Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Freshly arrived in the Netherlands: Pablo “venomGFX” Vazquez will be added to the team responsible for shading / lighting / render  & compositing. Great to have this ex-Apricoter over again!

Also queued up: Dolf “macouno” Veenvliet will start here in 2 weeks, to help the render team as well. And, last but not least, William Reynish – ex BBB – will be helping animating here the last three months! Starts in April…

This week we also have David Revoy over to help (paint overs!), he’ll be here for a week each month now.

That puts this project on over double the full-time artists as previously! We need it though, ambitions are high… and if we want a film by the end of june we better hurry!

Oh eh, where are the renders? Damn Soenke and Ben are hiding it somewhere… 😉

Laters,

-Ton-

I know you all are probably sick of my posts. Rigging is so boring, after all. No one wants to hear me talk about it. So I’ll keep this short.
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Hey community! How are you all? 🙂

Well my journey at the institute comes to an end.  I was suppose to stay here up until the end of the projects, but stuff came up (i.e. Life and job!) which I can’t put aside! And so, I am leaving tomorrow afternoon to go back in the cold winter of Montreal, Canada.

And, for the people that were on IRC and the live stream during the sprint or the people who read the ‘rumours’ on the intertubes, no Ton didn’t fire me 😛  Back during the sprint me and Ton were just joking about my departure, because hey, it’s better to laugh about it than to cry!

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More power in the animation department: Beorn started today as character animator. He was already living in Amsterdam, so it was an easy decision to add him during the final months. Beorn has been doing a course at Animation Mentor (using Blender) and already proved to be a very fast and skilled character animator.

Beorn is born Australian, and since recently with British nationality too. More euro power! 😉

-Ton-

BTW 1: On the picture, Beorn, Campbell’s ever leak bicycle, and whiteboard with secret instructions.

BTW 2: I’ve already seen so much cool stuff here in the studio… but the artists don’t like to share it yet! Just wait a bit, they are making it really awesome!

Sintel shapes, 12 examples

some quick tests combining shapes, screencaptures

Sintel pupils dilate, test renders

Note: This blog post is only focused on facial shapes. Texture is still in progress.

Our main character Sintel has a total of 55 shapes. These shapes have all been hooked up to Nathan’s facial rig. Tomorrow I will start creating various poses (phonemes & emotions) for our facial pose library.

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Actors Halina Reijn and Thom Hoffman were in a recording studio in Amsterdam and gave their voices to Sintel and The Shaman. For the occasion, Clark Levy turned into SuperColin…

Ali

Will you just look at the number of models posted the past couple days on BlendSwap!  Check it out!

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