Hi all,

First off I would like to say thanks to all the Blender developers and community for keeping this project alive and growing. Keep up the good work!

And secondly, on a more selfish note, I was wondering how hard it would be to allow bezier shapes to be animated frame-by-frame, in order to rotoscope images, and thus composite images and animations in 3D space? This would be a great feature, and would mean I could stop my search for a good (open source) rotoscoping package. Jahshaka promises this, but isn't quite up to speed yet... In fact, frame by frame keyframing of all mesh objects would be great. In my opinion, while RVK's are useful for some things, there are lot of situations where only good old frame by frame shape keyframing will do the job.

Thanks,

Aaron Hilton
Daysleeper Films.com

Like normal frame by frame keying of lattice objects for simple character/objects.

Suppose you know about animated backgrounds?

he's talking about travelling mattes.
i don't know if they can be done in blender. i've never tried, never needed to.

Yes, exactly, travelling mattes.

The reason I ask is that I saw a tutorial at a Star Wars fansite where someone compositied a hovering droid behind a character using a bezier shape, but wasn't able to do the whole sequence because aside from RVK's they weren't really animateable. He could only do a single frame.

I thought it would be really great to be able to set up scenes in Blender with videotaped characters "cut out" and placed in the scene. At the moment the characters can be cut out but only for one frame at a time.

It might be tricky to implement this idea properly as you'd want to be able to feather the bezier shape too, and to perform colour correction filtering and the like to really blend the two. This is the ideal but isn't necessary right now. Animateable bezier/mesh shapes is a great start.

Aaron Hilton
DaysleeperFilms.com

If you were at a Star Wars fan film site, you've probably already checked out http://www.blenderwars.com . Lots of links to lots of useful software like Mainvision...

Yes, I was at www.blenderwars.com recently.

Mainvision looks like a good program so long as it's workflow has been made less clunky. Axogon Composer is useful, but only for simple composites. I've never done anything *real* with it yet.

Perhaps I am just getting impatient waiting for Jahshaka to fullfil it's promises... It will be great once it does though.

Listen to me, I sound like an impatient end user. Sorry to all the developer types out there.

Aaron Hilton
www.DaysleeperFilms.com