Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

1st present

I wanted to offer in this special evening a little gift , for your help and your support around Sintel and Chaos&Evolutions during this year 2010. Thanks again , and here is a timelapse commented of my watercolor technic with Mypaint and Gimp-painter.

Digital Watercolor with Mypaint 0.9 and Gimp-painter from David REVOY on Vimeo.

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Sintel 4 DVD Box Set on the Blender Store

Phew, another milestone met… the four DVD masters were sent yesterday to the printer, luckily still in time for the Blender Conference (*). Expected delivery of the copies is next week friday, we then pack all 3200 orders during the weekend (yeah, that’s going to be fun! Luckily our shop manager Anja prepares this for us excellently).
Special thanks to all team members for making tutorials from home, to Jan Morgenstern for all additional sound and music work (including cleaning up 8 commentary tracks), to Pablo Vazquez for weeks of work on the DVD design and to Joeri Kassenaar for mastering the PAL and NTSC discs. You guys will even get 4 GB extra data, the production files were 12 GB in total, heavily compressed… didn’t fit on one DVD.

Preview: Angela Guenette tutorial on facial poses
Preview: Colin Levy tutorial on setting up render and compositing

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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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Dear community,

Here’s a much needed update on the animation front of project Durian. I’d like to take you through some of the challenges and workflows that we employ here in the studio.

We now have a little four man club of animators, (Lee, Jeremy, Beorn and myself) that works as its own mini-team. We have our own dailies, we critique each others work, we help others out whenever we can, and having worked as the sole full-time animator on Big Buck Bunny, this is truly a relief! We have some really positive, respectful team dynamics amongst the animators, which really makes this movie a joy to work on. Of course, I’ve only been here for a few montha, so I’m relieved of any fatigue and burnout (so far!).

However, even with more people and a strong team, this film is no walk in the park. The complexity, the variety and the realism makes the animation particularly difficult to pull off well. You instantly spot when something is off when you get close to realism, and some things are just really hard to get right. Luckily, it can also be very rewarding too. Once the animation is completed, it’s incredibly satisfying to see it nicely lit and rendered by the render team. Suddenly it looks gorgeous!

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Hello,

My week in the Durian team is almost finished here, and I couldn’t leave the Blender Institute without posting on the blog.

Apart for Sintel , I came to the Blender Institute with the prefinal videos of my DVD “Chaos& Evolutions” . And after some corrections, I decided to release the third video today about Alchemy ( edit: free, multi-platform and open source, download it here ) .

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Its been a while since we had a development post and while we’re always busy with blender much of it is work in progress.

Most of my time is spent on physics and bug fixes at the moment but seeing as it was my birthday on Friday, I took some time to work on something more fun :D. Enjoy!

– Campbell

Update:

• Image editor can be selected in the user preferences ‘File’ section.
• Save as PNG rather then TARGA to workaround reported problem with adobe photoshop not saving alpha.
• Render to an off-screen buffer rather then grabbing the view, removes view text and allows images editing images bigger then the view.
• Added option to capture high resolution images rather then using the viewport size.

At the studio we have to be able to maintain and work collaboratively with a large number of files. For those who are interested, I made a little tour of the system we have set up as well as the process within Blender to link in groups from other .blend files.

Word of caution: when working with files that reference other files, be *very* careful with filenames and filepaths! Moving files around or renaming things can result in quite a headache.

–Colin

Edit: Here’s a link to Blender-aid, the content management tool for Blender I mentioned in the video.