Sublime Text 2 is since some time my favorite code editor. I use it for everything these days, from Python and Amiga assembler to the code for this website. It’s polished, it’s elegant, and its API is dead easy to use for extending Sublime with custom functionality. I’m that geeky that I still fall in love with simple but beautiful applications.

Anyway, back to the subject, even though we are now getting a very robust and awesome Python implementation in LightWave 3D eleven, that goes above and beyond what we ever could do with LScript, I’ll probably still dabble around in LScript from time to time. At least when doing quick adjustments to older scripts that I don’t currently see any point in spending time to rewrite in Python.

So I’ve made my LScript Package that I created for Sublime Text some time ago available at GitHub for sharing. And by that also open it up for anyone else to add to and improve upon using GitHub’s social collaboration features for coding.

Check out this video for a quick demonstration:

So if you’re into LScript, and have wanted to give Sublime Text a spin, go ahead and grab my LScript package for it.

LScript Package for Sublime Text

Oh, and one more thing, by the time LightWave 3D eleven hits the shelves, I’ll get a lwsdk Python package for Sublime Text going.

Cheers!

To fight that ending of my film, I’m making sure that I’m running a tight ship from the very beginning and I’ve been very careful to keep everything well organized up to this point. But as I’ve went into pre-production, the amount of tasks and assets connected to the project are rapidly growing so I’m now at a stage where I need to come up with a system that can handle the added load without collapsing.

I’ve spent a few days researching digital asset management systems, collaboration systems, task managers and the likes. Everything has been evaluated from linking Excel files together to combining services like Basecamp, Teambox, Redmine with file sharing systems. And I’ve also considered dedicated services for film production like Shotgun. My ideal choice would be something that works now while having the potential to scale without a hefty price tag.

Using a main Excel document with links to sub-documents was the low-hanging fruit option to get something going right away. I created a simple system like that to evaluate, which actually turned out okay. It would work perfect for now. But the minute someone else joins me on this journey and by that we’ll need painless collaboration, the Excel option would crash and burn immediately! I definitely need to come up with a pipeline that scales properly, and that excludes Excel, so I don’t hit a wall and fall down hard somewhere along the production.

Leaving the low-hanging fruit behind, I went to the next level and signed up for a few popular collaboration sites. Teambox was the one I really liked, simple GUI and easy to work with. But at the end of the day, it’s not designed for film production. I started to come up with ideas of how I could shoehorn my needs into these systems, but soon I realized that shoehorning would be an on-going task if I went this route, and by that, I deleted these generic systems from my list of options.

The remaining option was to consider using a dedicated film collaboration and tracking system, Shotgun being my preferred choice. While awesome and living up to all my requirements and needs, it would kill my shoestring budget. As long as it’s just me and if I went with the lite option, it’s a mere $19/month. That’s fine. But I’m pretty sure I’m going to need API access down the road considering how I want my pipeline to work, and then we’re talking about $89/month instead for the studio option. And that cost is per user and month. So when I get more people on board, that sum would rise to a level that is not sustainable for this project. So because of that, Shotgun is not something I can consider.

Back to square one, what should I go with? I had a fourth scenario in my original research notes. I had written a reminder next to it in capital bold letters, “Johan, don’t go down this road this time, use your time for production, and find something that works out of the box!”. But here I am, having decided to go down that road anyway, despite what the ~6-month-ago Johan told me. And that is baking my own asset tracking and collaboration system.

Dancing on my own

So after doing my homework on existing systems and solutions I’m now face to face with creating my own. Crazy, or not, before pursuing my life as an artist, I spent many years working as a coder, so maybe not that crazy after all, and also me still getting some mileage out of those years.

Again, I had to spend another half day making some new research, to decide how to best develop a solution covering my current and future film production needs. Once again I wanted to see if I could find any low hanging fruit, to save time, so I built a prototype on the WordPress system. Using Custom Post Types and extending the WordPress core by writing a model for many-to-many database relationships, I very quickly got something up and running that worked almost as intended, concerning having a web front-end. But that is the catch. It’s very tempting to go with a framework simply because you get some results right away that works almost like you want. Short development time tastes good. But then you keep fighting to tune that framework into exactly how you want it to be and keep running into dead ends, so in the long run, building it on top of something might not always be the best option depending on present and future requirements.

