Planet Blender v2 beta4 - 'Turning Pages'

Time to Model!
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2010-04-02 23:28:47

Well, after a few weeks working in the concepts and the boards for the animatic, it’s time now to do some modeling stuff, which is REALLY fun! and it give us the possibility to play a little bit more with blender 2.5. I must say that I’m really comfortable now working on it, anyway I use to save the file every big change I made into the mesh, because you know, it’s still a beta release and blender crash -very- often! .. we are a little bit accustomed to that

Also now we are working “officially” with the render branch My English is not too good, so I’ll let the image talk by himself!

Also, for a better “sharing” issues between the members of the team, and also for scripting work, we decide to made a convention about how we have to use the layers for the props and for the sets files. Meaby it’s usefull for you too. here is:

We are also putting base materials in the objects using only procedural textures, and we are trying a new way to assign and modify materials, using a library.blend file which have the basic materials for all the files, so we just link the material and any change in the original file is updated in the other files too, nothing fantastic , but for us is kind of useful and fun!.

What else i can say! , well, Jarred is doing layout and he is also scripting a lot and Bassam is doing everything else needed for the project to keep going forward. They’re going to post soon with some massapusset (ask to Jarred about that word XD ) scripting!

Also we start doing Layout in 3d! YEAHHH!!! , I’m not able to show you too much, but here is a little sample:

The last thing i want to show is a little test of indirect illumination with the render branch build. Just for play I start to emit light from the light tubes, and here are the results! , (non lights only meshes!)

By the way, all the materials are only for preview and the models are not “final” … we have a lot of things to do yet! Another image to test the variations in the edge of the platform and in the pedestal too. Do you see any repeated and annoying pattern? Tell me please

Well that’s all for now!, keep in touch, please comment and see you soon!

Bye!

- pablo
Computer graphics painting, elephant, done with GIMP
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2010-04-02 17:49:13

It’s Friday, and you should probably know the procedure by now.

Every Friday I visit a site called Illustration Friday which provides a showcase for the work of artists from around the world. Every Friday they post a word which is to be used as inspiration for a piece of illustrative art work.

Once I’ve found out this week’s word I look through some of my old illustrations to see if any of them are related to it or, if none seem to fit the bill, I fire up GIMP and create a new piece of digital art with my graphics tablet.

The word this week was “ dip” and I immediately thought of a picture I had painted in GIMP of an elephant dipping his front feet into a pool as he looked at his picture reflected in the surface.

It’s a very dark, atmospheric illustration with a pronounced use of chiaroscuro.

I’m a big fan of this artistic technique, probably because my earliest influences were the black and white ink illustrations of primitive British science-fiction comic books like 2000ad, Starlord and Tornado. Starlord was my favourite and I was quite upset to see it fail and be gobbled up by the inferior 2000ad. An early run in with the triumph of the lowest common denominator, even within a niche market like sci-fi comic books.

Anyway I hope you like this week’s image for Illustration Friday, if you like it there are more illustrations here at the blog (take a look at the menu to the left), and also on the main illustration gallery and GIMP tutorial site.
Chaos&Evolutions : Master DVD burned
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-04-02 14:10:21

I spent last week with the Durianers in the Blender Institute to continue art directing and doing paint-overs. Unfortunately , as most of them concern the end of the movie or reveal part of the story, I can’t show them on the blog for the moment. Same for the matte-painting…

I was really surprised with the quality you have done with the last sprint about town peoples. Your characters and animations will help the team a lot, thanks again to all participants of the community that spend time on helping us.

The other purpose of my travel to the institute was to give the final videos and files of Chaos&Evolutions. And since yesterday , the master copy is burned.
I wanted to share this news with all the people that have pre-ordered this Dvd, more than 500 ! Thanks

In around 2 weeks (duplication time + shipping ) it will be in your mail box. If you don’t have your copy pre-ordered, know that the “pre-order discount” of 10% is still available until April 9th.

I attached to this post a screenshot of the final video page so that you can check the final content , and I made the Gimp bush kit available for downloading on my blog here.

-David
Interview with Andy Goralczyk
BlenderNation - 2010-04-02 07:37:21

BlenderGuru.com interviews Andy Goralczyk. Andrew Price wrote: Hey Blendernation editors, I recently had the opportunity to interview the great Andy Goralczyk and I’ve published the interview on Blender Guru. During the interview Andy talks about the biggest mistake 3d artists today are making, as well as why he’s stayed with blender for over 10 years. Andy has given some great [...]