Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project

Dear community,

Here’s a much needed update on the animation front of project Durian. I’d like to take you through some of the challenges and workflows that we employ here in the studio.

We now have a little four man club of animators, (Lee, Jeremy, Beorn and myself) that works as its own mini-team. We have our own dailies, we critique each others work, we help others out whenever we can, and having worked as the sole full-time animator on Big Buck Bunny, this is truly a relief! We have some really positive, respectful team dynamics amongst the animators, which really makes this movie a joy to work on. Of course, I’ve only been here for a few montha, so I’m relieved of any fatigue and burnout (so far!).

However, even with more people and a strong team, this film is no walk in the park. The complexity, the variety and the realism makes the animation particularly difficult to pull off well. You instantly spot when something is off when you get close to realism, and some things are just really hard to get right. Luckily, it can also be very rewarding too. Once the animation is completed, it’s incredibly satisfying to see it nicely lit and rendered by the render team. Suddenly it looks gorgeous!

To illustrate our animation workflow, I’ve put together a small movie of one of my shots at various stages:

Cheers,

-William

Hello,

My week in the Durian team is almost finished here, and I couldn’t leave the Blender Institute without posting on the blog.

Apart for Sintel , I came to the Blender Institute with the prefinal videos of my DVD “Chaos& Evolutions” . And after some corrections, I decided to release the third video today about Alchemy ( edit : free, multi-platform and open source, download it here ) .

Youtube version above, with high definitions options.

You can also download the OGV Theora file as it will be on the DVD here :
http://download.blender.org/durian/03-alchemy.ogv

I still have some video editing to do with Kdenlive before delivering the final DVD to  the Blender Institute, but I prefer to take time to finish it properly and spend time on Sintel art direction. Thanks for the patience of people that already pre-order it, and thanks for people that will pre-order it. By the way, It shouldn’t be too long to finish, and during this will extend of some weeks the pre-order discount of 10% on the Blender E-shop.

A propos Sintel art direction , I spent my week time here to do paint-over and matte-painting. It was good to connect again with the team, and meet Beorn. But sorry ; no picture of my recent work for Sintel at the moment, 3D artist will show the result soon.

-David

Another cool announcement for today: the long awaiting dvd from David is shaping up well! Those who attented his – already legendary – courses on the Blender Conference saw a glimpse of what to expect. For everyone else; get this awesome digital painting course (GIMP!) now! Oh, and yes… all Creative Commons, so it’ll be online and downloadable in no time as well. Getting a dvd will help us forward though! Expected delivery is mid march.

If you like to help us advertising this product? Check the banners preview, or download them all as a zip.

And then visit the Blender store here!

-Ton-

I’ve just made quick screenshots of the lone soldiers here… they’re still at work, but in 30 minutes I’ll get the beer, Lee gets the playing cards and we’ll have some old fashioned fun. Then Angela arrives too, and we go to our favorite thai – even open this evening for us – and around 23.30 I take everyone into town to watch Amsterdam explode at midnight!

On behalf of the entire Durian crew, I wish everyone here a totally amazing & happy new year! New chances, new opportunities!

-Ton-

(Soenke, Nathan, Lee, Ben, Campbell, Oliebollen).

Hello,

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)

-David