Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

On Big Buck Bunny we did the wings of both the flying squirrel and the bird with hand animation. In the case of the bird, that went really well. But for the flying squirrel it imposed a lot of limitations on us and made things just generally a huge pain for both animation and rigging.

So for Durian I decided to use cloth simulation for the membrane of the dragon wings. This has led us down a long, winding, extremely annoying road. I thought it was going to be easy. Little did I know…
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After many weeks of fighting technology, here’s a first glimpse of this wonderful short film that’s shaping up here.

With big thanks to Jan Morgenstern for the epic soundtrack, which as usual makes our humble creations look so much better!

We have less than 2 months now to finish this completely… imagine the tension that’s building up here to get everything perfect. For today, we’ll celebrate a big step forward. Enjoy!

/download/

-Ton-

The amount of high quality submissions keeps amazing us!
We’ll do a final selection soon, but not before this thursday. To give everyone a bit of insight in what we look for, and to give some of the contributions an honorable mention, here’s a collage of designs that we liked. It might be that we missed one or two good ones, don’t complain if yours is not there! Also the ones added the past 24 hours haven’t been reviewed yet.

Don’t forget: the logo submissions and reviews are on our forums.

-Ton-

Yo! We’re stretched to the limit and we need to get a crucial prop for the film modeled and textured: Sintel’s backpack. Instead of figuring out who on the team can spare a half a day to work on this, we thought we’d just open it up to the community!

So, what we’re talking about here is the backpack– which includes the pack, the straps, the leathery mesh containerything, as well as the rolled-up quilt. You’ve got THREE DAYS to bring this as final as you can. Show us what you’ve got!

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I’ve been meaning to get back to the guardians ever since I posted the last render of them. Personally I wasn’t happy with them but we needed to have something that at least worked on a basic level in a short space of time. If modelling gets held up, rigging gets held up and Lee and Colin needed to get on with planning and animating the fight scenes.

This is where I left them.

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For the sake of clarity, I thought we’d just post all the sprint-related info to the blog.

First, to answer some questions. The sprint will be taking place this weekend. We will be sporadically available throughout all of Saturday and Sunday. This is the time when we will be monitoring progress, giving feedback and direction, assigning tasks (if necessary) and hopefully maintaining a live stream on ustream!

However, we know this work takes time to do well, and we will be accepting submissions all throughout this week, ending at the end of next weekend, on the 5th of April.

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Yesterday we went to the 4k viewing room from Cinegrid Amsterdam again (www.waag.org). They were still fighting desktop issues, silly drivers stuff… the picture below was meant to be the first in a series showing us watch 4k, but then the camera battery went down! Still, it’s an insane  screen with epic proportions and resolution. So cool to see our work on it!

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