Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Hello awesome Blender Community!

Thanks for the comments on the Guardians in the previous post, I agree with most of them.

For those who mentioned the time frame and scale of the project – that is the main reason the characters look the way they do. There are plenty of other factors I can point the finger at like:

• getting familiar with using 100% Open Source and Creative Commons tools and resources
• uncertainty about things working in 4k
• not being used to the visual style we are trying to work in (not quite Pixar stylised but much further in that direction than realism)
• not using things like raytracing, higher polycounts for base meshes and most other tricks I have been trying to previously construct a workflow from…

…but the main issue is still good old fashioned time.

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Always room to improve (with the exception of time), but at this point here are the Guardians. 🙂

–Ben.

Lots of artifacts, no real coloring, material work or texturing… but it has character

HAAHAHaha Stayin’ Alive

cheers,
-soenke

Over the past few weeks I’ve started doing “Layout” work for Sintel. Layout is the stage where we figure out the basic character blocking (in this case choreography), camera angles and movement, as well as the timing and rhythm of the edit. At this point the sets and environments are also roughed out in low-poly form. The design of the environments greatly influence blocking, as well as composition/shot design.

Much of these decisions have already been sketched out in storyboards, but layout makes the parameters of sequences much more concrete.

Here is what the opening scene currently looks like:

Much is subject to change. (Especially the first shot.) Predub sound by Jan Morgenstern. I welcome your feedback!

–Colin

Freshly arrived from across the Atlantic: Jean-Sebastien Guillemette from Montreal!
He’s going to help us putting the film together: modeling and design, scene layouts, lighting, render, composites. Exciting 🙂

Oh, and I’m back from a 2-week’s holidays in La Palma, Canarian Islands. I’ve spent a week on slowing down and relaxing, and a week on Blender 2.5 code (drag’n’drop). 🙂 One one of my walks there (breathtakingly beautiful green island) I came by Dragon Trees. These are very ancient long living trees that are an important symbol in our film too…

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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.

(Updated with hairy beard render)

Hi all,

A bit of a quick update to keep the community in the loop.

(Thumbnail of course)

It’s been an experience trying to get things together as quickly as possible. How I would ideally like to do it is treat each character completely individually, have fun with the topology, all the unwraps and textures, spend a lot more time dirtying all the clothing and so on. Basically get really involved on every level and push and tweak things around  because I find all that quite enjoyable.

The schedule here is much tighter than what I have worked with before both in and out of a studio environment, so I am (gradually) getting used to the mindset of  ‘have something that works as soon as possible and progressively refine with the time remaining’. With that in mind, these guardians are getting close to the ‘something that works’ mark in the sense of texturing. There is more to be done – especially the faces with scars, eyes, individuality and so on – but for now I’m moving on to the hair, and fur for the cloaks. Mix of hand painting and photo reference. The skin is all hand painted (though WIP) but I like how that is coming along. Was quite enjoyable seeing as I haven’t hand painted skin textures for a while.

Anyhow, that is where the guardians are at. Much that could be refined or simply added but we’ll see what time permits.

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