Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project
Shaman’s 1st modeling stage is completed. Here are some quick screen captured images…
Note: Geometry pieces of hair/beard/brows are temporary and meant to outline shape. They will be replaced with hair particles.
Next stage will involve topology refinement to face & robe, adding remaining clothing details, adding inside mouth. Then lastly, sculpting final details/surface will follow.
– Angela
Just a quick post. I’ve been messing around a bit with facial rigging.
The tricky bit is that it needs to fit within the framework of the autorigging system, and needs to be fast to set up for background characters without much manual work, and also needs to be flexible enough to let us get really top-notch results for main characters.
After discussions with Angela and some tests, I’ve settled on a hybrid approach between bones and shape keys. The idea is that even with only bones, the face rig should work well enough for background characters. But it will be supplemented with shape keys for main characters. Things like lip roll, nostril flare, squinting around the eyes, etc. will be done with shape keys. Corrective shape keys will also be used to preserve volume and define creases better.
This is a test of the bone-only setup for the mouth area:
It’s not perfect, and the facial expressions don’t necessarily match her character, but it’s a good proof-of-concept, I think.
–Nathan
As you remember, everyone who has purchased and paid the DVD set before September 15th will get a film credit. People who purchase the DVD later, but before the film is finished, will get a credit on a special DVD section.
To avoid we miss names we already collected the full film credit list for the DVD sponsors (not gold sponsors, etc). You can review it here:
durian.blender.org/wp-content/content/filmcredits-dvd-durian.html
If you miss your name, or want a change, send a mail to Anja from our e-shop about this: shop at blender org. Also refer to your order number then! We will only use real names of individuals, no company names, no urls, and no nick names. If you want to be credited as company become gold sponsor, see our sponsor page.
A month before we go to premier, we’ll also email everyone a reminder. But email addresses can expire, or get caught in spam filters.
-Ton-
Hi all from the Blender Institute after two months of waiting! Talk about being late for work…
Best advice I can give for jetlag is to just get straight into it. I got here last monday morning at about 9am after a whole lot of flying so I wasn’t up to full speed that day of course (still worked a bit), but have been loving it ever since. I’ve been given domain over creating the guardian characters. Baddies are a lot of fun to work on. I’ve tried to keep their expressions fairly neutral for rigging because it is very easy to get carried away and give them massive smirks, angry eyebrows and all that sort of thing.
One day I’d like to pull out all the stops and create my own ridiculously over the top evil supervillain, but for now these characters need to fit in Sintel’s world. Which brings me to the point of style. Most characters I have worked on (at least in recent times) have been based on photographic reference of people, meaning my default reaction is to aim for as much realism as possible in proportions, details and so on. While we plan to add a lot of detail to much of the film, the world does have a certain style to it. My main challenge was to stop modelling from references like Jack Black and Hugo Weaving and bring the models into line with Sintel and each other. This aspect might take a few more revisions yet but the team reaction so far has been quite positive which means I don’t have to get on the next plane back home. Yay!
As far as technique – I modelled Jack first, tweaked the topology a bit and then made the other characters from that mesh so they all have the same topology. Not that we plan to just use one texture map for all of them because that would be lazy and really boring, but it should help troubleshooting when we get to the facial rigging and so on. Brecht has his genius hands full for a bit so sculpting is on hold for a little while (I was testing it for a bit on the weekend) so I’m working on finishing up the characters bodies and then some environment work. Really looking forward to how far we can push the characters with sculpt though, mainly in detailing their outfits but it will help add a lot to the look of the film in many ways.
In order to feed the pipeline as efficiently as possible in our limited time, we worked out this schedule of 3 modeling stages…
1st Stage = 5 days: Model with focus on form/proportions. Lock proportions. Pass to Nathan for rigging.
2nd Stage = 5 days: Model further detailing, topology refinement for better deformation with retopo, final inside mouth/teeth, etc.
3rd Stage = 5 days: Sculpt finer details/surface.
I started with the Dragon Baby 2 weeks ago, followed by the Dragon Adult last week. 1st stages of both are now completed. Today I start on the Shaman!
Dragon Baby, stage 1 model & progression
Dragon Adult, stage 1 model
So. In a continuation of our “1st Minute” series, here is the current state of our Animatic!
Keep in mind that this is *very* rough. The fight is literally a bunch of random drawings that look like a fight– there is no choreography and very little visual continuity between drawings. (This will be filled in later once we work out the fight with the kung fu guys!) The scratch dialogue has, uhhh… room for improvement. But check it out:
Forgive the patchy drawings– unfortunately David left before he could get to work on the boards, so these were done by me. Rough sound design was done in like an hour by Jan Morgenstern. It totally makes it work! And guess who did the voices?
Laters!
–Colin
My first real rigging post! Yay!
First, watch this video (there’s no audio, your speakers aren’t broken):
Second, I love Blender 2.5. So many awesome new features to help me make better rigs. I shouldn’t even say that. It’s not even features, so much as the new core design choices.
For example, notice the custom rig UI elements integrated directly into the side bar? It makes me so happy. And it wasn’t even that hard. Just some python scripting.
Okay, okay. I’m gushing. Let’s get down to rig itself.
Read the rest of this entry »