I came to the conclusion that going with that solution wouldn’t scale well and that it would add tons of work at the time I need to grow and connect it with other entities in the pipeline. I don’t want to risk painting myself into a corner, so I threw this prototype away.

This is were I decided that I’ll write the system from scratch. It will take me a bit longer, it will not show any cool results in the beginning, but it will give me a very solid foundation to add features on as the film progresses. And I get a system that works exactly like how I want it to work.

So after about a days worth of coding, I had a new prototype up and running. Here is a preview video of a working example. You have to excuse my tired voice. I recorded the video around 3:00 this morning after a whole day of marathon coding the different systems, so I probably sound a bit apathetic, especially towards the end. Anyhow, here it is…

This is a very simple test, but it validates the concept and the workings of the underlying server engine and its API, and demonstrates a working connection. It’s just a quick early glimpse of my first iteration. So far have almost all my efforts gone into writing the software for the server and designing the API and the database.

For the test in the video I pretty quickly wired together a simple and rough LightWave front-end plugin as well as a simple web front-end. Both are hooked up to the server via my API. The collaboration server is off-site and located in a virtual private cloud at Amazon (where incidentally I also run a render farm, you see, something might get hooked up there as well. Wink wink notch notch.)

Anyway, as simple as the preview was on a front-end level, I’m still quite satisfied of how far I got with this iteration of the system.

The plan now is not to start adding shiny, sexy, new front-end features. Instead I’ll continue working on the server software and API. To make sure I have a rock solid foundation to scale with the film production. As long as I have a solid framework that’s extendable combined with a powerful all-access API to safely store all data within, features to interact with it can be added when needed as the film progresses.

I’ve followed the most common conventions when designing the API to make it as easy to use as I possibly can. When authenticated it gives access to everything. Even though I did my test implementation with LightWave 3D, any application that has a SDK or a decent scripting engine can communicate with the API. The API is completely application neutral. Subversion for version control of assets is of course something that is on the top of my list to allow to take advantage of the API. I’ve previously written a SVN integration for LightWave that I’ll probably bake right into this.

In time I hope to make a few more integration plugins if needed for some of the other applications I use. modo and After Effects come first to mind. But maybe also a panel for Photoshop. Time is really the only limit of which apps I’ll hook directly in to the system. Perhaps Adobe Bridge could be a candidate. I haven’t checked out what you can do with the Bridge SDK, but maybe it can be made into a desktop client for the system. Concerning Bridge I don’t have a clue of what I’m talking about, I’m just making some brainstorming without knowing the limitations or possibilities of that particular application.

This is of course distracting me from the actual film production for a few more days, but once it’s, it’s done. And I believe that I’ll quickly get those days paid back in the terms of a more efficient and flexible workflow. Having a solid management and collaboration system for the film pipeline will with a bit of luck turn out to be worth its bytes in gold!

That’s it for this update.
Over and out!

I’ve simply been to busy to get around posting it to my journal as well. But here we go, the viewer and the source code is now available at SourceForge. You can download the viewer, the code or even join in and contribute to the project if you’re into development.

Turntable Viewer at SourceForge

What’s been keeping me from doing it earlier is to find and understand under what Open Source license to release them under. Many people just grab a license, often GPL, without really understanding what affect that actually will have on their software. I wanted to make an educated choice and do my research so I didn’t fall into any traps.

GPL was the first license I looked at, but it’s not very suitable at all to release open source plugins and scripts under. I found out that releasing a plugin under GPL for LightWave 3D actually violates the GPL. You cannot release a plugin for a non-free program like LightWave and the way LightWave handles plugins under GPL. Well, you can, but then you have to modify the GPL. That was just not a road I wanted to travel, and combined with all the restrictions GPL applies on the software, made me abandon the idea of using GPL.

Instead after reading and comparing a bunch of other open source licenses I ended up using the new BSD license which was exactly what I wanted out of the box. It is a very permissive license that allows you to use the source code in many more ways than GPL allows you to. You can do pretty much anything you want with my sources, including using them in closed software projects without having to share your code, as long as my copyright is left intact.

