Durian

The past few weeks Lee has been hard at work designing the Gatekeeper Fight. It’s not as easy task! We’ve been trying to figure out the best way to visualize the fight scenes, because a written beat sheet only can communicate so much, and blocky animatics can be somewhat difficult to read.

So. To better visualize the fight, the team decided to go out and record ourselves clobbering each other with mops and broomsticks.

Check it out.

Fight Choreography Experiment from Project Durian on Vimeo.

This video was shot and edited by our new documentary videographer, Ali Boubred!

Tips for decoding the fight: Nathan is Sintel, Lee is a bandit enemy. They’re in a bunch of snow.

Yeah, not everything is totally clear, and we didn’t get as far as we wanted to. This is meant to be extremely rough - a communication tool. It’s really helped us think things through. Hopefully we’ll be doing something similar/better for the fight at the beginning of the film. Stay tuned!

–Colin

For the past week or so I’ve been doing tests with the cloth simulation in Blender. Nothing too fancy, but just trying to shake out the most obvious issues before we try to use it directly in production.

The basic cloth simulation–how the cloth moves–already works quite well:

cloth_01.ogv

Read the rest of this entry »

At the moment we are thinking about doing our own skin photos to texture Sintel and I’m stuck with thinking about how to create good skin photos. So if you have anything that might help, like super high quality skin images you made yourself and want to share or if you have knowledge/links about creating epic skin photos or anything else that is important, go ahead and throw it at us. But be aware that everything you post here needs to be cc-by.

In the meantime you can crit a city scene I worked on the week before last week. Everything except the barrel and the potteries is straight forward modelling. The potteries are bezier-circles with a bezier curve as a bevel object and the barrel is a simple array deformed by a lattice.

-soenke

For the past two weeks I’ve been working on sculpting full time, which I’m quite happy about, it’s been a year since I’ve been able to work focused on actual 3D computer graphics related code for that amount of time, rather than the Blender 2.5 project which is mostly about user interface. The development is being done in a separate sculpt branch, and it’s not stable yet, though test builds have appeared on graphicall.org.

I continued the work done by Nicholas Bishop to speed up sculpting. We started discussing design about two months ago and decided on using a coarse bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), after which Nicholas implemented it. What this does is split up the mesh into nodes, and organize them in a tree structure. Each node has about 10000 faces, this is much coarser than a typical BVH used for raytracing or collision detection. We wanted the structure to have very low memory overhead and be relatively quick to build too.

The BVH is central to various optimization that were done, we use it for:

• Raycasting into the BVH to find the sculpt stroke hit point.
• Recomputing normals only for changed nodes.
• Creating more compact OpenGL vertex buffers per node.
• Redrawing only nodes inside the viewing frustum.
• Multithreaded computations by distributing nodes across threads.
• Storing only changed nodes in the Undo buffer.

Memory usage in sculpt mode before and after (2 million poly regular mesh).

In reaction to comments on the past post about Paint-over , we decided to give an extra revision of the main character design with Sintel.
Now we are sure to be away from the main industry standards ; Thanks !

- David

As a texture and a previz’ test, I did a 2D paint-over ( in Gimp ) on simple AO white rendering of the 3D mesh of Angela. I’m happy to share you some WIP pictures and the result.

-David

Rendered turn-around with wireframe that David put together with Soenke.

In the midst of this week’s permit adventures, Sintel’s head has been approved! I am currently using retopo tool to improve and further redefine topology structure for animation use.

Note: Geometry pieces of hair, eyebrows, lashes are temporary and meant to define shape. They will be replaced with hair particles.

As it is, there’s quite a bit of preparation that goes into showcasing a model’s wireframe in a render. End results are also not as desirable/accurate. Discussion was brought up on improvements for this in 2.5!

Angela

One of the more complex producer’s jobs is to arrange for an international team the legal paperwork to be allowed to stay and work in the Netherlands. According to the authorities, we have five ALIENS in the team who need to get official residency permits. The process is as follows;

- make appointments with IND (immigration services), get 30 page forms for each alien to fill in.
- take aliens to a place where you can get real approved passport pictures (no smiling!).
- take aliens to the Amsterdam city office to subscribe as a resident (needs passport, picture, rental contract of appartment, chamber of commerce stuff, etc)
- take aliens to the IND offices and wait 2.5 hours while IND employees try to fit aliens in a category… but wait, there it is, a miniature exception clause for artists who work temporarily in the Netherlands!
- then being sent back to office to redo the paperwork based on new clause.
- take aliens to the IND offices again, and * hoorah * they get a 6 month temporary residence granted!

And this is the short version of the whole process You can imagine the above took about 3 days of time & energy of the team… this week.

Anyway! Another great news is that we’ve found a documentary filmer - Ali Boubred - to hang out in our offices to record action and edit it all. He will soon introduce himself here too.

Oh, and we survived the final step in the process with the Dutch Film Fund today… today I went there with Esther and Colin to defend the latest script changes, production details and some finances. The board will decide within 2 weeks…

Pictures: Nathan, Campbell and me in train. Made by Colin’s iphone. It were cold rainy days indeed…

-Ton-

Here are some additionnal artwork done last 2 days around this first minute of the new script with few anecdotes about, as my period ending very soon in 2 weeks, I try to give my maximum and do as much of speedpainting I can. As time is missing with the last script revision, I will not do storyboard and try to finish the concept art, spend time with Soenke and Angela too on the process of 2D to 3D conversion.

-David

• the Shaman with 4 arms:

I design him this way to break the usual “indian master” shamanic cliché. I very like the spider 4 arms slow movements and gesture. Ideal to get a talking scene visually less boring. I really personnaly like this design.

Most part of the team is enthusiast or just ok with , but Colin don’t feel comfortable with the idea that human can have 4 arms in our fantasy world. This concept change his vision about the storytelling of the scene too.  So this Shaman concept will surely evolve in a different way,  on Monday we’ve got a meeting about the fantasy level of our world as we don’t have any general concept information about characters, environnement or the civilisation in the script work of Esther Wouda. So, we will invent it to give more background to our fantasy world.

We will study too the fun idea of Ton to build the design of our Shaman around our lovely smyling server at the Thaï restaurant.

• the 4 gatekeepers :

Half warrior / half religious,  our gatekeepers are a band of 3 guys plus a strong master.

Ton wanted to name them with 4 names of French presidents , but I was against. So, we found them some code name : “Jack” for the master cause he looked at first as the comedian Jack Black,  Smith for the second ( Agent Smith of Matrix ) , after we got a classical dark assassin, and our philosopher “LaoTseu”. Of course, they appear not long enough to develop their character too much , but our fun code name help to talk about the fighting organisation and they are far easier to remember than 4 name of French presidents ! Lee is already working on the “crappymattic” of the scene with Colin.

• Speedpainting 2D previzualisation :

This not a shot of the movie, but more an inspirationnal shot to give an idea to the team of the amount of snow / fog / and how it interact with color.

For the moment , I do this exercice with all the key scene of the movie. Behind “Jack” , you can see a fat man ( just a blury head)  ; he was the “fat guardian” concept art. We removed him from the band , cause too hard to kick fast for our Sintel.

Alrighty!

Since before the Blender Conference we’ve been working to improve and condense the script– and we’ve ended up restructuring the film somewhat.  So the first minute has changed dramatically!

Here I give you the script and temporary breakdown for the new First Minute of “Sintel.”

We’re gonna do a few tweaks and polishes today, and then the script will be locked!

–Colin

Edit: Here’s a PDF version of the breakdown, for those who requested it.