Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

A while ago, something strange happened while working on Sintel. A trailer was released for a movie called How to Train Your Dragon, with a very similar theme to what we’re working with. Strange how that happens, eh? I guess dragons are just the ‘in’ thing these days. Apparently we are at the mercy of trends too.

Anyway, the film was recently released here in the Netherlands, and so we went to watch it in IMAX 3D. Admittedly, we were actually blown away by its awesomeness. Crikey! These facial expressions sum up our reactions to the film – a mix between being awed and scared at the same time.

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Zoom, first blog post. Since I only recently arrived myself, I’m still getting used to things here. I decided to go for a quick institute tour to check out what everyone is working on. So, here are some sneaky sneak peeks of top secret Durian goodness, with out of focus depth of fieldness to protect you from the epic awesomeness of PROJECT DURIAN.

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I spent last week with the Durianers in the Blender Institute to continue art directing and doing paint-overs. Unfortunately , as most of them concern the end of the movie or reveal part of the story, I can’t show them on the blog for the moment. Same for the matte-painting…

I was really surprised with the quality you have done with the last sprint about town peoples. Your characters and animations will help the team a lot, thanks again to all participants of the community that spend time on helping us.

The other purpose of my travel to the institute was to give the final videos and files of Chaos&Evolutions. And since yesterday , the master copy is burned.
I wanted to share this news with all the people that have pre-ordered this Dvd, more than 500 ! Thanks

In around 2 weeks (duplication time + shipping ) it will be in your mail box. If you don’t have your copy pre-ordered, know that the “pre-order discount” of 10% is still available until April 9th.

I attached to this post a screenshot of the final video page so that you can check the final content , and I made the Gimp bush kit available for downloading on my blog here.

-David

Warning: this is an april 1 post without silly jokes!
Jeremy has arrived already on the 30st of March, forgot to post it yesterday, that’s why. Jeremy will help us the last three months as an animator. He’s from Sydney Australia (too many aussies here!), and worked with Matt Ebb for Promotion Studios on Lighthouse and Kajimba. Great guy, awesome animator!

-Ton-

(BTW: next to arrive next week: Joe Eagar, Blender developer! And then we’re complete… I hope!)

Heeeeyyyy guys!

Welp, the modeling sprint we had last month was pretty awesome. Even well after the sprint had officially closed, models continued to flow into BlendSwap. There’s a total of 29 pages worth of models in the Durian category, and they’ve already been a great help!

During the last sprint we discussed briefly doing another, with a different focus. As it so happens, we need some help with character modeling and animation for our market scene. We need tons of background characters!

Here’s a stupid video we threw together talking about it a little bit:

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Hello,

My week in the Durian team is almost finished here, and I couldn’t leave the Blender Institute without posting on the blog.

Apart for Sintel , I came to the Blender Institute with the prefinal videos of my DVD “Chaos& Evolutions” . And after some corrections, I decided to release the third video today about Alchemy ( edit: free, multi-platform and open source, download it here ) .

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Hi all,

Just a quick post to show some progress on the environments.

Basic workflow:

1. Modelling (always a good place to start) the cliff

2. Uv unwrap. Seeing as it was going to be projection / matte work for the most part I just did an unwrap of all the faces laid out on one sheet in quads. Not paintable as a map in gimp, but much easier than trying to unwrap every column and spike.

3. Render bake with basic light and ambient occlusion. There are four our five parts to the mountain range, increasing in texture size per poly as we get closer to the characters. Starting each texture with a render bake helps with painting but also with consistency.

4. One main projection using the feature Campbell recently added to do the painting in Gimp and automatically transfer it back on the mesh texture.

5. A few smaller projections into Gimp to start fixing some of the larger occluded areas.

6. Seam fixing in Blender’s viewport with texture paint, the result of which is the posted image using a mix of clone tool and brush tool with right click often to sample nearby colours.

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