Durian

Release scheduled in November/December , the next Mypaint will come with a lot of new features.
Of course I’m already use most of the new feature on Durian ; and I wanted to highlight my favorites here :
/!\ note : all this picture are from a development version ; they can change in the future Mypaint v0.8 , and all the concept art used to present those screen are outdated (of course)

Pick context

I never see this features in any 2D software, and this is a litlle revolution : We knew by the past color picking , ideal to pick a color in the canvas ; Mypaint now got “Pick context” : Now you can pick the total brush setting ( color/size/opacity/shape…etc…etc… ) on the canvas , or select a layer  by picking the painted area on it with this feature.

New colors selectors

HSV and RGB sliders ; a new color wheel precise and ergonomic , as well as a color history , and a lot of information about colors ( harmonies ). Really cool. The pop-up selector was redone too with nice HSV fast selection, as well as some color variation on the RGB color space.

Straight line for perspective

Now, “Shift” key will help you to draw perspectives lines, the concept of this feature is very good  ; lines keep origin while shift is press so it’s very easy to got some fast perspective grid. ( I pasted the resulting concept art after the feature screenshot above )

Brush system

Before , Mypaint had only a rounded shape to paint with  ; now, with the aspect ratio and angle , “knife” , “marker” are possible. So more dynamic sketching !
There is too some cool new brushes , extremely creative , and thanks to the team to include my set in the defaut brush setting. I played on the picture above a bit with some new interesting ones.

Palette

A very good palette appear with the possibility to generate gradient between to colour insertion auto-magically, have multi group of palette and of course import/export from Gimp.

Ora tools

Not really a Mypaint feature , but now, with this python script plugin, Gimp can open the layered Open raster files made with Mypaint, and Save them too.

Want to help this project ? Quoting the Mypaint blog :

“Besides coders we want translators and people to write documentation. Don’t worry if you don’t have a lot of experience, we will help you get started. We also want packagers so we can get into official package repositories. And someone to help get a Mac OSX version up and running (should not take much) would be great.”

Big thanks of course to the development team ; especially to :

• Jon Nordby (Jonnor) for Ora tools
• Martin Renold (Maxy), the original creator of Mypaint,  for working on my feature request list
• Ilya Portnov (Portnov) for adding so much features !
• Sean J. MacIsaac (SeanJM) for the good designs, Ui mockup on the wiki , and quality feedbacks.

My paint website : http://mypaint.intilinux.com/

Official sources here .

-David

My presentation at Blender Conference included facial topology for animation use, as well as demonstrating a series of facial shapes on our test model.

A bit about my work flow: I start by creating the full symmetrical shape, ensuring natural progression from default shape (0) to full key shape (1). The next step is ensuring proper mixing of shapes. Much tweaking is spent on the more subtle details. Once the shape is completed, I weight paint to break up left/right side to allow asymmetrical expressions.

In his recent post, “Development Update #2″ , Brecht describes some of the development work that has gone into improving work flow efficiency.

Here’s the .blend

Enjoy!

Angela

Last week, I paid a two-day visit to the team in Amsterdam. Aside from getting to know each other, introducing me to the ubiquitous windmill beer and overstretching the definition of “vegetarian” at the local Thai joint, I got lots of cool insights into the production process and, of course, discussed the soundtrack with Colin and Ton.
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At Blender conference I showed an animation of an eye. Because the textures are procedural we might be able to use this eye model to quickly bake high resolution textures for not so important characters. For our main characters I hope to actually model the iris for close ups, so that we get nice shadow casting. The eye movements are some 2.5 f-curve noise modifiers, only to get some life into the animation.

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David made this cool new graphic to promote our dvd presale… so it’s time to tell we plan a to do a Quad box even! It’s just more efficient to have two single layer video dvds (PAL, NTSC) and two dual-layer DVD-ROMs, one with all the  (HD) videos and tutorials, and one with the studio data. (24 GB total).

Still nothing compared to Main sponsors, who will get a TeraByte usb drive with *everything* on it.

-Ton

Bugfixing and bringing back features in 2.5 has been taking up most of our time in the last two weeks. However a number of new features have been added as well, so let’s talk about those a bit.

Campbell and Martin worked on a Gimbal mode for the transform manipulator, which allows you to see exactly where each Euler axis actually is and edit only the single f-curve corresponding to that axis. It also gives you a nice visual indication when you reach Gimbal lock.

Bone near Gimbal Lock

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Hello,

I got some comments and emails last days about the availability of some desktop wallpapers with the concept arts. While reading those,  I thought it was a bit early cause I can make them better a good idea. So, I did three 1920×1200 wallpapers  ( if your screen is lower , you can still scale them down ). And while I was playing, I tweaked too the blog wordpress theme.

Dragon Wallpaper (click to enlarge)

-David

Hi blender community and beyond!

So this is my first blog post for the project and finally I have something to show! In the previous post you have seen the original first minute which took up a lot of my time in the second production week.

Last week before Blender Conference I was experimenting with action animation, basically to get into the groove of what will be needed. Luckily I got enough done to show it at the conference, and now here!

Sintel fighting animation test from Project Durian on Vimeo.

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Hello!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. Yesterday was the last day of the Blender Conference and we’re all still recovering!

But we haven’t forgotten about you. We have a number of posts coming up to go over some of the stuff we showed off at the Durian talk on Sunday.

But first things first. For those of you who missed the live stream, we revealed a lot about the movie–including the (working) title!

Photos by Dolf Veenvliet

BAM! Congrats to “D” for guessing the title right. You deserve a prize! Perhaps a free DVD?

And we also revealed the final character design for our main character– whose name, coincidentally, is Sintel as well!

Click to Enlarge

BAM! Done by the amazing David Revoy of course.

Here’s the video I slapped together to kick off the talk:

Blender Conference Intro Video from Project Durian on Vimeo.

And here’s a quick video to introduce the work we’ve done on the first minute of the film! It’s rough, but hopefully gives you a glimpse of some of the stuff we’ve been doing. All of this material has already been cut– but we feel this has been an excellent exercise.

Durian First Minute - 01 from Project Durian on Vimeo.

Also check out the PDF of this sequence in first draft of the script!

Expect more updates from us soon.

–Colin

Hi all,

Silence here… only means good stuff of course! We’ve got already so much great stuff to show, but we’re saving it all up for the next sunday Blender Conference talk. A bit of a tease is always more fun
After the conference we will be much more open, and just post our amazing discoveries right away. The only thing we’ll be reluctant with is revealing the full story.

What’s everyone working on?

• David concept-arts the Dragon. (We already have a final girl, she’s awesome!)
• Colin works on the conference presentation, and with script writer on final tweaks. We want to cut some in the film… it was getting just too much. Last week’s storyboarding and crappymatic edits reveiled it too.
• Angela is modeling the final character and making facial rig test setups.
• Soenke continues shader testing, he did hair last week, now trying eyebrows and other facial hair.
• Nathan is at home for his bro’s wedding, but he did already make a cool 2.5 rig last week. He’ll be back tomorrow.
• Lee is using this rig now to make a fight shot test.
• Campbell & Brecht are both fixing a gazillion of bugs, and run in and out the studio all the time to get them artists working with 2.5!
• And me? I managed to get Blender compile again today, on my 5 year old mac, and for first time in over a month! Not that I can code now, have to work on the talks on the conference too…

Laters!

-Ton-