Ideas we will probably never use

by - 2012/02/22 16 Comments Artwork

It was too hard to finish the storyboard the day before yesterday as we promised: we were fixing the script and the concept-arts while too many new ideas were incoming. But as our pre-production period allow us still around 10 days remaining we decided to take time and enhance all what we can.  It’s amazing to work with Ian and we have a very high creative period in Amsterdam now.

Also, this is a perfect time to blog-post older concept-arts. This are ideas we will probably never use; but this not mean they are ‘dead’ concept;  if you look for free CC-By concept-art, feel free to give them a try for your own 3D models. I would be happy to see them have a 3D life.

They were mostly all painted into Krita 2.4 beta, and I really wanted to thanks here the Krita team for the effort/support I could received since I started working on this project. I will probably blog post later a tutorial to show you the features I like in Krita.  There is also artworks where the base drawing were done using Mypaint straight-line branch (read this forum topic to know how more about this branch).

  1. 3pointedit says:

    Excess art, an abundance of riches. Cool.

    Glad to see so many days allocated for story boarding! But I would love to know how you all expect to go about the edit process.
    Will Blenders VSE be the only tool?
    Will you lay up the storyboards first and replace them as shots complete?
    How do you expect to shot list wild footage? In the VSE?

    Does Ton or Ian really think that Blender is up to the job of editing, all the video for a live action performance, in the Sequencer?
    Thanks in advance for your time.

  2. PhysicsGuy says:

    Wow David, it all looks really beautiful. I don’t think I’m a good enough modeler to do your concepts justice, though!

  3. Fred C says:

    I love the dude in the suit, I think I am going to attempt my on drawing of him.

  4. CT. da'Bomb says:

    There should be a part in the movie where some people steal the clock out of Big Ben in the middle of the night :P

  5. J. says:

    In Amsterdam? In my world I first need to travel to London to see the Big Ben! :P

  6. Blendiac says:

    Awesome to see the general direction that Mango is (has been?) going. Love the killer bot attacking Thom image and the social core image. Man, I hope we’ll get some shots in Mango as huge, sci-fi and dare I say epic as that one. It reminds me a bit of the shot in the matrix where Neo first wakes out of the matrix and sees the bajillion other people still hooked in in their pods.

    I’m looking forward to seeing those Krita tutorials, too. It’s such a great program, but there are so many tricks to really getting it working well. I’ll be interested to learn some of yours!

    Anyway, thanks for taking the time to share these with us. I’m already frothing at the mouth to see more of what’s happening in Mango, and this is a delicious tease! Like the poster above, my only wonder is if Blender’s VSE will be used for this? If it it is going to be used, I think it will need some improving (like thumbnails on the video strips :P ). I’m hoping that this is the direction that will be taken, as long as it doesn’t divert too much coder time from helping make purdy pictures. Otherwise going with something like Kdenlive and helping them work through any bugs encountered might be the way to go. Either would be awesome, but it does seem to me that editing live action open source is a bit of a minefield that’s been waiting for some developer love for a while.

    Good luck and all hail Blender!

    • PhysicsGuy says:

      Having used both Kdenlive and Blender VSE for short video editing projects (that is: a few minutes of final cut), I have to say that
      Blender VSE works much better. With HD footage, Blender VSE manages to give me a reasonable preview of what a transition will look like. Kdenlive doesn’t stand a chance. I do have an underpowered cpu and too little memory, but for Blender this is much less of a problem.

      I have not used Blender VSE for longer projects yet, so I can’t say how well it works. I have used Kdenlive once for a project of about 25 minutes of final cut. It was very difficult.

      Ofcourse in all honesty, for Blender I did first use ffmpeg to convert the source footage into a image sequence and ImageMagick to scale every image in the frame to the correct size and aspect ratio, which I didn’t do for Kdenlive. Perhaps if I had done this for kdenlive as well, it would have worked better.

      Aside from this, Blender VSE just works much nicer, because the interface is blendery and therefore familiar. I don’t know if I agree that you need thumbnail previews in the VSE. I don’t think it will help much. By the time you enter the VSE, your footage will be color corrected, so on first glance, the images will appear similar. In a thumbnail, you probably can’t see enough detail to see if you are dealing with the right shot. Instead, you shots should be clearly and consistently labeled.

  7. qubodup says:

    Hey, thanks for sharing these!

    Is there a chance that you will provide full-resolution images, without watermarks (but under the same license) perhaps even layered, if they are? They might be useful for OpenGameArt for example.

    In any case, please put them on the final disc if there’s space :)

  8. luca says:

    wow, the killer robot concept, really could go some dark places..it almost gave me the goosebumps.

  9. Josh says:

    id like to do concept, I am currently working on my own game level, doing all the concepts for it as we speak.

  10. Christoph Pöhler aka Dracio says:

    Very nice work I am realy looking forward to have same nice Monster Robots witch are terrorising Amserdame I realy licke the garbits self recylet look of it it reaminds me at “#9”

    Es far es I am able to jude the Movie is geting samthing between “#9” Bladrunner in the heart of amsterdam it thad isn#r arsame I dont know

  11. Like this cuase
    if you’d like your card to be usable in blender cycles and all other parts of blender which are likely to use opencl

    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Amdati-Opencl-Blenderheadsblender-Cycles/331359736899999?sk=wall

  12. Ps i’m working on a project,
    can i use some of these concepts in my project