Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
Werwack edited this page Aug 10, 2022 · 12 revisions

News from the development side

Hi,

My name is Julien Blervaque, I'm the designer of Shot Manager, the main developer and the current maintainer. To me Shot Manager represents a real step forward to organize, explore and shoot animation in a 3D scene. I believed in it and it proved to be very efficient in production and really suitable to needs of layout and previsualization.

Shot Manager currently has many features and is pretty stable. There are still several things and paradigms I would like to experiment with it in the future.

  • 2022/08/10: Today it a great day! Official launch of Shot Manager 2.0! All along with a teaser to illustrate the main lines of the storyboard workflow!

    I'm glad to see all that online. The last 10 days were really busy. We wanted to do the release during Siggraph, and here it is! This allows some issues to be closed, and I opened some new ones to track the new features development and the roadmap. I am also updating the documentation. There is still this strong need for video tutorials though :D I'll try to work on some during the next few weeks...

  • 2022/06/21: Last week it was the Animation Film Festival at Annecy (France). I met the Blender team there, it was really great to see them again! Nice talks. They offered me to do a presentation of Shot Manager on their booth and they liked the add-on pretty much. I'm very enthusiastic with the perspective of having more discussions with them and Daniel Lara Martinez.

    I am still improving the upcoming version 2.0. You can follow the development and get the latest pre-releases here: Shot Manager V2.0 Beta

  • 2022/04/24: At last! A new version released! And not a small one, this one supports Blender 3.1! There is some sweat in this one, believe me... The fact that the Blender Foundation is changing the Python version every here and there from one release to another is a NIGHTMARE for developers. I mean, when you have some dependencies such as OpenTimelineIO, that you rely on an official wheel distribution and that this wheel just doesn't exist since the specified version of Python is not supported yet... So at the end, and (huge) thanks to the contributors of OpenTimelineIO (Jean-Christophe Morin and Nick Porcino), wheels were created and I eventually added them inside the Shot Manager add-on package (instead of waiting for there official online publish on pypi.org).

    In the meantime I'm actively working on Shot Manager V2! Big addition there: a full storyboarding workflow! Will support 2D as well as 2.5D grease pencil drawings. A REVOLUTION here! 🤩 A public beta release should come out mid-May. Stay tuned!

  • 2022/03/15: Today, as for a month now, I'm working on the new Storyboard module. My surprise of the day comes from the fact that in order to avoid an import cycle issue between classes Shot (UAS_ShotManager_Shot) and GreasePencil (GreasePencilProperties), which are each one referring to the other, the use of a PointerProperty introduced in a Monkey Style leads to a read-only attribute. Weird. See this thread as an illustration: Custom pointer property is read only?. So I ended up introducing a CollectionProperty instead, which will do the trick.

  • 2021/12/04: After 1 month of hard work I eventually release V1.6! New UI choices and solutions for more flexibility in the workspaces, more stability, better performances... And a bunch of new cool features such as the conversion of camera bound markers to shots!! Enjoy!

  • 2021/10/19: Release 1.5.73 now has OpenTimelineIO 0.13 on Windows! Big step here! Plus improvements and robustness on the Retimer tools and a few nice small features. Next step: the doc! (again)

  • 2021/09/21: Shot Manager 1.5.65 released yesterday, now available on Blender 2.93 !!! Youhou!! Well, EDL import and export have been removed so that the add-on can work without OpenTimelineIO, but this is a necessary feature in production so it will come back soon ;)

  • 2021/09/14: I'm working on improving the documentation on ReadTheDoc and implementing a more robust mechanism of feedback in order to inform the user if something went wrong during the installation process. Next release is expected at the end of the week, stay tuned!

Clone this wiki locally