Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

I was looking to fight jet lag by staying awake this afternoon, which is always helped by keeping active in some way. While I was out for a walk I thought it would be a cool idea to do a bit of matte painting work and remembered I took some cloud photos from the plane. With that as inspiration and reference I made the following as a quick 4K test.

Having created 4K textures plenty of times, working with the physical pixel width isn’t that new to me, but I think it is really exciting to see it as an image as it would appear in the film. Just think of it – every single frame of Durian will have this resolution and hopefully most frames will be loaded with even more detail.

For content creation and data management that starts to get a little scary (it was fun to watch Colin’s face each time Ton mentioned something he wanted to try in 4K), but as someone who loves details I’m personally very excited about the idea. We haven’t decided on a final aspect ratio but we think somewhere between 2.35:1 and 2.5:1 to capture the epic cinema feeling. This image is 2.35:1 give or take a pixel.

Finally, we are still working on the story so the image doesn’t really give anything away. We have decided to keep the story a surprise for the premiere, but we plan to openly share basically everything else as we develop it. Figured that was the best way to be as open as possible but still have a rewarding film at the end.

– Ben.

PS – http://picfindr.com/ – cool website for searching stock images that can be filtered via license.

Hello Blender Community! First post on the Durian blog. It’s great to be here in Amsterdam and I’m extremely excited about (and slightly intimidated by) the project and the work ahead! We’ve got a killer team here and we’ve had a fantastic week of preproduction. I’m a bit overwhelmed really– Ton’s kept us really busy!

One thing on the agenda was to go out and actually do something in the city. So yesterday Ton sent us out to visit a local Amsterdamian museum, and we brought along the studio camera to document our journey. (David and Brecht preferred to be productive and stayed in the studio.) Check out the video:

Visit to the Tropenmuseum from Project Durian on Vimeo.

–Colin

(Note: Sorry for not putting it on the title card, but both tracks of music for this video are licensed under Creative Commons.)

Well, I am at the airport about to begin the long journey back home. Nathan’s hugging has caught on with most of the team now. I thought I would take the time to give a bit of an insider view as someone who is joining an Open Movie team for the first time and has also never been to Amsterdam.

The city itself is fantastic! It is familiar enough to feel like home and different enough to feel like an adventure at the same time. The people (mainly the team) help a lot with this welcoming feeling. However, this isn’t a tourist blog – we have travelled from our respective corners of the globe to make an awesome movie!

The main thing I have taken from this week that will be hopefully be as uplifting for the community as it was for the team is that storyline will be king. I’m not just saying this to calm any fears about the story being weak just because there is action – we are all genuinely pouring a lot of ourselves into the story to have it as strong as possible right from the start. We scheduled in several sessions at the beginning of the week to make sure the story was discussed, but from day one nearly all our spare time seemed to naturally come back to story discussion. How would characters react to certain events? Why would the world we are creating work in such a way? What would be the most logical yet engaging way to tie all the various plot points together?

During these times we began to watch the first of many clips and short films as examples come to mind. The language barriers can sometimes be less of an issue than the creative ones – ie. making sure we are all on the same page with a certain concept. For the most part, it seems that our collective ideas on what we envision ‘Durian’ to be are already quite consistent which is an amazing feeling.

Of course you have seen in previous posts that there has been much discussion on other aspects of the project such as development targets, team roles and so on – but each discussion comes back to the story concepts in some way with a resolve to make them stronger.

Epic fun – Epic win! 🙂

– Ben

Hooray! We passed 1000 DVD sales! A great landmark!

Now we need to get to 2000! Come on, we can do it!

–Nathan

Today we discussed Blender features, trying to get an overview of the things the artists really need to complete the project. This is only a rough overview, we didn’t discuss all topics yet, a more complete and detailed list will be compiled later, for developers interested in getting involved.

Modelling and Sculpting

• Sculpting: the main challenge here is performance, supporting more polygons and smoother interaction. We have various strategies to achieve this, it will be interesting to see how far we can push it. Better brush tools are also welcome, we expect these can be implemented quite efficiently as artists start using the system and provide feedback.
• Multiresolution: we intend to improve the new multiresolution infrastructure for sculpting and rendering, preferably supporting high polygon meshes without any baking steps inbetween.
• BMesh: n-gons and the associated modelling tools would be useful, but they are not a must have for this project. Still it may be worthwhile to use the Durian project as a way to get BMesh tested and completed, we’ll have to evaluate the status of this project in October.

