Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

David didn’t have enough time to do much design on the snowy environment before he left, which gave me a chance to do it. Now that the fight choreography is well underway I have been doing sketches, talking with Colin and the others and working out a an environment design that looks cool and fits the requirements of the fight. It almost goes without saying, but for the sake of those who are newer to 3D and Blender – the more fleshed out the concept art is the easier the rest of the process becomes. It’s something that took me a while to fully appreciate while I was starting out so I thought I’d just mention it anyway.

Same deal as usual, click to enlarge:

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In order to feed the pipeline as efficiently as possible in our limited time, we worked out this schedule of 3 modeling stages…

1st Stage =  5 days: Model with focus on form/proportions. Lock proportions. Pass to Nathan for rigging.

2nd Stage = 5 days: Model further detailing, topology refinement for better deformation with retopo, final inside mouth/teeth, etc.

3rd Stage = 5 days: Sculpt finer details/surface.

I started with the Dragon Baby 2 weeks ago, followed by the Dragon Adult last week. 1st stages of both are now completed. Today I start on the Shaman!

Dragon Baby, stage 1 model & progression

Dragon Adult, stage 1 model

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click to enlarge

Here some of the concept art concerning the first minute of the movie. Shaman changed to the definitive one after some Al.chemy research, the shaman hut got some drawings too, and the guardian “Jack” got a portrait to help modelling I painted some weapons :  the knife of Sintel, and the blades of the guardians. And to finish my period at the institute in beauty ; I wrote especially for the community a tutorial about my speedpainting process, as you asked me in the previous “1st minute concept art” post.

I’m back to Toulouse (France) tomorrow , but I will surely keep blog posting sometimes as I will continue to work remotely on the Durian. I hope you will enjoy !

-David

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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

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 speed painting 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

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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 favourites here:

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