Progress report / Google Group started

If you think you might be interested in the "Lunatics" project, we now have a Google Group for discussion. This seemed like the lowest maintenance way to set up a discussion area for the project. A Google Group (if you don't already know) can be treated as either a "mailing list" or a "forum" at your preference, so that should be reasonably accessible.

The group requires membership to view, but you can request an invitation through the site: lunatics-tv-production

So far, it's a small group, so it's pretty low volume.

Other progress for this week:

• Contacting a character design artist who seems pretty interested in the project. I hope to post details when we're a little more firm.
• I've finally installed Blender 2.5. Now I feel sort of silly about taking so long -- all I had to do was to install the self-contained binary package from Blender Foundation (had been trying to find Debian packages, but so far they have not worked out for me). Now I should be able to start testing software extensions.
• Also some work with embedding Blender in GTK is being done on Pyppet by HartsAntler to bring it up to date with the current Blender. Pyppet is a digital puppetry extension.
• Mark Kane has been working on another package which performs a kind of motion capture based on recorded video. His package is called "Monet". Monet is still targeted to Blender 2.4, because of issues with Python Imaging Library and Python 3.2, which is used in the Blender 2.5 scripting environment.

I hope to start updating this news weekly with a brief report of the progress we're making.