Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

We already had a small contribution from the Dutch Film Fund to develop the script and storyboards. After a careful deliberation the Film Fund board today decided to also grant us support for the realization of the film. This will allow us to extend the project with three months (end of June), cover up for much needed expenses (like voice actors, hardware, PR) and most likely even extra team members!

We’re all incredible happy here… Sintel is very complex to make, much more than previous projects. This additional funding – which nearly doubles our current budget – is crucial for that.

In past conversations the Film Fund’s main concerns were with the quality of our projects, to some extent the movies didn’t exceed the level of a technical demos. It’s a great confirmation of our current work and quality demands that we now have their blessing this time. 🙂

-Ton-

Short news snippets from the producer’s office:

• We’ve found a fighting choreographer and consultant: Man-Lung Tang! According Man-Lung his name means “Wise Dragon”, he’s running a Kung Fu school here in Amsterdam, and acted and advised on several dutch films and tv series. He loves stunt fighting, and is specialized in acting getting hurt badly! (See picture, copied from www.kit.nl).
  Man-Lung will arrange for us an afternoon of choreography rehearsing in his studio, using other fighters as well (incl a girl). All of this will be recorded in HD and put online, of course!
• Monday we get Ben Dansie here! Team then is starting their third month already… time to get serious!
• We’ve updated the website with a ‘get involved’ link. New is also an invitation for visiting the studio “Weekly”. Everyone’s welcome to see what we do, but please first make an appointment with me.
• Use the forums if you want to contact us! Check on the ‘get involved’ page… you can post issues or suggestions there.
• I’m still trying to get famous voice actors… will know more in a week hopefully.
• Funding: we know soon a decision what the Dutch Film Fund will do. The Cinegrid Consortium subsidy (for 4k digital cinema) is still waiting for some province government signature here… already takes months to settle. If this subsidy doesn’t get available soon, I’ll move that budget to the next open movie!
• Colin will finish storyboarding in a week, we’ll also get a final breakdown then and make a full final project plan. (Remind Colin to give another Directorial Address! Oh, and post the animatic of first minute 🙂
• And the rest? Soenke is modeling the first city environment. Nathan is doing his rigging magic. Lee modeled a bad guy, and already started animating a shot. Angela is modeling dragons now. They all will blog about their work soon too.
• Oh! And there’s a new main sponsor: www.coreel.com

-Ton-

David Revoy, concept artist for Durian, finished his time at the Blender institute in Amsterdam and went back to France on tuesday, november 24th.

David left the Blender institute from Project Durian on Vimeo.

-Ali-

Some weeks ago I was looking into clouds and whether we need to paint them or if we can use actual 3d clouds. My first try was more an accident than an attempt.

While looking into methods to create massive amounts of trees for far away shots with hair, a simple render showed up after pressing f12. Slight tweaking of materials revealed that it might be possible to do clouds with hair but doing a quick 4k render showed that the number of hairs would need to be much too high.

Some time went by and I tried out doing clouds with volumetrics, which I should have done in the first place… It looks much more promising, is quick to set up and it’s animatable, perfect for our project.

The file bellow shows the volumetric clouds. The scaling is too big and will be different in final shots. The colors are a result of a simple rgb-curve in the render compositor.

simple_volumetric_clouds.blend

Have a nice day.
-soenke

The past few weeks Lee has been hard at work designing the Gatekeeper Fight. It’s not as easy task! We’ve been trying to figure out the best way to visualize the fight scenes, because a written beat sheet only can communicate so much, and blocky animatics can be somewhat difficult to read.

So. To better visualize the fight, the team decided to go out and record ourselves clobbering each other with mops and broomsticks.

Check it out.

Fight Choreography Experiment from Project Durian on Vimeo.

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At the moment we are thinking about doing our own skin photos to texture Sintel and I’m stuck with thinking about how to create good skin photos. So if you have anything that might help, like super high quality skin images you made yourself and want to share or if you have knowledge/links about creating epic skin photos or anything else that is important, go ahead and throw it at us. But be aware that everything you post here needs to be cc-by.

In the meantime you can crit a city scene I worked on the week before last week. Everything except the barrel and the potteries is straight forward modelling. The potteries are bezier-circles with a bezier curve as a bevel object and the barrel is a simple array deformed by a lattice.

-soenke

For the past two weeks I’ve been working on sculpting full time, which I’m quite happy about, it’s been a year since I’ve been able to work focused on actual 3D computer graphics related code for that amount of time, rather than the Blender 2.5 project which is mostly about user interface. The development is being done in a separate sculpt branch, and it’s not stable yet, though test builds have appeared on graphicall.org.

I continued the work done by Nicholas Bishop to speed up sculpting. We started discussing design about two months ago and decided on using a coarse bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), after which Nicholas implemented it. What this does is split up the mesh into nodes, and organize them in a tree structure. Each node has about 10000 faces, this is much coarser than a typical BVH used for raytracing or collision detection. We wanted the structure to have very low memory overhead and be relatively quick to build too.

The BVH is central to various optimization that were done, we use it for:

• Raycasting into the BVH to find the sculpt stroke hit point.
• Recomputing normals only for changed nodes.
• Creating more compact OpenGL vertex buffers per node.
• Redrawing only nodes inside the viewing frustum.
• Multithreaded computations by distributing nodes across threads.
• Storing only changed nodes in the Undo buffer.

Memory usage in sculpt mode before and after (2 million poly regular mesh).

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