Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

I’ve moved to working on the rendering engine, which will be my main focus in the next 3 months. There’s still some fixing needed on the sculpt tools but I won’t do any big changes anymore there. The planned rendering development consists of four parts.

Shading System

The shading code will be refactored to make a clean separation between materials and lamps, and some corrections will be made to the current lighting calculations. But mostly the intention is a more modern system to design materials, one that is not so much geared to direct lighting from lamps only, but works well also for indirect light. Nodes will also be central to the way materials work rather than something glued on top of it. It’s basically a merger between physically based rendering materials that are design for advanced lighting algorithms, and production rendering materials that can do things like output passes or use some tricks for speed.

The current design is on the wiki. We most likely won’t implement the full thing for Durian, but the intention is to implement the foundation and the parts that we use ourselves. Improved raytracing can then be implemented by others later.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hi all,

Export UV Layout is back in 2.5 and is nicer than it used to be:

Also, you can now edit the right half of a symmetrical UV layout / mesh and then mirror it to the left half:

Anywho, not the greatest examples –  just a quick post to let you all in on the joy of having this stuff working! Character texturing is currently going on at the moment so as you can imagine it’s quite handy. 🙂

– Ben.

–Nathan
Read the rest of this entry »

Just 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

Since my last post and over the holidays I have mostly been working on smaller things which I didn’t even think it worth posting about, some of these were requested for specific tasks, others were just for fun. Recorded 5 videos, read on for the other 3.

And before you ask, all this is in the public subversion builds.

Shape Key Transfer

Grease Pencil Depth

Read the rest of this entry »

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 just made quick screenshots of the lone soldiers here… they’re still at work, but in 30 minutes I’ll get the beer, Lee gets the playing cards and we’ll have some old fashioned fun. Then Angela arrives too, and we go to our favourite thai – even open this evening for us – and around 23.30 I take everyone into town to watch Amsterdam explode at midnight!

On behalf of the entire Durian crew, I wish everyone here a totally amazing & happy new year! New chances, new opportunities!

-Ton-

(Soenke, Nathan, Lee, Ben, Campbell, Oliebollen).