Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

While memory is a dry topic, many of you would have experienced Blender grind to a halt (or worse), with big files the workstation can’t handle.

Yesterday Beorn was having trouble loading a scene which was taking a lot of memory, After concluding it wasn’t a memory leak in blender I looked into why Blender would show 75mb in use while the system monitor shows over 700mb.
It turns out is because the operating system cant always efficiently deal with applications memory usage and ends up using a lot more ram.

So I tested jemalloc, an opensource drop-in replacement for the operating systems memory allocation calls, used by firefox, facebook and freeBSD according to their site.

I was surprised to find memory usage went down by up to 1gig in some cases, without noticeable slowdown, using less memory in almost every case.
It can also decrease render times in cases where the system starts to use virtual memory.

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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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Some days are good, some are bad… Ali

By reviewing the recorded videos, I found some footage that I did not film but I think it is worth showing. A kind of Easter egg…  Enjoy!  Ali

The last of the team members arrived friday, with a day delay on the airport… the poor guy! Joe – everyone knows him for his BMesh project – will assist our team with a lot of crucial development topics, such as cloth sim, snow particles and of course loads of bug fixes. Welcome Joe!

-Ton-

(Sorry for crappy picture, i need a new camera!)

Over the last weeks new team members arrived to support the durian project. It is getting crowdy in the Blender institute but amazing work is being done and it is much fun. Ali

A while ago, something strange happened while working on Sintel. A trailer was released for a movie called How to Train Your Dragon, with a very similar theme to what we’re working with. Strange how that happens, eh? I guess dragons are just the ‘in’ thing these days. Apparently we are at the mercy of trends too.

Anyway, the film was recently released here in the Netherlands, and so we went to watch it in IMAX 3D. Admittedly, we were actually blown away by its awesomeness. Crikey! These facial expressions sum up our reactions to the film – a mix between being awed and scared at the same time.

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