Durian

NOTE: Forgot to mention we all use latest SVN builds, so anything above revision 26680 to 90 or so should work fine.

Hello awesome Blender Community!

Thanks for the comments on the Guardians in the previous post, I agree with most of them.

For those who mentioned the time frame and scale of the project – that is the main reason the characters look the way they do. There are plenty of other factors I can point the finger at like:

• getting familiar with using 100% Open Source and Creative Commons tools and resources
• uncertainty about things working in 4k
• not being used to the visual style we are trying to work in (not quite Pixar stylised but much further in that direction than realism)
• not using things like raytracing, higher polycounts for base meshes and most other tricks I have been trying to previously construct a workflow from…

…but the main issue is still good old fashioned time.

The Guardians were scheduled as all four characters to be worked on at the same time. Modelling, hair, texturing, facial expressions and so on. Other than getting a head start on Jack’s face, the bulk of the modelling was done in a week. Facial shapes (so far) were done for all four in a bit over a day. Granted they use a lot of the same pieces and materials but working on four characters at the same time isn’t particularly efficient. As you can imagine if something was updated, then it often needed to be updated in the other four files for consistency. The four rig files are separate too, so everything needed copying in there as well. I tried merging all four characters into the one blend file for a while but had to split them back out eventually anyway.

The result of the such a time frame is four characters that at least work to a certain level, but to be perfectly honest I wouldn’t include them in a reel or portfolio. Talking with Ton about the current level of the characters, I explained that I can’t think of one quick area that we could schedule to bring them up to a higher level. (We at the Blender Institute also agree that Proog and Emo have more character and polish by the way.) Given more time there is plenty of things I would tweak or simply redo outright, which would be fine for a personal project, but on a really tight schedule that we are having issues sticking to as it is, their budgeted time is already more than over. Originally I should be well into the modelling and texturing work of the snowy mountain range by now.

So – where to from here? Excuses don’t get a film done.

There has been much support from the Blender Community – financial support, donations of textures, development work and generally cheering us on. As always this is very much appreciated! There has also been talk but nothing really put into practice yet about community contribution to the art assets themselves. This is our first go at changing that:

guardians_r854.zip – 317.8mb (All four characters + Textures)

Apologies for the relatively large file, but if I sampled the textures down too much then there wasn’t a huge point in including them. (Most now 2k instead of 4k.) This file includes all the Guardian meshes and textures with the current rigging progress. Just a basic camera and spotlight with some environment lighting. You should be able to see pretty obviously once you start playing around where the current issues are. I’m not a fan of the hands either for the record.

For the film, we probably won’t use raytracing but it hasn’t been ruled out completely. The lighting in the previous image was kept quite simple because the textures and materials need to hold up before compositing and so on. More of an in-house review image than a promotional image. (One of the corrected ones looked quite dark on my monitor – good Eizo – here so we may have to get them calibrated.) Before I keep rambling -

Feel free to play with basically everything except the face topology as that helps to transfer face shapes and speed maintenance things like that up. Play with textures, additional modelled details, scars, dirt, hair (please!) character traits and whatever you would like to try to make them more fun and unique. Please stick to the style and details of the concept art below where you can, but at this point we are unleashing them a bit to see how far the community can help us bring them visually.

Thanks in advance for your time if you lend a hand- I hope you enjoy playing with them and I look forward to seeing how this turns out. Community involvement is something we probably should have tried to start sooner.

Uploading

There is an open ftp space on blender.org. It works like this:

• ftp to: download.blender.org
• user: anonymous
• password: your email address

When logged in, go to the directory ‘incoming’. What you put there is visible here:
http://download.blender.org/ftp/incoming/
This upload space deletes all old files after a couple of weeks, so don’t use it for permanent storage, link to your file in the comments and we can look into it.

–Ben.

Always room to improve (with the exception of time), but at this point here are the Guardians.

–Ben.

Lots of artifacts, no real coloring, material work or texturing… but it has character

HAAHAHaha Stayin’ Alive

cheers,
-soenke

Over the past few weeks I’ve started doing “Layout” work for Sintel. Layout is the stage where we figure out the basic character blocking (in this case choreography), camera angles and movement, as well as the timing and rhythm of the edit. At this point the sets and environments are also roughed out in low-poly form. The design of the environments greatly influence blocking, as well as composition/shot design.

