Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Okay okay, should’ve probably updated you on this stuff earlier.

The first minute has gone through some radical changes since the last time I posted about it, and I think it’s much improved!

To bring you up to speed, the first thing I did was try an alternate ending for the bandit fight, partially based on the comments I received on the blog. I restructured things a bit to give it more of a frantic quality, and to better introduce the Shaman character. I can upload this version if you’re interested.

But a few weeks ago we decided replace the scene with another section of the fight scene that was originally placed later in the film. I think this change really streamlined the film and made it feel much more cohesive. An unavoidable biproduct of this choice is that we’ve completely scrapped three of the four guardian characters. (!)

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Updating the blog has become somewhat a burden… doing a good post can take many hours, and “just dump stuff on the blog” is a bit scary! Nevertheless, here I do an attempt to just dump stuff from our “weekly” folders. Just WIP. No further comments… but I like it! 😉

-Ton-

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Yo! Pablo (venomgfx) here, on my debut as Durian Blogposter (sounds cool uh? 😀 )

The past week was awesome!, not only because it was my first one here :P, but also because David came all the way from Toulouse, to help out, and he was a huge help.

Sintel Cabin’s Progress, more detail needed!

Even though its not finished, blogposting wont hurt (hope so!).

On this scene, my work was supposed to be design-model, then light/compo this shot, but since this was my first week, I’ve been told “No need to be completely productive the first few weeks”, great! relief.. so I took some time to learn the workflow and pipeline here, luckily is really similar to how I use to work before and on my personal projects nowadays.

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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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Hi all,

Just a quick post to show some progress on the environments.

Basic workflow:

1. Modelling (always a good place to start) the cliff

2. Uv unwrap. Seeing as it was going to be projection / matte work for the most part I just did an unwrap of all the faces laid out on one sheet in quads. Not paintable as a map in gimp, but much easier than trying to unwrap every column and spike.

3. Render bake with basic light and ambient occlusion. There are four our five parts to the mountain range, increasing in texture size per poly as we get closer to the characters. Starting each texture with a render bake helps with painting but also with consistency.

4. One main projection using the feature Campbell recently added to do the painting in Gimp and automatically transfer it back on the mesh texture.

5. A few smaller projections into Gimp to start fixing some of the larger occluded areas.

6. Seam fixing in Blender’s viewport with texture paint, the result of which is the posted image using a mix of clone tool and brush tool with right click often to sample nearby colours.

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As mentioned in my last blog post, there were four big changes planned, shading system refactor, indirect lighting, per tile subdivision and image tiled/mipmap caching. As usual, in practice those plans can change quickly in production. So here’s an update on the plans and some results.

For indirect lighting, the intention was to use a point based method. I found the performance of these quite disappointing. The micro-rendering method works well only with low resolution grids, but this is noisy, and when increasing the resolution suddenly performance is not as good any more. That leads to the Pixar method which is somewhat more complicated. This can scale better, but the render times in their paper aren’t all that impressive, in fact some raytracers can render similar images faster.

Indirect lighting test with sky light and emitting materials

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Freshly arrived in the Netherlands: Pablo “venomGFX” Vazquez will be added to the team responsible for shading / lighting / render  & compositing. Great to have this ex-Apricoter over again!

Also queued up: Dolf “macouno” Veenvliet will start here in 2 weeks, to help the render team as well. And, last but not least, William Reynish – ex BBB – will be helping animating here the last three months! Starts in April…

This week we also have David Revoy over to help (paint overs!), he’ll be here for a week each month now.

That puts this project on over double the full-time artists as previously! We need it though, ambitions are high… and if we want a film by the end of june we better hurry!

Oh eh, where are the renders? Damn Soenke and Ben are hiding it somewhere… 😉

Laters,

-Ton-