A fitting metaphor

Almost everyone familiar with the Olympics knows about the Olympic flame. Once lit, it is never put out. The torch that bears the flame is simply passed between runners in a long relay, until the final runner uses the torch to start the flame in the event arena.

So what does this have to do with tweenMachine? Sadly, more than I’d hoped.

As many of you know, I began working several years ago on an updated version of tweenMachine written in Python. My dream was to complete the conversion fairly quickly, and then move on to adding new features, making tweenMachine even more robust and useful.

As many of you also know, reality has not exactly matched the dream. The effort that began in earnest showed some promise at first. However, progress unfortunately slowed more quickly than expected. In the end, a lot of time has passed with very little progress.

I’ve been stewing over this problem for a long time. Despite the perfectionist in me screaming, “Don’t let go! You can still make this work!,” I already had more than enough evidence to prove otherwise. It was not easy to accept what reality has been trying to beat into me for some time now, but I finally did: I’ve been carrying this “torch” since I built and lit it many years ago, but like Olympic torch runners, I’ve become fatigued. If the flame is to stay alive — and I’m determined that it will — the torch must be passed to another.

The next runner

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Alex Widener! Alex is a pipeline developer at Laika, with prior experience at Pixomondo, Adidas, and Moonbot Studios, and effective immediately will be taking over all development and support of tweenMachine. The tweenMachine Breakdown is also going to be turned over to Alex, so subscribers to that newsletter should be hearing from him fairly soon. Please join me in thanking Alex for stepping in and offering to keep the flame alive and take this torch to places that I cannot!

I’ll still keep a trimmed-down page about tweenMachine for historical purposes, but the new hub for the tool will be here:

https://github.com/alexwidener/tweenMachine

I don’t know what else to say at this point other than a massive THANK YOU to everyone for using and supporting my little tweenMachine tool over the years. When I first started cobbling the MEL code together roughly 14 years ago, I never imagined it would become so popular. I still only have a vague idea of its spread and usage through the industry, but details like that were never very important. I simply wanted to make animators’ jobs a little more streamlined.

If I managed to do that for even one person, I’m happy.