Crows Work In Progress

This needs more comp and rain streaks on the window, and should probably be half the speed.


One of a flock of four.  Quite happy with this first rough.

Here's some diagrams of a toe-first running action I made from video footage of a barefoot kenyan boy.

Crow References

I've been thumbnailing like crazy trying to plan out the layout and blocking before I even sit down at the computer.  I started going through the film on a scene-by-scene basis then realised it would probably be better if I'd begun with some character-trait walks, runs, flights etc. to show how each of the four different characters moves.  For reference on the crow flight I've split up some videos into frames and overlayed the 'keys' (or every frame where there's space on the page).  It has the same effect as in the multiple exposure photos you see in Edgerton's Stopping Time.  Hope these are useful bits of animation reference.

Crow landing close time intervals from here.

Crow landing larger time intervals from here.

Crow flight extreme keys only just after take-off.

Every frame of a crow take-off.

Crow-flight with real-time spacing from this footage.