Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

I’ve felt my progress being slower than I’d like it since getting here, one reason being my texture reference library. Usually I would select some photo reference as a base for a texture, blend some stuff together and then continue painting and tweaking the image textures from there. The problem with my library thus far is that it is a mix of free images and image packs I’ve purchased. Seeing as everything used to create the film ends up on the DVD’s as well – it makes sense that we use or make our own Creative Commons material to keep things simple.

Rather than sift through my lousy folder structure to figure out what parts of my existing library are ok, it’s just easier to take a bunch of new photos. Soenke has a nicer camera but for reference mine is ample so I thought I’d get into it today. Fortunately Amsterdam is a city with history and a range of weather so I only had to walk outside my apartment to start taking photos of weathered surfaces. A couple of quick small samples – my camera is 6 megapixel, so obviously the real ones are bigger.

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We are all very happy to announce we’ll get another Blender artist to work in Amsterdam! Jean-Sebastien is well known in the Blender community as X-warrior, posting amazing graphics and animations already for years. His expertise in managing complex and big environments are going to be very welcome here.

JS will finish his current work in Montreal first, and flies in the weekend of January 23rd 2010.

Let me also wish everyone on the blog a Merry Christmas! Things slow down here now a bit, with only the Aussies staying over during the holidays. Oh, and me! We’ll do an indoor Barbie or so! 🙂

Laters,

-Ton-

Sintel, stage 2 model

Sintel’s 2nd modeling stage is completed. Sculpting finer details will follow.

notes: Scale of measurement for Durian, 1 Blender unit = 1 meter. Geometry pieces of hair/eyelashes are temporary and will be replaced with hair particles.

Here’s the .blend

Happy Holidays! 🙂

– Angela

Good afternoon, blog! How’s it going?

Thanks everyone for your comments and for keeping tabs on us. We even appreciate unreasonable criticism! Here’s a little update from the studio:

Didn’t get a chance to interview Nathan, Soenke or Brecht, but next time around I’ll be in their faces!

–Colin

Since there are more then 3-4 characters to be rigged we agreed having some way to make a rig once and re-use with minimal manual tweaking was needed.
Over the past few weeks Nathan and I have been working together to make a system which can generate these in a way that lets us apply them in a variety of situations.

Nathan broke his rigs down into body parts; hips, neck, spine, finger, arm, palm and leg. with the desired ‘before & after’ for each.
Then I took these and wrote a script that would look at the simple rig and create the final version.

After this it was just a matter of putting it all together to rig an entire character.
If this proves its self to be useful it may well become the defacto auto-rigging system in blender, too early to say now.

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David didn’t have enough time to do much design on the snowy environment before he left, which gave me a chance to do it. Now that the fight choreography is well underway I have been doing sketches, talking with Colin and the others and working out a an environment design that looks cool and fits the requirements of the fight. It almost goes without saying, but for the sake of those who are newer to 3D and Blender – the more fleshed out the concept art is the easier the rest of the process becomes. It’s something that took me a while to fully appreciate while I was starting out so I thought I’d just mention it anyway.

Same deal as usual, click to enlarge:

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Colin, Lee, Ton and I went to Man-Lung Tang’s school on Friday (12-12-09), mainly to improve some of the fighting sequences. The afternoon was very productive and the resulting fight choreographies will certainly add a lot to the movie. Further the students of Man-lung were nice enough to provide the team with some spectacular acrobatics, really nice indeed!! Check it out, here is a glimpse of the afternoon.

-Ali-