Lunatics Tutorials

Demo: ABX FIle Context Discovery

Lunatics Tutorials — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:56:35 GMT

ABX is our "Anansi Blender eXtensions", which is our studio helper code. I'm currently working on the core functionality, and one thing I need is to get some context on the file I'm processing so that we can correctly generate names, identify appropriate configurations, and so on.

To this end, I've written a "FileContext" module to get information from the path, filename, and on-disk explicit data files (in YAML format). This applies to any kind of file, not just Blender, so it'll probably be a prototype for a similar module in KitCAT as well.

For ABX, this will be followed with a "BlenderContext" to module to work with data stored inside the Blender file (and probably to copy one to the other).

Soyuz Flight Sequence Assembly: Fixing the Teddy Bear String Rig

Lunatics Tutorials — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:17:04 GMT

Before assembling the Soyuz Flight sequence, SF-1 subsequence, I had to make sure the component libraries were up to date. This video details the fixes I made to the Teddy Bear String Rig to rescale it and make it work correctly with my set.

Soyuz Flight Sequence Assembly: How the Teddy Bear Rig Works

Lunatics Tutorials — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:12:12 GMT

In this 3rd video in the Sequence Assembly series, I explain the way the teddy bear rig is supposed to work, before going into how I updated it to work in the sequence.

Sequence Assembly: SF-1 Intro

Lunatics Tutorials — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:08:57 GMT

This is the introduction to setting up the SF-1 subsequence of the SF-SoyuzFlight sequence. It will contain the character action and shots inside the Soyuz spacecraft during the launch, and be intercut with other subsequences later.

Soyuz Flight Sequence Assembly: Linking Plan Explained

Lunatics Tutorials — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:06:33 GMT

We are developing a tutorial/demonstration course, illustrating our production design process for "Lunatics!" open movie project. This is the first video as part of that course, explaining the plan for linking the various sources files together to create the sequence (this sequence is the flight into space aboard a "Soyuz-SF" spacecraft at the end of episode one).

Screencast: Fixing Broken Proxies

Lunatics Tutorials — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:03:39 GMT

Keneisha Perry illustrates the problems with updating an animation shot file when a character's proxy has become "broken" -- meaning it has become unusable due to changes in the library file (typically, the rig or rig object name had to be changed for some other file to work correctly). In these cases, the animation has to be transferred from the broken proxy to a newly-created one from the library file.

This seems like something that could be (easily?) done with a Python plugin in Blender, but we don't have one to do it. This is a good example of the reason we could use programming help on the project -- there are a lot of little tasks like that this that would probably help with production (but we don't really want to stop production to work on them).

http://www.patreon.com/lunatics
http://lunatics.tv

Screencast: Keneisha Perry on Appending Character Animations

Lunatics Tutorials — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:00:18 GMT

Keneisha Perry shows the process of adding animations to a scene, using the Non-Linear Action (NLA) editor, from existing action libraries to a shot file (this is a shot from our pilot episode, "Prolog").

Moontruck Rigging

Lunatics Tutorials — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 03:45:09 GMT

Rigging for the "MoonTruck" model for "Lunatics!"
Presented by Chris Kuhn, who created this model and the constraints-based control rig for it.

[NOTE (2022): The components of this model have been color-coded for simpler modeling and rigging, it is NOT going to look like this when the materials and textures are finished]

Signature Effect - Dynamic Paint Only

Lunatics Tutorials — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 03:39:23 GMT

The dynamic paint texture used to key the dynamic paint reveal effect.

Animated Writing Test

Lunatics Tutorials — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 03:37:01 GMT

After much more experimentation, I've manage a very slight improvement in the writing animation, and also of course added a simple rigged pen to follow the motion (though this is probably not the pen I'll use in the production shot). I didn't want the pen to look too mechanical. A person writes mostly with the wrist (or fingers -- but when writing large letters like this, the wrist motion dominates). So while the point of the pen follows the text, the top of the pen moves less. I rigged this with two separate animated curve paths in Blender, using bone constraints to get the pen to follow them. I'm hoping this will be easy to integrated with the IK rigging of the character.

(No sound).

Animation Test - Signature with Dynamic Paint Reveal

Lunatics Tutorials — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 03:34:00 GMT

Test using Blender's dynamic paint to reveal an already prepared signature graphic (no sound).
The timing is fairly close to what I want, though it might need some tweaking. The biggest problem is that the brush is revealing some parts before they should be visible. Might need to narrow the brush down a bit.

Result of 3-Camera Technique Test

Lunatics Tutorials — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:30:31 GMT

Three-camera animation test. Footage was rendered in Blender from three camera views of the same animated motion. The footage was spaced-out to allow for process editing effects (dissolves). The final edit was completed in Kdenlive, by overlapping the footage from each shot.

The Blender file contains 5 scenes:

Scene Action -- Contains the animated cubes. This is what the animator interacts with.
Cam-1 Shot / Cam-2 Shot / Came-3 Shot -- Contain animated cameras only. The director (or DP) interacts with this scene.
Sequence -- Contains a sequence editor session with the footage arranged for rendering and output (the resulting shot is longer than the original animation, because the shots are time-shifted so as not to overlap).

