Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Alrighty!

Since before the Blender Conference we’ve been working to improve and condense the script– and we’ve ended up restructuring the film somewhat.  So the first minute has changed dramatically!

Here I give you the script and temporary breakdown for the new First Minute of “Sintel.”

We’re gonna do a few tweaks and polishes today, and then the script will be locked!

–Colin

Edit: Here’s a PDF version of the breakdown, for those who requested it.

Release scheduled in November/December , the next Mypaint will come with a lot of new features.
Of course I’m already use most of the new feature on Durian ; and I wanted to highlight my favourites here:

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My presentation at Blender Conference included facial topology for animation use, as well as demonstrating a series of facial shapes on our test model.

A bit about my work flow: I start by creating the full symmetrical shape, ensuring natural progression from default shape (0) to full key shape (1). The next step is ensuring proper mixing of shapes. Much tweaking is spent on the more subtle details. Once the shape is completed, I weight paint to break up left/right side to allow asymmetrical expressions.

In his recent post, “Development Update #2” , Brecht describes some of the development work that has gone into improving work flow efficiency.

Here’s the .blend

Enjoy!

Angela

Last week, I paid a two-day visit to the team in Amsterdam. Aside from getting to know each other, introducing me to the ubiquitous windmill beer and overstretching the definition of “vegetarian” at the local Thai joint, I got lots of cool insights into the production process and, of course, discussed the soundtrack with Colin and Ton.
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At Blender conference I showed an animation of an eye. Because the textures are procedural we might be able to use this eye model to quickly bake high resolution textures for not so important characters. For our main characters I hope to actually model the iris for close ups, so that we get nice shadow casting. The eye movements are some 2.5 f-curve noise modifiers, only to get some life into the animation.

procedural eye test from Project Durian on Vimeo.

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David made this cool new graphic to promote our dvd presale… so it’s time to tell we plan a to do a Quad box even! It’s just more efficient to have two single layer video dvds (PAL, NTSC) and two dual-layer DVD-ROMs, one with all the  (HD) videos and tutorials, and one with the studio data. (24 GB total).

Still nothing compared to Main sponsors, who will get a TeraByte usb drive with *everything* on it. 🙂

-Ton

Bug fixing and bringing back features in 2.5 has been taking up most of our time in the last two weeks. However a number of new features have been added as well, so let’s talk about those a bit.

Campbell and Martin worked on a Gimbal mode for the transform manipulator, which allows you to see exactly where each Euler axis actually is and edit only the single f-curve corresponding to that axis. It also gives you a nice visual indication when you reach Gimbal lock.

Bone near Gimbal Lock

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