Planet Blender

v2-beta4 'Turning Pages'

... where Blenderheads live. Aggregate of blogs by Blenderheads
  • The Producer’s Report #102 - Feelin' Satisfied
    Phil McCoy's Posts - Project London - 2010-02-07 23:30:00


    Here's Josh Truax as Nebraska Higgins looking like he owns the world during his interrogation by Joint Command Officers. We are feeling some of that same smugitude as we close in on finishing the estimated VFX list, and that will basically happen this week. Pretty cool. Next, we are working on a revision to the opening reel that will constitute a new animated sequence concocted by Ian and Nate Tayler to quickly introduce our audience to the world and characters of Project London.

    The team assembled to work on this new sequence include Benjamin Bailey, Nate Taylor, and perhaps a couple more new guys.

    The producers are "over the moon" about the amazing Jerry toss that Ian talked about in one of his previous blog posts (Digital Doubles). Today we saw it rendered for the first time. Jerry jumps from the Goose while in flight and lands on the face of Subject C, where he immediately begins to wrestle this gargantuan monster. Nate Taylor is the man.

    Status of Visual Effects (VFX) Shots:

    • Number remaining: 4!!! (LESS THAN 10 Ayeee!!)
    • Number in progress: 4
    • Number completed: 618
    • Percentage remaining: 0.6% Wow! Less than 1%!!! (After next week, we will talk about things other than VFX!)
    • Total VFX: 650 (a bunch were completed before we started tracking them)

    Doom: Three years of our lives! (calculated by Ian)

    Projected date for completion of all VFX:

    • 13 February 2010 (based on projected time estimates of all tasks)
    • 13 February 2010 (based on spreadsheet items completed per week)

    This week’s recommendations:

    • Ian: "Memorizing a few constellations" (for the ladies) or (for the guys).
    • Nate: "The Flower Duet" from the opera, Lakme by Delibes.
    • Phil: "8.5 x 11"

    Cheers,

    Phil McCoy, Executive Producer
    on behalf of Nathan McCoy (left), also Executive Producer and Phil McCoy (right)

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  • On Mandravia now but my Wacom Bamboo CTL 460 won’t work
    Starbright Illustrations - 2010-02-07 22:20:47

    I have been off line for quite a while now , something like three weeks actually – an eternity for me. But where on Earth have I been? Have I been working on lots of new illustrations?
    Erm, well, no.
    My absence has been hardware related, oh and my translation “day job” got in the way too, but mostly – like I said – hardware related. What happened was that my chunky, robust, seemed-like-it-would-live-forever laptop died.

    Well, just the screen died, but that was enough to take it from being the centre of my world (sad, I know), to a medium-sized lump of plastic with some exotic metals inside that makes a noise when you plug it in.

    There was another XP machine here at base camp, a seven-year-old one, and wouldn’t you know it. It picked almost the very same day to finally give up the ghost too. It had had mobo troubles for a long time, and in the end it gave in to its terminal mobo blues. So, on the same day, both Windoze machines died.

    But I had another computer, thanks to a donation from a generous friend who lent it to me when it got full of viruses and needed its OS wiped. I had been playing with Linux on that machine. More than just playing, I had been getting quite enthusiastic. I had added Puppy Linux after downloading it and putting it on the machine via a USB stick.

    But I broke that one too – this time “just” a software issue though. The laptop doesn’t have a battery, well it does but it can only store 2.8% of the power it should. Without the power cable in, this brave lappy tries its best, but only manages to stay awake long enough to boot up. If it had to boot up a monster like Windows it wouldn’t even get that done.

    So I booted it up to post about my troubles with the other two laptops and, you guessed it – I’d forgotten to put the power cable in, and it made a “poop” noise and died while I was connecting to the Internet. No problem, I thought, I attached the cable, booted up again, but the Internet dialler program had been broken by the unexpected power out while it was loading. Aaargh! With the other two computers pushing up daisies, that meant my only access to the web was gone!

    Without web access I couldn’t download a fresh Puppy Linux to put on the USB and start again either, so I went to the newsagent to buy a magazine with an operating system. First I made a quirky choice, and paid money for a magazine with the new Google Chromium OS. But of course that turned out not to be an operating system at all, just a front end for their web tools. So back to the newsagents.

    I then bought a cool magazine that had two double-sided DVDs, with bootable versions of four different flavours of Linux, called respectively, Kubuntu, OPENsuse, Knopix and Mandravia. First I tried Kubuntu. It didn’t do much of anything at all. It just froze at the boot screen. Apparently this is a known issue. Ubuntu-related OSs just won’t boot on some machines. Next I tried Mandravia, with a KDEdesktop (on boot up you can choose between KDE and Gnome desktops). It booted but it was so slow it would take 20 mins to open a document. So next I put OPENsuse on the laptop – and this time I chose the Gnome desktop (a good choice as it turns out, KDE seems to big and resource hungry for this five-year-old laptop). OPENsuse booted up nicely, and behaved itself well, it connected me to the Internet too. I used it for our latest translation job and it was quicker and more pleasurable to use than XP had been. But there was one issue.

    I couldn’t get my super-new Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet (a CTL 460) to work. It’s one of the real new ones, and although some people have gotten it to work, it just isn’t really supported in Linux, yet. I’ve been trying and trying, and I replaced OPENsuse with Mandravia (this time I chose the Gnome option so that it would work) on the off chance that it was supported. Which is where I am now. Quite happy with Mandravia on my machine.

