Please note that although we’ve finished the short, due to some festival restrictions I can’t post the FINAL cut of the short! If you’d like to see it in its entirety, please send me an email at andrewgartner@gmail.com so I can send you the protected link to the full version.  Please identify yourself in the email, just so I can have a reminder of who has seen the short in case any questions arise for festival submissions.  I hope everyone understands that I do not want to damage the chances for my teammates to get the recognition for their hard work on this piece.  Thanks in Advance!

Stoveghost Rough Edit 3 from StoveGhost Studio on Vimeo.

http://www.postgazette.com/pg/10346/1110226-53.stm#ixzz17vYz0fwp

Also check out the show itself here:

http://bvw.etc.cmu.edu/content/show-redirect

A huge thank you to all of the people who helped make this show happen!

Slainte

The PandaLE team is wrapping up the ETC flavor of the Panda3D level editor here in a few days.  We’ve managed to get through all the core features and add a few useful ones of our own.  For me, the fact that i can tweak shader input values and get the results instantly in the viewport is a HUGE time saver.  Plus programmers don’t have to place everything in the world any more, and artists don’t have to lay out a level in one giant scene file.  They can just create individual assets and lay them out as they choose.  For a quick peek at the documentation and overview of the project go here.  http://wiki.etc.cmu.edu/pandale/index.php/Main_Page.  There’s a good chance this level editor will make it into the Panda3D main source code on CVS in the next week, so if you’re a Panda person be sure to check it out.

The Stoveghost team is also making its way through the storyboarding process as we get nearer and nearer to the ETC pitch dates for projects.  Although we had originally planned on having a full blown animatic by this point, we really wanted to make this story solid so we spent the time there.  I’ve also been drafting our workflow and pipeline, including how we are going to use Renderman throughout the process.  I had been considering using Disney’s open source Ptex format for the short, but it looks like its just a few months away from being usable for the project.  I’m missing one crucial step in generating vector displacement and point cloud ambient occlusion out of Mudbox, and I’m not sure I have the time to write the utility myself.   Also, since it seems Pixar has given back a utility to do just that for the current beta of Mudbox (see this http://area.autodesk.com/siggraph/video23), I may just want to wait a bit.   However, if the faculty here at the ETC suggest we need a bigger tech component I may have to roll up my sleeves and build the plugin.  Thankfully, 3D-Coat (and some others) have added PTex to their model painting interfaces, so it’s only displacement, AO, and reflection that I have to worry about.

Also, I have been notified that I’m spending this semester working on an ETC student project with Caterpillar as a client (they make really big earthmovers and the like).  Not sure how much more i can say about it until we figure out if we’re under NDA or not but I’m super excited.  Especially if they let me take a spin on a Bobcat or something.  Grad school rocks when they let you play with life size Tonka toys.

Finally, the big ramp up to the ETC’s Building Virtual World’s (BVW ) class has begun.  I’m taking on a new TA role that didn’t exist last semester by wrangling all the hardware and pipeline issues.  In addition I wound up as the Tech coordinator for the show in December.  Should be a lot of fun to help the first years through the process (considering most have never used any of the 3D packages or Perforce before).   Also, a lot of late nights spent setting up the hardware devices for the class the following morning.