Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

In the midst of this week’s permit adventures, Sintel’s head has been approved! I am currently using retopo tool to improve and further redefine topology structure for animation use.

Note: Geometry pieces of hair, eyebrows, lashes are temporary and meant to define shape. They will be replaced with hair particles.

As it is, there’s quite a bit of preparation that goes into showcasing a model’s wireframe in a render. End results are also not as desirable/accurate. Discussion was brought up on improvements for this in 2.5!

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One of the more complex producer’s jobs is to arrange for an international team the legal paperwork to be allowed to stay and work in the Netherlands. According to the authorities, we have five ALIENS in the team who need to get official residency permits. The process is as follows;

– make appointments with IND (immigration services), get 30 page forms for each alien to fill in.
– take aliens to a place where you can get real approved passport pictures (no smiling!).
– take aliens to the Amsterdam city office to subscribe as a resident (needs passport, picture, rental contract of an apartment chamber of commerce stuff, etc)
– take aliens to the IND offices and wait 2.5 hours while IND employees try to fit aliens in a category… but wait, there it is, a miniature exception clause for artists who work temporarily in the Netherlands!
– then being sent back to office to redo the paperwork based on new clause.
– take aliens to the IND offices again, and * hoorah * they get a 6 month temporary residence granted!

And this is the short version of the whole process 🙂 You can imagine the above took about 3 days of time & energy of the team… this week.

Anyway! Another great news is that we’ve found a documentary filmer – Ali Boubred – to hang out in our offices to record action and edit it all. He will soon introduce himself here too.

Oh, and we survived the final step in the process with the Dutch Film Fund today… today I went there with Esther and Colin to defend the latest script changes, production details and some finances. The board will decide within 2 weeks…

Pictures: Nathan, Campbell and me in train. Made by Colin’s iPhone. It were cold rainy days indeed…

-Ton-

Release scheduled in November/December , the next Mypaint will come with a lot of new features.
Of course I’m already use most of the new feature on Durian ; and I wanted to highlight my favourites here:

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My presentation at Blender Conference included facial topology for animation use, as well as demonstrating a series of facial shapes on our test model.

A bit about my work flow: I start by creating the full symmetrical shape, ensuring natural progression from default shape (0) to full key shape (1). The next step is ensuring proper mixing of shapes. Much tweaking is spent on the more subtle details. Once the shape is completed, I weight paint to break up left/right side to allow asymmetrical expressions.

In his recent post, “Development Update #2” , Brecht describes some of the development work that has gone into improving work flow efficiency.

Here’s the .blend

Enjoy!

Angela

At Blender conference I showed an animation of an eye. Because the textures are procedural we might be able to use this eye model to quickly bake high resolution textures for not so important characters. For our main characters I hope to actually model the iris for close ups, so that we get nice shadow casting. The eye movements are some 2.5 f-curve noise modifiers, only to get some life into the animation.

procedural eye test from Project Durian on Vimeo.

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David made this cool new graphic to promote our dvd presale… so it’s time to tell we plan a to do a Quad box even! It’s just more efficient to have two single layer video dvds (PAL, NTSC) and two dual-layer DVD-ROMs, one with all the  (HD) videos and tutorials, and one with the studio data. (24 GB total).

Still nothing compared to Main sponsors, who will get a TeraByte usb drive with *everything* on it. 🙂

-Ton

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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