Sintel, the Durian Open Movie ProjectJust a brief update on Dragon Baby Model: Stage 2 is in progress and nearly complete. This stage involves further topology refinement & finalizing the model for rigging/animation use. Here are some quick screen captures of my work in progress…
Sculpting details to follow in Stage 3.
– Angela
Well, not so much a new plan but a fleshing out of the plan Ton has been busy working with. Yesterday we had our first Monday kick off meeting for the year with the team at almost full strength again after the holiday season and Ton went through the effectively complete production schedule. We all knew it was tight before hand, but seeing the project all accounted for and blocked in was for me at least a very key moment to get my head around things. A lot of discussion followed during the day on everything from different tools needed for scenes, when certain major landmarks in art assets and code should be reached, who was taking ownership of which segments and so on. Normally I’m not a fan of lots of discussion, especially when we have a whole lot to do in limited time but it was good to nut a lot of these things out. Helps in both mentally planning and even in gaining a bit more confidence to get on with the tasks at hand. Now that we have the concept art, script, storyboard edited in animatic form, a full schedule and Colin working on the ‘layout’ for the film – (effectively a roughed in animation with camera placements in the proxy scene) we are invincible!
Ok, just better organised than we were.
Better get back to work, but the team has been up to some cool stuff so expect more posts soon. 🙂
Hope you are off to a flying start this January! Even if that means making the most of your local beaches / ice skating rinks.
– Ben
I’ve felt my progress being slower than I’d like it since getting here, one reason being my texture reference library. Usually I would select some photo reference as a base for a texture, blend some stuff together and then continue painting and tweaking the image textures from there. The problem with my library thus far is that it is a mix of free images and image packs I’ve purchased. Seeing as everything used to create the film ends up on the DVD’s as well – it makes sense that we use or make our own Creative Commons material to keep things simple.
Rather than sift through my lousy folder structure to figure out what parts of my existing library are ok, it’s just easier to take a bunch of new photos. Soenke has a nicer camera but for reference mine is ample so I thought I’d get into it today. Fortunately Amsterdam is a city with history and a range of weather so I only had to walk outside my apartment to start taking photos of weathered surfaces. A couple of quick small samples – my camera is 6 megapixel, so obviously the real ones are bigger.
David didn’t have enough time to do much design on the snowy environment before he left, which gave me a chance to do it. Now that the fight choreography is well underway I have been doing sketches, talking with Colin and the others and working out a an environment design that looks cool and fits the requirements of the fight. It almost goes without saying, but for the sake of those who are newer to 3D and Blender – the more fleshed out the concept art is the easier the rest of the process becomes. It’s something that took me a while to fully appreciate while I was starting out so I thought I’d just mention it anyway.
Same deal as usual, click to enlarge:
Hi all from the Blender Institute after two months of waiting! Talk about being late for work…
Best advice I can give for jetlag is to just get straight into it. I got here last monday morning at about 9am after a whole lot of flying so I wasn’t up to full speed that day of course (still worked a bit), but have been loving it ever since. I’ve been given domain over creating the guardian characters. Baddies are a lot of fun to work on. I’ve tried to keep their expressions fairly neutral for rigging because it is very easy to get carried away and give them massive smirks, angry eyebrows and all that sort of thing.
One day I’d like to pull out all the stops and create my own ridiculously over the top evil supervillain, but for now these characters need to fit in Sintel’s world. Which brings me to the point of style. Most characters I have worked on (at least in recent times) have been based on photographic reference of people, meaning my default reaction is to aim for as much realism as possible in proportions, details and so on. While we plan to add a lot of detail to much of the film, the world does have a certain style to it. My main challenge was to stop modelling from references like Jack Black and Hugo Weaving and bring the models into line with Sintel and each other. This aspect might take a few more revisions yet but the team reaction so far has been quite positive which means I don’t have to get on the next plane back home. Yay!
As far as technique – I modelled Jack first, tweaked the topology a bit and then made the other characters from that mesh so they all have the same topology. Not that we plan to just use one texture map for all of them because that would be lazy and really boring, but it should help troubleshooting when we get to the facial rigging and so on. Brecht has his genius hands full for a bit so sculpting is on hold for a little while (I was testing it for a bit on the weekend) so I’m working on finishing up the characters bodies and then some environment work. Really looking forward to how far we can push the characters with sculpt though, mainly in detailing their outfits but it will help add a lot to the look of the film in many ways.
In order to feed the pipeline as efficiently as possible in our limited time, we worked out this schedule of 3 modeling stages…
1st Stage = 5 days: Model with focus on form/proportions. Lock proportions. Pass to Nathan for rigging.
2nd Stage = 5 days: Model further detailing, topology refinement for better deformation with retopo, final inside mouth/teeth, etc.
3rd Stage = 5 days: Sculpt finer details/surface.
I started with the Dragon Baby 2 weeks ago, followed by the Dragon Adult last week. 1st stages of both are now completed. Today I start on the Shaman!
Dragon Baby, stage 1 model & progression
Dragon Adult, stage 1 model
For the past week or so I’ve been doing tests with the cloth simulation in Blender. Nothing too fancy, but just trying to shake out the most obvious issues before we try to use it directly in production.
The basic cloth simulation–how the cloth moves–already works quite well:
Cloth Test 01 from Project Durian on Vimeo.