Rigging and Animation

• Rigging likely will not require deep changes, most new features here will be focused on various relatively small changes to make the system more flexible for building better rigs and presenting a good interface to the animator.
• Proxies will need to be improved, for example to support multiple instances of a character with variations.
• Animating the camera position and rotation by doing real life recording would be an interesting feature to have. Motion tracking would be needed for this, completely using open source tools of course, and the libmv project is a promising candidate. This would not be natively integrated, but use a script most likely.
• The new animation system in 2.5 will be extensively used, but I don’t have a good overview what kind of feature requests will come up here yet. We’ll likely discuss things in more detail with the riggers and animators later this week.

Physics

• In this project we’ll have a lot of chances to use the physics systems. Big Buck Bunny did not use physics much, as many of the tools where not at the level we needed, with Durian we will try to get the physics systems production ready.
• Physics must work with the Proxy system, to support working with physics simulation in typical library linked setups, and it must get better support for using caches/bakes in production setups and on render farms.
• Cloth simulation is already quite advanced. We intend to use it on the main characters, so inevitably we will run into various issues that will need to be fixed, to get this up to the level that we can use it for close ups in 4K.
• Hair simulation is another effect that we would like to use on main characters. The current system for this is not up to the task, as for example hair volume is not taken into account. How to get good hair simulation working is still unknown.
• Smoke and Particles will be great for various effects, the recent developments in these areas are very welcome, we’ll follow closely and evaluate how to get these working efficiently for us.
• Rigid body dynamics would be great to have as well, Bullet is up to the task, but it should be properly integrated, not through the game engine.

Rendering

• Rendering scenes with much more detail is one of the targets. This requires changes throughout the rendering engines, from per-tile geometry subdivision, to image and shadow tile disk caching.
• Volumetrics are useful for rendering dust, smoke and explosions for example, and this of course fits our theme very well. We’ll need to evaluate the system to see how well it works in full production scenes regarding performance and memory usage.
• The shading system can use a good review to evaluate correctness and make it more extensible for future improvements, and we hope to work with other developers on this. For Durian we’re working with very detailed scenes, which likely excludes raytracing or photon mapping for us, so it would be good to get a structure that can accommodate various approaches.

Compositing

• Working with 4K resolution will require us to make this system tile based, so that large images can be composited without running out of memory.
• We’ll also need to figure out a workflow for working with lower resolution images than the full 4K, and only for the final rendering do the full resolution.

Brecht.

Hi,

Soon to be linked here better; there’s also a blender.org forum where people can share ideas or communicate about our Open Projects. It hasn’t been used too extensively in the past – this blog already gave enough to talk about – but it sometimes works very well!

Check for example on an interesting new thread about open source audio tools, and the role Durian could play in it:
http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15608

-Ton-

Yesterday all Durian artists arrived here in Amsterdam for the pre-production week, a week of discussions, reviews, brainstorms, pipeline designs, styling proposals, watching clips, and of course a lot of fun to get to know each other.

The agenda for the week has been defined this morning as follows:

Monday
– 10h: welcome, going over all topics to make final agenda
– 14h: Script/story review sofar
– 16h: Martin Lodewijk visiting to do the script pitch

Tuesday
– 10h: Style and design: each artist shows a clip and explains why it’s cool or not
– 14h: Blender review: features for the film, as well usability roadmap for 2.5 project

Wednesday
– 10h: Animation! Tools, techniques, video references, kung fu courses, etc
– 12h: Lighting, textures, use of GI, final gathering, etc… how images can look great!
– 14h: Field trip to Amsterdam, probably the Tropical Museum (Asian art)

Thursday
– 10h: Communication: Blog, docs, DVDs, tutorials, Durian book, external help
– 14h: Team roles
– 16h: Story/script take two

Friday:
– 10h: Pipeline issues, project planning
– 14h: legal topics, visa, contracts, etc,

While I was typing this after lunch, Martin suddenly showed up, he was early! So I could only finish this text now… Martin delivered three treatments/stories, of which we’ll work out the second, which is about a girl and… an epic dragon!

More later,

-Ton-

(Picture L to R: Nahan, Colin, Brecht, Ben, Angela, David, Soenke, Lee)