Sintel, the Durian Open Movie ProjectHello,
I got some comments and emails last days about the availability of some desktop wallpapers with the concept arts. While reading those, I thought it was a bit early cause I can make them better a good idea. So, I did three 1920×1200 wallpapers ( if your screen is lower , you can still scale them down ). And while I was playing, I tweaked too the blog wordpress theme.
Dragon Wallpaper (click to enlarge)
Hi blender community and beyond!
So this is my first blog post for the project and finally I have something to show! In the previous post you have seen the original first minute which took up a lot of my time in the second production week.
Last week before Blender Conference I was experimenting with action animation, basically to get into the groove of what will be needed. Luckily I got enough done to show it at the conference, and now here!
Sintel fighting animation test from Project Durian on Vimeo.
Hello!
Sorry for the lack of updates recently. Yesterday was the last day of the Blender Conference and we’re all still recovering!
But we haven’t forgotten about you. We have a number of posts coming up to go over some of the stuff we showed off at the Durian talk on Sunday.
But first things first. For those of you who missed the live stream, we revealed a lot about the movie–including the (working) title!
Hi all,
Silence here… only means good stuff of course! We’ve got already so much great stuff to show, but we’re saving it all up for the next sunday Blender Conference talk. A bit of a tease is always more fun 🙂
After the conference we will be much more open, and just post our amazing discoveries right away. The only thing we’ll be reluctant with is revealing the full story.
What’s everyone working on?
Our plan is to do regular development updates, summarizing what we are working on, rather than doing it only for bigger features. Last week and this week the focus is on bug fixing in Blender 2.5. The artists here are already using Blender 2.5 for modeling, shading, lighting, rigging, animation and video editing. In the Peach project Blender wasn’t used as much in the first weeks, and then we started from a stable version even. So, that immediately resulted in many different bugs and small feature requests from the artists.
We’re not going to list the bug reports here now, instead here’s some photos of our bug lists. There’s also multiple places where you can track svn commits, for example here: Blender project, Campbell’s commits, Brecht’s commits.
Besides bug reports, I also worked on key configuration. Now keymaps can be saved, and different key configurations can be made, so we can have a revamped 2.5 version, a classic 2.4 version, and some similar to other 3D applications for users switching from or using both.
It’s not really a critical feature for Durian but should give us some more liberty to bring back 2.4x tools without worrying too much about them fitting well in 2.5. This way artists can use 2.4x shortcuts for now, and we can bring back tools in that key configuration without worrying too much if it fits in the new design, while the UI designers work on a revamped 2.5 key configuration.
Campbell mostly worked on bug-fixes and bringing back missing features into 2.5 but also added edge to curves conversion, pattern select tool and an experimental mouse grab option to avoid having the mouse limited by the screen size when transforming and dragging buttons.
Brecht.
Please note, this simple model is *not* our actual character for the movie. The purpose of creating this simple model is merely to test 2.5 modeling, rigging, animation.
My task last week was to test 2.5 modeling tools by creating a quick, simple, young female character – as well as reporting any bugs, missing/broken hotkeys, etc. along with the team. Most were fixed last week, while the rest were noted and I continued on using work-arounds. Among some modeling features planned for and discussed over the course of the week: sculpt, retopo, bmesh/ngons.
The last week I’ve basically been doing test renders and bug-hunting, eg. some very not exciting AAO test renders which resulted in me getting mad at Blender.
A time consuming part is the hair and make it look attached to skin. I have no idea how the BBB crew stayed sane with all that fur.
Here are also some wip images including the moment I found the linear workflow button. When you want to look further into linear workflow, which hides behind the little button called Colour Management, which can be found in the render settings, check out this link:
So long and have a nice week, but stay tuned for more.
-Soenke
