Planet Blender

The Producer’s Report #113
Phil McCoy's Posts - Project London - 2010-05-01 22:30:00

Today at the management meeting, we discussed Ian's proposals to improve Project London based on our own sense of what needed to be addressed and the input we collected from the screening at the Grand Illusion two weeks ago. Nate and I are really excited about the many ideas Ian brought to the table and can't wait to see the implementation.

We also spent some time discussing next steps for the Sound Design Team, which includes meeting with select Lead Sound Editor candidates. We plan to have a lot more information for the team in a few days.

We took our monthly Skype call with Branson Anderson today to discuss the status of the Graphic Novel. While we aren't exactly on schedule, the artwork on the pages we reviewed is flat out stunning.

To cap off the meeting, we shot our first "video blog post" featuring Ian (see photo above) talking about the revisions and new work being implemented, our excitement around the quality of people on the sound design team, and the first announcement about the Global Premiere. We plan to have it edited and available in the next few days... hopefully!

Cheers,

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

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Twitter: 2010-05-02
Matt Ebb - 2010-05-01 17:31:00

• congrats kat for runner up aust top emerging arch photographer! may issue capture magazine bottom p29 < #
• finished first b/w roll on gakkenflex today, hoping for results! #
• camera shutter speed syncronised with helicopter blade frequency http://bit.ly/9IoqWh #
• @Tristan3d see @KinokuniyaAust .. would have been fun to be in there today in reply to Tristan3d #
• anyone know where to see shanghai world expo opening streaming online tonight? we did the previs, curious to see the final #
• @allinthemind news flash: Muji to corner the australian cigarette industry in reply to allinthemind #

Down with tri’s – long live quads – close in work on my Blender spaceship model
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2010-05-01 12:27:38

After a long night watching pretty much all of Mad Men 3 back-to-back on DVD it’s once more to the spaceship model for more mesh tweaking. It’s time to turn all those tri’s peppered over my model like a pox into beautiful even quads – without compromising the complex mesh of this Vega Strike game spaceship.

But first some procrastination. What does Google say about the fine art of losing tri’s in Blender.

As usual the first hit I found giving advice about Blender issues was a post on BlenderArtists.org. It contains a couple of useful hints on how to kill tri’s. I also found a general discussion on Blender Newbies. It blames the subsurf modifier for the need to get rid of tri’s, and my spaceship is intended to have subsurf. This other Blender Newbies thread has a cool tip for slightly modifying tri’s that won’t convert into quads. You change their mind with the smooth command. Cool but too destructive my finely tuned spaceship model. OK enough of that. On with the job.

Two tri’s right next to each other was an easy win. I simply highlighted them with face select in edit mode and pressed ctrl J. Now as you can see above my spaceship has a quad that looks a bit like a necktie instead of those original tri’s circled in red in the first image in this post.

I hoped they were all going to be this easy – but…

I had two triangles at the mirror seam which refused to play nice and turn into a quad. I tried pressing ctrl j, I tried pressing F – and nothing. They just sat there.

So I deleted them and it turns out there was no edge at the mirror axis. I solved this little problem by selecting the two “hanging” vertexes and pressing f to draw a line. Then I switched to edge select and selected the four sides of my new four sided hole in the mesh. I then simply pressed f, and a quad was born.

No triangle could resist the power of my logical and spatial mind.

I did have to chase some triangles all the way to the mirror edge of the model on the central axis before I could merge two vertexes and finally get them to disappear, but even the most obstinate triangles could finally be squeezed out of existence at the mirror seam – leaving hopefully a spaceship model that will behave well and not throw up too many shading artifacts once it is in game.

OK, on to the next job in getting this model ready for baking.

The many faces of Sintel
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-05-01 10:40:34

Every Friday we have a meeting where all the members of the team show their progress. Inevitably the most entertaining bits end up being the oddities we all encounter. Thankfully some of us are dilligent enough to save screen captures to share with the rest of the team. We’ve had some struggles with hair which resulted in some epic pictures, and well… some team members are especially adept at eh… ‘recognising the potential for mischief’. There are many of these but I thought I’d share a small selection of my personal favourites.

Exclusive: Modeling the Female Head 02
Blender Cookie - 2010-05-01 04:57:26

In this Citizen exclusive Blender 2.5 video tutorial, we begin the process of modeling a full female head. The series will be taking an in-depth at the techniques needed to accurately model the subject, including accurate anatomy and topology. This second portion continues where the first part left off and goes through the process filling in [...]

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