Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

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:

1. Concept painting

2. Flat render of the proxy environment WIP

3. Paintover of the proxy environment WIP, just to help everyone visibly check it’s still heading in the right direction. Can’t have everything stuck in the back of my head because I’d much rather make changes we are all clear on now than after a week or two of solid work.

Through rounds of feedback there will be changes to the structure, look, feel and so on but for now the file is over to Colin to start moving cameras and character blocking for the layout. The background mountains can obviously be changed around a lot but you will notice that within the space of a day the horizon is already very different to my first painting. This way it feels more like a part of an epic landscape, rather than having the fight conveniently take place at the pinnacle of an epic landscape. Decisions, decisions…

Software was Gimp for anything painting related, Blender 2.5 for the little bit of modelling so far. The concept art was all done in Gimp, blending some photo reference into painting. Also to re-iterate, the environment model is simply blocking in the forms for Colin to plan the shots. Then based largely on the shot placement, the actual set will be modelled.

- Ben

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

UPDATE:

Dragon Adult, stage 1 model, revised

- Angela

click to enlarge

Here some of the concept art concerning the first minute of the movie. Shaman changed to the definitive one after some Al.chemy research, the shaman hut got some drawings too, and the guardian “Jack” got a portrait to help modeling. I painted some weapons :  the knife of Sintel, and the blades of the guardians. And to finish my period at the institute in beauty ; I wrote especially for the community a tutorial about my speedpainting process, as you asked me in the previous “1st minute concept art” post.

I’m back to Toulouse (France) tomorrow , but I will surely keep blog posting sometimes as I will continue to work remotely on the Durian. I hope you will enjoy !

-David

- The tutorial -

In reaction to comments on the past post about Paint-over , we decided to give an extra revision of the main character design with Sintel.
Now we are sure to be away from the main industry standards ; Thanks !

- David

As a texture and a previz’ test, I did a 2D paint-over ( in Gimp ) on simple AO white rendering of the 3D mesh of Angela. I’m happy to share you some WIP pictures and the result.

-David

Here are some additionnal artwork done last 2 days around this first minute of the new script with few anecdotes about, as my period ending very soon in 2 weeks, I try to give my maximum and do as much of speedpainting I can. As time is missing with the last script revision, I will not do storyboard and try to finish the concept art, spend time with Soenke and Angela too on the process of 2D to 3D conversion.

-David

• the Shaman with 4 arms:

I design him this way to break the usual “indian master” shamanic cliché. I very like the spider 4 arms slow movements and gesture. Ideal to get a talking scene visually less boring. I really personnaly like this design.

Most part of the team is enthusiast or just ok with , but Colin don’t feel comfortable with the idea that human can have 4 arms in our fantasy world. This concept change his vision about the storytelling of the scene too.  So this Shaman concept will surely evolve in a different way,  on Monday we’ve got a meeting about the fantasy level of our world as we don’t have any general concept information about characters, environnement or the civilisation in the script work of Esther Wouda. So, we will invent it to give more background to our fantasy world.

We will study too the fun idea of Ton to build the design of our Shaman around our lovely smyling server at the Thaï restaurant.

• the 4 gatekeepers :

Half warrior / half religious,  our gatekeepers are a band of 3 guys plus a strong master.

Ton wanted to name them with 4 names of French presidents , but I was against. So, we found them some code name : “Jack” for the master cause he looked at first as the comedian Jack Black,  Smith for the second ( Agent Smith of Matrix ) , after we got a classical dark assassin, and our philosopher “LaoTseu”. Of course, they appear not long enough to develop their character too much , but our fun code name help to talk about the fighting organisation and they are far easier to remember than 4 name of French presidents ! Lee is already working on the “crappymattic” of the scene with Colin.

• Speedpainting 2D previzualisation :

This not a shot of the movie, but more an inspirationnal shot to give an idea to the team of the amount of snow / fog / and how it interact with color.

For the moment , I do this exercice with all the key scene of the movie. Behind “Jack” , you can see a fat man ( just a blury head)  ; he was the “fat guardian” concept art. We removed him from the band , cause too hard to kick fast for our Sintel.

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 favorites here :
/!\ note : all this picture are from a development version ; they can change in the future Mypaint v0.8 , and all the concept art used to present those screen are outdated (of course)

Pick context

I never see this features in any 2D software, and this is a litlle revolution : We knew by the past color picking , ideal to pick a color in the canvas ; Mypaint now got “Pick context” : Now you can pick the total brush setting ( color/size/opacity/shape…etc…etc… ) on the canvas , or select a layer  by picking the painted area on it with this feature.

New colors selectors

HSV and RGB sliders ; a new color wheel precise and ergonomic , as well as a color history , and a lot of information about colors ( harmonies ). Really cool. The pop-up selector was redone too with nice HSV fast selection, as well as some color variation on the RGB color space.

Straight line for perspective

Now, “Shift” key will help you to draw perspectives lines, the concept of this feature is very good  ; lines keep origin while shift is press so it’s very easy to got some fast perspective grid. ( I pasted the resulting concept art after the feature screenshot above )

Brush system

Before , Mypaint had only a rounded shape to paint with  ; now, with the aspect ratio and angle , “knife” , “marker” are possible. So more dynamic sketching !
There is too some cool new brushes , extremely creative , and thanks to the team to include my set in the defaut brush setting. I played on the picture above a bit with some new interesting ones.

Palette

A very good palette appear with the possibility to generate gradient between to colour insertion auto-magically, have multi group of palette and of course import/export from Gimp.

Ora tools

Not really a Mypaint feature , but now, with this python script plugin, Gimp can open the layered Open raster files made with Mypaint, and Save them too.

Want to help this project ? Quoting the Mypaint blog :

“Besides coders we want translators and people to write documentation. Don’t worry if you don’t have a lot of experience, we will help you get started. We also want packagers so we can get into official package repositories. And someone to help get a Mac OSX version up and running (should not take much) would be great.”

Big thanks of course to the development team ; especially to :

• Jon Nordby (Jonnor) for Ora tools
• Martin Renold (Maxy), the original creator of Mypaint,  for working on my feature request list
• Ilya Portnov (Portnov) for adding so much features !
• Sean J. MacIsaac (SeanJM) for the good designs, Ui mockup on the wiki , and quality feedbacks.

My paint website : http://mypaint.intilinux.com/

Official sources here .

-David