Tomorrow is June 1st, the start of the second 3 month period, aimed at completing this film. Looking back on the past months I can be very happy already, it’s been a blast and I think we’ll survive well, especially because two new team members are going to strengthen our work force!
Andy Goralczyk: lighting design & compositing
Roman Volodin: vfx artist and animator
We’ll say goodbye this weekend to one team member who’s 3 month period ended:
Nicolo Zubbini: 3d modeling
Nicolo has been modeling and texturing tremendous amounts of environments and 3d models, he’s been great! I’m happy that we can afford him to continue work from home an extra month on finishing more props especially.
Last 10 days we’ve been testing our pipeline on a number of shots (the scientist shooting scene). That’s been extremely useful! And as expected, it didn’t go half as good as we expected even! :) Main bottleneck still is masking and keying (and other tools for cleaning footage). Slightly holding us back is the new compositor and Cycles – but that’s being worked hard on.
We also found out today that the preferred pipeline for linking/sharing data among Blender files won’t work without bad hacks. That went back to the drawing table as well – mostly because you cannot localize (“proxy”) efficiently yet.
The image here is the proposed rough scene planning now. In five big categories we’ll complete this film. Individual scenes/shots and tasks get added next week. I need Ian to return from his break in Seattle to confirm the final edit! Laters :)
-Ton-
did Ian go back to Seattle to work on Project London, or is he just taking a break from everything?
I think it was said earlier he go take a brak and see his family.
oh. i didn’t see that :/
You know, I still cannot believe the quality and continual improvements to Blender from you lot.
TFS
Good to hear that the Mango team is finding so many areas of blender to improve upon. ;-)
What about music ? No news since a long time ! I found that site : i think it’s really intersesting for simulating explosion one heard from a distance place. So take a look at :) http://www.explauralisation.org/
Composer Joram Letwory is coming over soon to discuss music work with Ian. Will get regular reports too. :)
And is the E.A.R. system gonna be used ? Or is the GSOC 2011 gonna be improved to add refraction ray calculation ?
Meanwhile heres some making of to look at: http://vimeo.com/42203005
Hmm, keying is a hard problem to solve. Wish you all the best there. The work looks amazing keep it up.
Hi, what software do you guys use for project planning and management ?
OpenOffice spreadsheet & OpenOffice draw!
That’s interesting…we are/were doing the same at our studio, but once it grew it just became such a mission. Will blender ever incorporate a management tool(internal/external?) as it does end up saving an immense amount of time! Something in the line of (http://www.shotgunsoftware.com/)?
An open management tool will help make a LOT of thing automated which helps being able to focus more on the work at hand and also just gives so much more control. Also this can feed info from management to user and back where open office only gives info which needs to be updated manually.
For sure OpenOffice handwork is only useful for smaller projects. I can manage 10 people with it, but wouldn’t try to do do 50! :)
There are a couple of open source project management tools, like Redmine. These are not specifically targeted at media projects though. Making a great film/animation tool for managing asssets/projects/people/planning was a target for our next open movie; Gooseberry.
Wow…i’m just curious about that fancy timeline :D. Just googling about redmine and Helga, very interesting. i’ll try both later :) Thanks Ton, looking forward for Gooseberry! :D
And Helga! http://helgaproject.org/
@Ton, how do you feel about Celtx? I always liked it a lot.
@Johantri, the 48hfp team uses/used redmine on the last couple of projects with great success, but I can say with experience that it 1. takes up a lot of server memory, 2. is not easy to set up for even people with intermediate backend server / IT skills, and 3. without a lot of customization, and participation, it can feel like overkill and take away from the project.