Quick post. Here’s a preliminary block out model of robot. And for some reason someone wanted me to make a brain.. ?
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Robo-Rigging
I’m baaaaaack! Arriving a little later than everyone else but now the team is complete!
Making up for missing out on the “Quit Blender” fun, I’ve been spending my first few days playing around with some of the half finished models that have been laying around. This robotic arm (modeled by Kjartan from David’s awesome concept with little tweaks by me) is the first to be rigged up as a test.
Development update: Cycles & S-curves!
We didn’t forget what Mango is really about; which is of course to help improving Blender!
Last Monday we had two meetings with the devs & artists, on cycles and general issues. Yesterday we discussed pipeline designs. This morning we worked out a design idea for curve editing for masks. Time for an update :)
Storyboards
As part of our new even-opener initiative, we’re releasing everything but the last minute (and the script)- that means we’re releasing a ton of storyboards!
Feel free to swing over and take a look here at the gallery. Or download the pdf with high resolution images (20 MB).
Team complete!
And, here’s the Mango Open Movie team in two versions, all of them still looking like fresh young happy people! From left to right: Nicolo, Ian, Sergey, Kjartan, Jeremy, Francesco, Sebastian. (Brecht is working from home still this month).
Quit Blender! Source files and HD version
As promised we release a final version of the kickoff workshop short film in full HD for your delight, containing a few fixes and tweaks. We are also releasing the main production folder under CC-BY license for you to explore and improve.
- Quit Blender production files (~173MB)
- Quit Blender footage folder (~589MB)
Here we have an outline of the quit_blender_files folder:
- chars – the library files for the tentacle robot and the dones
- footage – a readme.txt file, which will invite you to copy in there the content of the quit_blender_footage folder
- scenes – all the VFX shots in the short film, shot_XX_compositing usually is the final version of the file, linking in all the libraries and effects
- sets – basics sets used for tracking support, masking and compositing
Since a lot of renaming and refactoring has been done, it is possible that some paths might still be broken. Make sure you are using a recent (trunk or 2.62 should also work) release version of Blender.
Last but not least enjoy the full HD version of “Quit Blender”!
Open or closed: we’re open! :)
This morning’s kick-off meeting we agreed on following the OPEN strategy:
– We’ll open everything, except for the last minute.
– But we do not publish the script at all.
This is easier than trying to check each time if we spoil secrets… or being forced to categorize posts. This strategy allows us to discuss a lot of issues openly for our followers, but still keep the ending hidden – AND let everyone guess the story :)
-Ton-
Meeting with the costume designer
Ian spent today a couple of hours with Pablo Londono Serria. His ideas and designs for clothing are awesome – we really like the proposals and direction it will take. Pablo admitted he had two big desires in his life; getting his own fashion brand, and do a post-apocalyptic film once. :)
Pablo will show first clothes Wednesday already!
Lazy sunday in Amsterdam (and some research)
Today we did a little tour to the Oude Kerk here in Amsterdam and enjoyed the first sun of spring. Blogging in the sun while hanging around in the beanbag in the Blender Institute is also quite pleasant, I can tell you!
Anyway, the light in the church is beautiful! We have to find a way to put this in the movie while at the same time have it destroyed by robots. Also the trees and bicycles in front of the church and around the redlight district might become a masking nightmare too. Or we just cover them with futuristic tech-stuff. But let’s see what happens.
I couldn’t help but film and track something in the church. But I have other things to do than putting something in it, so if you guys are interested in some compositing fun, here’s the track and footage. Do something cool and link here! :)
https://download.blender.org/ftp/incoming/libmv/sebastian/kerktrack.zip
First week kick-off, behind the scenes
Tony Mullen wrote:
It’s my last week at the Blender Institute before returning to Tokyo. It also happens to be the start of production on the Blender Institute’s Mango Open Movie project. For the past week, the team has been working on a 5-day project to get their feet wet with working together and with what will become the Mango production pipeline. I’ve basically been keeping out of the way, observing, and taking a little bit of behind-the-scenes video:
For a brand new team doing five days of work it’s very impressive. Add to this the fact that the main Mango project has already been completely storyboarded (in stunning detail) by David Revoy, and I think that Mango is off to an incredibly auspicious start.
(Thanks Tony! Was great having you around here, and see your own short film evolve: http://electrictownmovie.wordpress.com/ That one is going to be awesome too! :)
