Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Hi blender community and beyond!

So this is my first blog post for the project and finally I have something to show! In the previous post you have seen the original first minute which took up a lot of my time in the second production week.

Last week before Blender Conference I was experimenting with action animation, basically to get into the groove of what will be needed. Luckily I got enough done to show it at the conference, and now here!

Sintel fighting animation test from Project Durian on Vimeo.

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Hello!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. Yesterday was the last day of the Blender Conference and we’re all still recovering!

But we haven’t forgotten about you. We have a number of posts coming up to go over some of the stuff we showed off at the Durian talk on Sunday.

But first things first. For those of you who missed the live stream, we revealed a lot about the movie–including the (working) title!

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Hi all,

Silence here… only means good stuff of course! We’ve got already so much great stuff to show, but we’re saving it all up for the next sunday Blender Conference talk. A bit of a tease is always more fun 🙂
After the conference we will be much more open, and just post our amazing discoveries right away. The only thing we’ll be reluctant with is revealing the full story.

What’s everyone working on?

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Our plan is to do regular development updates, summarizing what we are working on, rather than doing it only for bigger features. Last week and this week the focus is on bug fixing in Blender 2.5. The artists here are already using Blender 2.5 for modeling, shading, lighting, rigging, animation and video editing.  In the Peach project Blender wasn’t used as much in the first weeks, and then we started from a stable version even. So, that immediately resulted in many different bugs and small feature requests from the artists.

We’re not going to list the bug reports here now, instead here’s some photos of our bug lists. There’s also multiple places where you can track svn commits, for example here: Blender project, Campbell’s commits, Brecht’s commits.

Please note, this simple model is *not* our actual character for the movie. The purpose of creating this simple model is merely to test 2.5 modeling, rigging, animation.

My task last week was to test 2.5 modeling tools by creating a quick, simple, young female character – as well as reporting any bugs, missing/broken hotkeys, etc. along with the team. Most were fixed last week, while the rest were noted and I continued on using work-arounds. Among some modeling features planned for and discussed over the course of the week: sculpt, retopo, bmesh/ngons.

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The last week I’ve basically been doing test renders and bug-hunting, eg. some very not exciting AAO test renders which resulted in me getting mad at Blender.

A time consuming part is the hair and make it look attached to skin. I have no idea how the BBB crew stayed sane with all that fur.

Here are also some wip images including the moment I found the linear workflow button. When you want to look further into linear workflow, which hides behind the little button called Colour Management, which can be found in the render settings, check out this link:

Colour Management

So long and have a nice week, but stay tuned for more.

-Soenke

The purpose of this fire method is more of a companion effect in case a particular scene calls for so much fire that the volumetrics / simluation becomes route impractical to use on ‘absolutely‘ every part of the scene. The goal is to use volumetrics and simulation for the bulk of the fire where appropriate.

I was going to call this post ‘Flaming monkey mullets Batman!” seeing as most of my tests were setting the top of a Suzanne head on fire, (eg the first of these two videos ) but never got around to compositing the head back in.

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