    So that’s what I’ve been doing folks. Instead of illustrating, like a good little artist, I’ve been installing operating systems and playing with graphics tablet drivers (to no avail). But now I’m back illustrating, using a good old pencil, pad and scanner. All supported by Linux.

    So more pictures soon.


  • Guardians – Community Help
    Durian - 2010-02-07 19:40:07

    NOTE: Forgot to mention we all use latest SVN builds, so anything above revision 26680 to 90 or so should work fine.

    ***** NOTE 2: Apologies for the poor communication on our part regarding your help this week, Colin will be posting shortly about how we are planning to organise outside help in the near future. *****

    ____________________________________________________________

    Hello awesome Blender Community!

    Thanks for the comments on the Guardians in the previous post, I agree with most of them.

    For those who mentioned the time frame and scale of the project – that is the main reason the characters look the way they do. There are plenty of other factors I can point the finger at like:

    • getting familiar with using 100% Open Source and Creative Commons tools and resources
    • uncertainty about things working in 4k
    • not being used to the visual style we are trying to work in (not quite Pixar stylised but much further in that direction than realism)
    • not using things like raytracing, higher polycounts for base meshes and most other tricks I have been trying to previously construct a workflow from…

    …but the main issue is still good old fashioned time.

    The Guardians were scheduled as all four characters to be worked on at the same time. Modelling, hair, texturing, facial expressions and so on. Other than getting a head start on Jack’s face, the bulk of the modelling was done in a week. Facial shapes (so far) were done for all four in a bit over a day. Granted they use a lot of the same pieces and materials but working on four characters at the same time isn’t particularly efficient. As you can imagine if something was updated, then it often needed to be updated in the other four files for consistency. The four rig files are separate too, so everything needed copying in there as well. I tried merging all four characters into the one blend file for a while but had to split them back out eventually anyway.

    The result of the such a time frame is four characters that at least work to a certain level, but to be perfectly honest I wouldn’t include them in a reel or portfolio. Talking with Ton about the current level of the characters, I explained that I can’t think of one quick area that we could schedule to bring them up to a higher level. (We at the Blender Institute also agree that Proog and Emo have more character and polish by the way.) Given more time there is plenty of things I would tweak or simply redo outright, which would be fine for a personal project, but on a really tight schedule that we are having issues sticking to as it is, their budgeted time is already more than over. Originally I should be well into the modelling and texturing work of the snowy mountain range by now.

    So – where to from here? Excuses don’t get a film done. :)

    There has been much support from the Blender Community – financial support, donations of textures, development work and generally cheering us on. As always this is very much appreciated! There has also been talk but nothing really put into practice yet about community contribution to the art assets themselves. This is our first go at changing that:

    guardians_r854.zip – 317.8mb (All four characters + Textures)

    Apologies for the relatively large file, but if I sampled the textures down too much then there wasn’t a huge point in including them. (Most now 2k instead of 4k.) This file includes all the Guardian meshes and textures with the current rigging progress. Just a basic camera and spotlight with some environment lighting. You should be able to see pretty obviously once you start playing around where the current issues are. I’m not a fan of the hands either for the record.

    For the film, we probably won’t use raytracing but it hasn’t been ruled out completely. The lighting in the previous image was kept quite simple because the textures and materials need to hold up before compositing and so on. More of an in-house review image than a promotional image. (One of the corrected ones looked quite dark on my monitor – good Eizo – here so we may have to get them calibrated.) Before I keep rambling -

    Feel free to play with basically everything except the face topology as that helps to transfer face shapes and speed maintenance things like that up. Play with textures, additional modelled details, scars, dirt, hair (please!) character traits and whatever you would like to try to make them more fun and unique. Please stick to the style and details of the concept art below where you can, but at this point we are unleashing them a bit to see how far the community can help us bring them visually.

    Thanks in advance for your time if you lend a hand- I hope you enjoy playing with them and I look forward to seeing how this turns out. Community involvement is something we probably should have tried to start sooner.

    Uploading

    There is an open ftp space on blender.org. It works like this:

    • ftp to: download.blender.org
    • user: anonymous
    • password: your email address

    When logged in, go to the directory ‘incoming’. What you put there is visible here:
    http://download.blender.org/ftp/incoming/
    This upload space deletes all old files after a couple of weeks, so don’t use it for permanent storage, link to your file in the comments and we can look into it.

    –Ben.

  • New Developer Q & A Session
    BlenderNation - 2010-02-07 11:23:13

    Blender developers are hosting an on-line Q&A session TODAY (Sunday the 7th) at 15:00 CET (click here to see what time this is for you). Campbell Barton writes: Excuse the late post but the 7th of Feb beings us to next new developer Q&A. How about we focus on something a bit different this time? Off hand possible [...]
  • Twitter: 2010-02-07
    mke3.net - Matt Ebb - lighting/shading/td/code - 2010-02-07 03:31:00

  • The best Blender 2.5 learning resource
    mike's digital anthology - 2010-02-07 01:50:32

    Michael Fox’s series of Blender 2.5 walk through is definitely one of the most valuable video tutorials I’ve seen in a long time.  He made a total of more than 10 hours of video, explaining each features of Blender 2.5 in awesome detail.  Seriously, go check it out, you’ll learn so much in so little time.
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