R&D: The need for "diff" and "patch" operators for Blender files

Lunatics Tutorials — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:10:09 GMT

Collaboration on programming projects has been dominated since the 1970s by "merge-based" version control, which allows multiple contributors to work on a project together without stepping on each others toes. This can be generalized to other "list ordered" data, but handling "graph structured" data like Blender files is not something we have free software tools for.

So artists are still stuck with "lock based" collaboration methods, where only one person can work on a file at a time, even if the edits they are making are cleanly separated. Merging edits requires a person to meticulously check and manually merge changes, which is a lot of extra work that shouldn't be necessary.

However, algorithms do exist (some of them rather recent) for doing this kind of work, and I think it's time we started turning those into a practical tool for collaboration on artistic works.

This is just one small piece of an infrastructure research and development project for the "Lunatics!" open animated series project. I'm going to be posting more of these videos over the next few months. Eventually they will be cut together into a longer project proposal. I'm not quite sure where this going in terms of the big picture, so I don't really know which part will be first in the proposal.

This is also my first "explainer" video using the Synfig 2D animation package. I will probably be making more use of this.

2-Level Editing in Kdenlive (for 22-2-22)

Lunatics Tutorials — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:04:14 GMT

It's been over 7 years since my last "2-Minute 2-Torial", so it seems only right to bring it back for "Twos Day" -- Tuesday, 22-2-22 (ISO - or 2/22/22 or 22/2/22, if you prefer your dates American or European, respectively).

Transcript:
Did you know that you can use a Kdenlive edit as a clip in another Kdenlive edit?

This is very useful in animation workflow, because we often want to use stand-in versions of shots, and then replace them, later.

In this shot, for example, I simply used a drawing and panned across it in Blender
to create a quick "storyboard animatic".

I also wasn't sure exactly how long it should be. I can adjust that with the speed
setting in Kdenlive.

Later, I went through several versions of the shot, as more and more elements were
animated.

These aren't just different shots. In Kdenlive, they are different kinds of shots:

The storyboard animatic may use the "Change Speed" tool to adjust the timing, or
the "Transform" effect to pan and zoom the image, working with just a few still
images as the source.

The Open GL animatic previews are usually AVI video files, rendered directly from
Blender.

And the final renders are usually a series of frames rendered to a lossless
format like PNG images, for maximum fidelity. This is called a "PNG stream", and is
the usual format for our final animation output.

Each of these is stored differently, and you can't simply reload the clip in the
Kdenlive project bin with the new versions!

But you can update them easily in a separate Kdenlive file.

Then you use that Kdenlive file AS the clip in the scene you are editing.

With proxy-workflow (which I'll explain in another video), this is just as fast as
rendering the shot and including that, but there will be no loss of quality when
the project is rendered.

It also makes it easy to use special effects, like limited framerates, as I used
for this "timelapse" shot. Only the shot file needs to know that it was animated
"on threes".

The final edit file only sees video, through all of these steps, and it updates
automatically from the linked Kdenlive project!

Setting up Multicam in Blender

Lunatics Tutorials — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:45:23 GMT

A multiple-camera configuration allows animating a scene just once, and capturing the action with several cameras. Although Blender has a facility for switching cameras during rendering, it does not allow for any overlap for transitions (or to allow for creative changes in the editing phase).

Detecting Link Failure in Blender

Lunatics Tutorials — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:39:15 GMT

This tutorial is about a problem with Blender (up to version 2.76), which I consider its absolute worst failing: link-failure and the resulting loss of data. There are a number of ways around this problem, which I will cover in a 2nd tutorial, but in this one, I just want to focus on the problem and how you can tell that it's happening. Recovering from this is a pretty advanced topic, and if you've got anyone more experienced to turn to, this video will tell you if it's time to go ask for help!

Importing Lipsync into Blender (Part 2)

Lunatics Tutorials — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:36:28 GMT

In this 2nd tutorial on lipsync with Papagayo for Blender, I explain how to import the MOHO .dat lipsync file into Blender for animation.

Direct link to the download page for the script on our site:

http://rs.lunatics.tv/pages/view.php?ref=262

Tumbling Letter Title Effect (Part 2 - Reversal and Style Animation)

Lunatics Tutorials — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:31:05 GMT

In this second part of the Tumbling Letter Title Effect tutorial, I explain how to get reverse playback using the Blender Visual Sequence Editor, and then how I animated the materials and freestyle lines for the letters to get the "toon materializing" effect.

Part 1, which explains the use of physics simulation for the tumbling, is here: https://vimeo.com/143082633

Tumbling Letter Title Effect (Part 1 - Physics)

Lunatics Tutorials — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:28:25 GMT

This is the first of two videos explaining the tumbling-letter title effect we use for the opening credits of "Lunatics!" The movement of the letters are simulated using rigid body physics simulation.

Linking Our Characters for Animation

Lunatics Tutorials — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:25:33 GMT

This 2-minute tutorial explains how the Lunatics! characters should be linked into a shot file for animation. There are 6 steps outlined here:

Link the character group
Link the Rigify script for the character's armature
Link the Lunatics! face rig control script
Link desired Pose Libraries or Actions (especially the Phoneme Post Library)
Proxy the Armature (and other control objects if they exist)
Assign the Phoneme Pose Library to the Character Armature

[Erratum: the video says to assign the Pose Lib to the mesh, but it's actually associated with the armature]