Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

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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Since my last post and over the holidays I have mostly been working on smaller things which I didn’t even think it worth posting about, some of these were requested for specific tasks, others were just for fun. Recorded 5 videos, read on for the other 3.

And before you ask, all this is in the public subversion builds.

Shape Key Transfer

Grease Pencil Depth

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Since there are more then 3-4 characters to be rigged we agreed having some way to make a rig once and re-use with minimal manual tweaking was needed.
Over the past few weeks Nathan and I have been working together to make a system which can generate these in a way that lets us apply them in a variety of situations.

Nathan broke his rigs down into body parts; hips, neck, spine, finger, arm, palm and leg. with the desired ‘before & after’ for each.
Then I took these and wrote a script that would look at the simple rig and create the final version.

After this it was just a matter of putting it all together to rig an entire character.
If this proves its self to be useful it may well become the defacto auto-rigging system in blender, too early to say now.

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Bug fixing 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!

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!

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Our plan is to do regular development updates, summarizing what we are working on, rather than doing it only for bigger features. Last week and this week the focus is on bug fixing in Blender 2.5. The artists here are already using Blender 2.5 for modeling, shading, lighting, rigging, animation and video editing.  In the Peach project Blender wasn’t used as much in the first weeks, and then we started from a stable version even. So, that immediately resulted in many different bugs and small feature requests from the artists.

We’re not going to list the bug reports here now, instead here’s some photos of our bug lists. There’s also multiple places where you can track svn commits, for example here: Blender project, Campbell’s commits, Brecht’s commits.

A first version of the features wishlist is now available. Interested developers are invited to pick up items from this list. For the non simple features, it’s best to contact me or the module maintainer when you start working on it, so design and implementation can be discussed in advance. Note that this list can’t be considered complete yet, it will keep evolving throughout the project.

For the rest of the month September, developers here at the Blender Institute will still be occupied with Blender 2.5. This is the version that the artists will use, which will definitely help getting it ready for real word usage. In October work will start on Durian features, combined with bug fixing or adding missing things in 2.5. But, that doesn’t stop other developers from working on interesting features already.

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