And the reason I’m using Google Code is that, well, it will probably be around for a very long time, to eliminate the risk that they would one day disappear from the net.

Excellent! So if you’re interested in LScripting, feel free to download and dissect my sources, make your own versions and so on…

My Google Code Project Page
Browse the Source Codes
Checkout the Source Codes with Subversion

Enjoy!

We had already talked about getting more data pushed between meshes this way, and when also Timothy Albee asked if Weight Map transfers could be added to the Conform tool, I made a branch with this variation.

As it was something I already had in mind, and it wasn’t that much work to change a few things to copy vertex maps instead of conforming the geometry after the matching has been processed, the transfer version was alive in a few hours. Sunday fun! This first iteration can transfer Weights, Morphs and Selection Sets by matching the UV layout. Feel free to get the tool if this is something you’d find useful.

Read more and download Transfer By UV

The concept behind this LightWave 3D modeler addition is to be able to use a base mesh and conform it to other variations, even if the variations have gone through major changes. Like chopping off and replacing body parts, dramatically altering the look, size and proportions. The plugin uses the UV layout as a point of reference to find which points to match between the source and destination mesh to perform the conform. The only requirement is that the UV map layout is basically kept identical between the different meshes to be used.

By using the UV layout to make the conform, point order and point count becomes irrelevant. This is especially useful when working with sculpting applications and then bringing back variations to be used for morphs or new meshes.

Read more and download the plugin here

This started out as a script I wrote a long time ago when I worked with a project where I constantly needed to change between different Global Illumination settings, so to keep my sanity I whipped up a script to quickly switch them on the fly.

Render Presets for LightWave 3D

I continued to find it useful and over time I’ve included additional settings that I’ve had use for. I finally decided to clean up the user interface to be more generic and add more of LightWave’s common render settings so I could release it in public. In this release presets can be setup for Global Illumination, Render Flags, Camera Antialiasing, Backdrop and Processing Effects. I might add a few more options in the future when time permits.

Read more and download the plugin here

There were a few layer to OBJ scripts available for modo but none that worked like I wanted or properly with modo 401. I needed this functionality badly right now to bring layers out as separate OBJ files and then take them into ZBrush as SubTools. I do this many, many times each day in my work so this script saves me some decent amount of time. Maybe GoZ will deprecate this script when it’s released for Windows. We’ll see, but until then it’s a nice companion for a modo <-> ZBrush workflow.

Get the modo script here

I’ve been wanting to learn Python for some time now, and creating this script was a nice little introduction to Python for me. Many other applications I use can be scripted through Python, so definitely a good language to touch some base with in other words. Not to forget that the upcoming LightWave CORE will have a solid Python API.

We have the native FiberFX as well as the Sasquatch plugin from Worley Labs. Unfortunately the actual creation and styling of hair guides is still a bit cumbersome in LightWave, which is a shame really as the quality of the renders can be of outstanding quality.

FiberFX has done some progress in the effort of bringing hair styling tools into LightWave, but it’s still not as powerful as you can find in some other applications. And in the day and age of the common multi application pipeline you simply use the best tool for each job, if you have access to them. In my case I’ve have 3ds Max at my disposal, which has some pretty good hair styling tools. My problem was that I couldn’t find any decent solution to transfer the guides from 3ds Max into LightWave unless I shelled out another 2 grand. So I ended up writing this little LightWave modeler tool that imports hair guides (or splines really) via Autodesks ASCII Scene Export format, .ASE.

Check out my ASE Spline Import page for more details and to download the tool.

If you find this tool useful, I hope I’ll see some really nice hair renders surfacing in the LightWave community. :)

I recently polished it a bit by giving it a decent GUI and some more options, so I could release it. I hope some of you might find the tool useful in your workflow.

It’s a more elegant symmetry correction solution than my SymmXMirror tool as it’s non-destructive, but they both have their time and place when appropriate to use.

Fix Symmetry offers three different functions to help taking care of symmetry problems in objects while modeling. Symmetry Check, Quick Fix and the interactive Tolerance Fix.

Check out my Fix Symmetry page for more details and to download the tool.

Have fun and enjoy! :)