Much of these decisions have already been sketched out in storyboards, but layout makes the parameters of sequences much more concrete.

Here is what the opening scene currently looks like:

Much is subject to change. (Especially the first shot.) Predub sound by Jan Morgenstern. I welcome your feedback!

–Colin

Freshly arrived from across the Atlantic: Jean-Sebastien Guillemette from Montreal!
He’s going to help us putting the film together: modeling and design, scene layouts, lighting, render, composites. Exciting

Oh, and I’m back from a 2-week’s holidays in La Palma, Canarian Islands. I’ve spent a week on slowing down and relaxing, and a week on Blender 2.5 code (drag’n'drop). One one of my walks there (breathtakingly beautiful green island) I came by Dragon Trees. These are very ancient long living trees that are an important symbol in our film too…

-Ton-

At the studio we have to be able to maintain and work collaboratively with a large number of files. For those who are interested, I made a little tour of the system we have set up as well as the process within Blender to link in groups from other .blend files.

Word of caution: when working with files that reference other files, be *very* careful with filenames and filepaths! Moving files around or renaming things can result in quite a headache.

–Colin

Edit: Here’s a link to Blender-aid, the content management tool for Blender I mentioned in the video.

(Updated with hairy beard render)

Hi all,

A bit of a quick update to keep the community in the loop.

(Thumbnail of course)

It’s been an experience trying to get things together as quickly as possible. How I would ideally like to do it is treat each character completely individually, have fun with the topology, all the unwraps and textures, spend a lot more time dirtying all the clothing and so on. Basically get really involved on every level and push and tweak things around  because I find all that quite enjoyable.

The schedule here is much tighter than what I have worked with before both in and out of a studio environment, so I am (gradually) getting used to the mindset of  ‘have something that works as soon as possible and progressively refine with the time remaining’. With that in mind, these guardians are getting close to the ’something that works’ mark in the sense of texturing. There is more to be done – especially the faces with scars, eyes, individuality and so on – but for now I’m moving on to the hair, and fur for the cloaks. Mix of hand painting and photo reference. The skin is all hand painted (though WIP) but I like how that is coming along. Was quite enjoyable seeing as I haven’t hand painted skin textures for a while.

Anyhow, that is where the guardians are at. Much that could be refined or simply added but we’ll see what time permits.

(Edit) A bit of fun here and there is a good thing, so sharing a screencap of eyebrow WIP:

Back to work.

(Edit 2) Hair Progress Render:

Shows up the work needed in the face texture(s), but quite happy with the hair settings for now. Can probably cheat the hair blending in a bit with texture and the darkening of his hood will help the top hair line as well. Saved most of my test renders (15) so will figure out some sort of thing (slideshow or something) that shows the progression. Was worried about hair a bit because it’s been a while since I’ve done any. Getting there!

–Ben

I’ve moved to working on the rendering engine, which will be my main focus in the next 3 months. There’s still some fixing needed on the sculpt tools but I won’t do any big changes anymore there. The planned rendering development consists of four parts.

Shading System

The shading code will be refactored to make a clean separation between materials and lamps, and some corrections will be made to the current lighting calculations. But mostly the intention is a more modern system to design materials, one that is not so much geared to direct lighting from lamps only, but works well also for indirect light. Nodes will also be central to the way materials work rather than something glued on top of it. It’s basically a merger between physically based rendering materials that are design for advanced lighting algorithms, and production rendering materials that can do things like output passes or use some tricks for speed.

The current design is on the wiki. We most likely won’t implement the full thing for Durian, but the intention is to implement the foundation and the parts that we use ourselves. Improved raytracing can then be implemented by others later.

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Hi all,

Export UV Layout is back in 2.5 and is nicer than it used to be:

Also, you can now edit the right half of a symmetrical UV layout / mesh and then mirror it to the left half:

Anywho, not the greatest examples -  just a quick post to let you all in on the joy of having this stuff working! Character texturing is currently going on at the moment so as you can imagine it’s quite handy.

- Ben.

–Nathan
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