Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Sintel was in the Seattle International Film Festival. This was quite convenient for me, since I live in Seattle, but not so convenient for Colin who lives on the other side of the USA. Despite that inconvenience, he still flew across the country to visit and attend SIFF. It was a lot of fun!

Unfortunately, it did not occur to us to film anything until the last day he was here, which was after Sintel had already screened. But with the footage Colin shot on that last day, I edited together a short video.

Also, we met with Ian Hubert of Project London fame, who also lives in Seattle!

Enjoy!

Ogg Theora: siff_with_colin.ogv

– Nathan

Download here: http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/characters/sintel-lite-2-57b/

Hi all,

The file pretty much speaks for itself given the previous Sintel Lite post. Beorn should probably get more of the credit for this one seeing as he chased the script changes down this time and a glitch of some sort with the proxy head mesh. On my part, I updated the composite and render setup a little bit to work nicer with Approximate Indirect Lighting, so now you can use mesh based lights. That won’t light hair, cast shadows, create specular or bump details. Basically it just gives diffuse light and bounced light. Ideally you use it in combination with the usual spotlights and so forth. However, with Cycles on the planned horizon that doesn’t seem to matter much anyway in the long run. This file still doesn’t use ray tracing though and I set the Indirect Lighting to one bounce so it still renders quick. The file also loads and renders off a net-book, just doesn’t render nearly as quick.

Obviously.

I’m still aware that due to the nature of Blender being very accessible, not every Blender user out there has a beast of a machine to use so I thought I’d test it out. Textures should be included this time, although they haven’t really changed since last time.

Questions will probably get answered quicker at the forum thread:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?206875

or on the Blendswap page:

http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/characters/sintel-lite-2-57b/

Look, we even received a Laurel! 🙂

The cinema where Sintel screens has digital 4k projection, I’m working with them getting this formatted right and delivered. Would be a real world premiere then too.

May 19 – June 12, 2011
http://www.siff.net/

PLEASE NOTE:
With the version uploaded to Blendswap.com I somehow left out the textures. The other links are fine.

http://cdupload.com/files/164326_afujl/sintel_lite_textures.zip – about 1mb

NEW: http://vimeo.com/20972435 – quick video tour.

This zip file contains the textures needed to use/render Sintel Lite. Extract to the same folder as the .blend and it should automatically create a folder called ‘textures’ with all the image files in it. All should work as normal from there.

http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/characters/sintel-lite/ – .blend only, about 26mb

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After almost 10 days of uploading, the 650 GB of 16 bits TIF files arrived safely at xiph.org. Ralph from Xiph converted these to 16 bits PNG and mentioned it was actually 165 GB less data 😉 Both TIF and PNG are available there now.

http://media.xiph.org/sintel/

Hopefully they can manage the bandwidth. Thanks for hosting it xiph.org!

We’re very interested to host and link to brand new superior encoded HD Sintel versions. Post urls here!

Although people have been publishing 4k camera footage in free licenses before, a Creative Commons release of an entire short animation film in original 4k non-lossy files could well be a world premiere!

Sintel in 4k – 4096 x 1744 pixels – has been made possible thanks to the support of the Cinegrid Amsterdam consortium, a group of research labs, new media and art institutes. The Cinegrid project will explore capture, creation, distribution, screening and archiving possibilities of  Ultra High Definition (4k and 8k) content, based on making this technology accessible for a wide audience, such as independent artists, researchers or cultural events.

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Since the previous post we just couldn’t stop trying to fix yet another few errors. 🙂 It’s still not totally flawless, some of the textures & material settings were too complex to easily debug or fix.

The 4k files are being copied to USB drives to be shipped to our sponsors. The 16 bits 4k frames are 650 GB in total… not fun for a mirror, nor for uploading either. Need to solve this still, but maybe xiph.org wants to try to host it. Will keep you updated on it. The 4k film will at least show prominently on NAB Las Vegas this year.

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