Weekly news 2018-08-06: post-release of episode 26

Hi Patrons! Thank you for all the good comments and feedback after the latest episode of Pepper&Carrot; episode 26 posted one week ago!

A big move in preparation:

At the end of the month of August, I'll move to a new place. It's not far -only 4km away- but it feels good to move after what happened in 2017 (  the burglary and the big water leak in the garden of this February). 

So, on the photo in the top of this article, I took a last picture of my workplace before I started to pack things; with my cats, Noutti (on right) and Tigrette(on left) who keep watching my screen when I draw. 

On the new house, I plan to find exactly the same setup: a cat-station, a windows on the left (because I'm right-handed; to not have casted shadow when I draw on paper), my large tablet Intuos3 A3, and two cheap 1080p monitors. I really like this setup.

Unfortunately, the new house is not really ready; I have to refresh the walls, the floor, kitchen equipments and more. I have a lot of work ahead in August to make it a comfy place to create new artwork and story and live with my wife and Noutti and Tigrette. I also have to finish to pack the old house at the same time. So, starting on Tuesday, I'll be fulltime in Do-It-Yourself mode for the full month :-)

If I have the energy at the end of the day; I'll take advantage of this period to sketch ideas during evenings, and plan the next series of episodes. 

The weather:

This is just a tiny screenshot to give a bit of context; the weather is extremely hot here.

The new documentation:

One of the biggest task I made last week was to plug in the website of Pepper&Carrot a system to display a new collaborative documentation under Sources category. Now all the translation process is documented in detail.

Spring: Blender Foundation open movie

The small team of four artists for the open-movie Spring shared with me their first results; I could see the first minute of the movie this week and the quality is very promising (even if the sequence I saw was not definitive or final-final-final). Here under is a shot of this sequence and then, under, the character design artwork I made for the project back in october 2017. 

The team and the project are used to be mainly guinea-pig to stabilize the big refactoring of future Blender 2.8; and the team had hard time in May, June and July to adapt to the new tool. But nowaday, they get faster and faster. With this short movie produced in-house; the Blender Foundation collect directly feedback, bug reports and crashes. That was similar in 2009 when I participated to the Sintel project and when Blender had the 2.5 big refactor. The end of production for Spring is hard to predict with Blender 2.8 and the small team; but the director told me with humor it wont cross Spring 2019.

You can find more information about this project on the blog of the Blender Cloud. 

A big maintainance

I really love our online collaborative tool Framagit! Last week, I also updated around 400 SVGs from Inkscape 0.91 version to Inkscape 0.92.3 version.

 All English and French version of Pepper&Carrot are now perfectly compatible with Inkscape 0.92.3. They all had to be reviewed visually because the rendering differs slightly and sometime it can lead to a missing soundFX, or a bad position of a speechbubble. 

I scripted a tool to assist me into this task. ( you can see it in action on this video ; on left the script with all the informations, on center a mini windows with "yes or no" to validate or not; and on right two rendering animated: previous version VS newest version ). 

Here is a gif under; so you can see the difference of both rendering. A big part is also due to improvement into the font "Lavi" that I maintain.

The website:

The website also received an upgrade and now display all languages, even the one not complete. The project has many language with only the 6 first episode translated; or sometime from episode 01 to episode 20. I found a way to add the language even if the translation wasn't complete. The pills on the homepage has lower opacity in this case:

So, it was a very intense week were I wanted to do my best to maintain Pepper&Carrot before I'll move. 

I'll give you news about my progress in August (even if it is a single sketch took with my mobile and a lonely mini paragraph, I risk to get Internet cut in the transition).

Have good holidays if you take some; and thank you very much for your support!