Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

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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Colin, Lee, Ton and I went to Man-Lung Tang’s school on Friday (12-12-09), mainly to improve some of the fighting sequences. The afternoon was very productive and the resulting fight choreographies will certainly add a lot to the movie. Further the students of Man-lung were nice enough to provide the team with some spectacular acrobatics, really nice indeed!! Check it out, here is a glimpse of the afternoon.

-Ali-

Shaman’s 1st modeling stage is completed. Here are some quick screen captured images…

Note: Geometry pieces of hair/beard/brows are temporary and meant to outline shape. They will be replaced with hair particles.

Next stage will involve topology refinement to face & robe, adding remaining clothing details, adding inside mouth. Then lastly, sculpting final details/surface will follow.

– Angela

Just a quick post. I’ve been messing around a bit with facial rigging.

The tricky bit is that it needs to fit within the framework of the autorigging system, and needs to be fast to set up for background characters without much manual work, and also needs to be flexible enough to let us get really top-notch results for main characters.

After discussions with Angela and some tests, I’ve settled on a hybrid approach between bones and shape keys. The idea is that even with only bones, the face rig should work well enough for background characters. But it will be supplemented with shape keys for main characters. Things like lip roll, nostril flare, squinting around the eyes, etc. will be done with shape keys. Corrective shape keys will also be used to preserve volume and define creases better.

This is a test of the bone-only setup for the mouth area:

face_test_01.ogv

It’s not perfect, and the facial expressions don’t necessarily match her character, but it’s a good proof-of-concept, I think.

–Nathan

As you remember, everyone who has purchased and paid the DVD set before September 15th will  get a film credit. People who purchase the DVD later, but before the film is finished, will get a credit on a special DVD section.

To avoid we miss names we already collected the full film credit list for the DVD sponsors (not gold sponsors, etc). You can review it here:

durian.blender.org/wp-content/content/filmcredits-dvd-durian.html

If you miss your name, or want a change, send a mail to Anja from our e-shop about this: shop at blender org. Also refer to your order number then! We will only use real names of individuals, no company names, no urls, and no nick names. If you want to be credited as company become gold sponsor, see our sponsor page.

A month before we go to premier, we’ll also email everyone a reminder. But email addresses can expire, or get caught in spam filters.

-Ton-

So. In a continuation of our “1st Minute” series, here is the current state of our Animatic!

Keep in mind that this is *very* rough. The fight is literally a bunch of random drawings that look like a fight– there is no choreography and very little visual continuity between drawings. (This will be filled in later once we work out the fight with the kung fu guys!) The scratch dialogue has, uhhh… room for improvement. But check it out:

Forgive the patchy drawings– unfortunately David left before he could get to work on the boards, so these were done by me. Rough sound design was done in like an hour by Jan Morgenstern. It totally makes it work! And guess who did the voices?

Laters!

–Colin

My first real rigging post! Yay!

First, watch this video (there’s no audio, your speakers aren’t broken):

sintel_rig_demo_01.ogv

Second, I love Blender 2.5. So many awesome new features to help me make better rigs. I shouldn’t even say that. It’s not even features, so much as the new core design choices.

For example, notice the custom rig UI elements integrated directly into the side bar? It makes me so happy. And it wasn’t even that hard. Just some python scripting.

Okay, okay. I’m gushing. Let’s get down to rig itself.
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