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.

–Ben.

HAAHAHaha Stayin’ Alive

cheers,
-soenke

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

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-

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.

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

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.

Further people have been asking about OpenCL for GPU acceleration. That is something we’re not planning, it wouldn’t be even remotely possible given the time constraints. Also the recently released Open Shading Language by Sony Imageworks would be good to have, but a shading language is not something we can spend time on now, though I think what they are doing is in the same spirit, bringing together physically based and production rendering. I’m looking at their design to see how compatible we can be so someone can implement support for this later, but it looks quite similar, the big difference being of course that we are building a node system and they’re making a shading language.

Indirect Diffuse Light

There’s already an incomplete implementation in trunk based on the approximate AO algorithm. We’ll try to extend this method to do proper shadowing. This could be done using either the recent micro-rendering algorithm (a bit simpler and more flexible) or the pixar technique (proven to work). The main challenge here is keeping performance high enough, it is expected to be quite a bit slower, but hopefully still faster than raytracing, and working on scenes that don’t fit in memory.

Disk Caching

Memory usage is a big problem, especially when rendering in 4K. The plan is that many data structures in the rendering engine will be cached to disk and loaded only when needed. The main implementation issues here are how to do this threaded efficiently and trying to avoid latency killing render performance. There’s many things that could be cached to disk, hopefully we can implement it for most of these:

• Image textures
• Shadow maps
• Multires Displacements
• Smoke/Voxel data
• SSS tree
• Point Based Occlusion/GI tree

Per Tile Subdivision

This is probably the most complex one, we want to subdivide meshrd per tile to render very finely displaced meshes. One challenge is that this requires a patch based subdivision surface algorithm that does not need the full mesh in memory. The existing subdivision library could be modified to do this, but it would not be very efficient. Another possibility is to integrate the integrate QDune Catmull-Clark code.

Other problems are grid cracks, though perhaps these are not too difficult to solve if we take them into account from the start. Another concern is the filtering of multires displacements, this is quite a complicated problem, if it doesn’t get solved we’ll need a simple workflow for baking multires to displacements maps. Existing displacement code also needs to be improved to do filtering properly.

Other issues are how to deal with threading, sharing diced patches between threads, and distributing objects/patches across tiles efficiently. Will be a fun challenge .

For Interested Developers

Of course these are just plans, we’ll see how far we get, though I hope we can do all of them. If you’re a developer interested in helping out, the disk caching would be a good project to pick up as it doesn’t involve that much knowledge of the render engine. Also approximate indirect diffuse lighting could be a good thing to help on, as most of the data structures are already there, the point cloud is already built, it is mostly a matter of implementing the rasterization.

Brecht.

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

UPDATE: