Monthly Archives: March 2012

Weekly – March 23

by - 2012/03/24 29 Comments Artwork, Production

This is only the 2nd weekly presentation of the team, and we’re already getting glimpses of how the film will look like! Ian and Jeremy have been doing crazy stuff on animatics already! The whole team’s been working great last week; concepts, training dvd work, animation tests, modeling, and even work on an auto-run Blender demoloop for HP (Francesco will post this soon).

As usual I’ll just grab from the weekly presentation folder. The artists themselves will update with more elabortated posts here.




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Production update & HP sponsor!

by - 2012/03/22 15 Comments Artwork, Production

Everyone’s busy, no blog posts is always good news (unfortunately for you guys out there!). The team spirit is awesome amazing, very inspiring, it tops any project before! It’s probably a bit thanks to the kick-off workshop, but also because we have an amazing talented and well fitting team together.

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Amsterdam photo refs

by - 2012/03/21 7 Comments Production, Random

Here’s a small selection of the thousands reference photos shot during the last weekends.

Boats, bridges, canals and the Oude Kerk, of course. but also many refs from the architecture and design of the Amsterdamse School (1910-1930~)

Especially interesting are the street furniture pieces (like the electrics box and the street-lamp in these pictures ) partly used directly as typical dutch environment props , but also as a base to build sci-fi and tech pieces (some of those shapes and geometries seems made just for that !)

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Sample Chapter from “Track Match Blend”!

by - 2012/03/21 6 Comments Random

For all of you who are already waiting for  too long for the Track Match Blend DVD here is a little preview chapter about using manual undistortion for a better camera solution and using reference images from Google Maps to check if the solution makes sense.

I am working hard to finish the DVD within the next days! Sorry for the delay!
:)

Here’s the link to footage and blendfile:
download.blender.org/ftp/incoming/libmv/sebastian/using_reference_material.zip

Blockheads.blend

by - 2012/03/20 15 Comments Rigging

Due to popular demand, and us being the sharing type, here is the blockheads file for your amusement!

BlockHeads_Release.blend

There is a readme text inside the file that explains the particulars of them all.

Now go out and make us some funny blockheads skits!!!

—————

Edit: People were having crashes with the file, possibly due to different versions of blender. This file *should* be ok!

BlockHeads_Release2.blend

BlockHeads

by - 2012/03/20 17 Comments Rigging

We’re starting to gear up for the animatic. With Ian getting the timing together with a storyboard edit, I’ve been rigigng up some low-poly, least-distracting, fast, quick and easy to use proxy characters I’ve affectionately named BlockHeads.

The idea is to use these with low res environments to really plan out how each scene and shot will be done. Obviously we’ll probably tweak it all alot once we start the actual filming. But for now this will give us a really solid idea on how each shot should be planned, how when and where we need to add detail and also what the film itself is going to be like.

Editing the Storyboard

by - 2012/03/19 8 Comments Artwork, Directing & writing, Production

The video has nothing to do with the rest of this post :P. I was sketching “defensive tombstones”, and Sebastian walked by and said, “I have the perfect shot tracked for that!” so I threw some in! I’ll wait to develop them until we know if we have a specific place for them, though.

It’s also the first video on our new Mango-Specific YouTube channel. There are some videos we want to post, but aren’t really deserving of the massive traffic the BlenderFoundation channel gets, so it’s more for scraps and the like. If that’s your thing, though, feel free to subscribe-or-whatever.

Anyway! Anyways? Anywaying?

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Monday morning kick-off

by - 2012/03/19 3 Comments Production

Every end of friday 18h we do weeklies – artists/devs show their work. These weeklies we try to be constructive and cheerfully positive. That way everyone can enjoy a friday drinks/dinner together and weekend without too much stress as well. Every monday at 10h we do the kick-off meeting. Then the new targets for the week are being discussed, and some asses get kicked – when needed. For Durian this practice did quite well, so I’m testing it with the team here if it works :)

Notes from today’s kick-0ff:

  • Ian will work on moving storyboard edit
  • Everyone continues design work (robots, dome, props)
  • Target: friday basic models – also character stand-ins – ready for 3d animatic work next week
  • Ton/Rob and Ian will finish breakdown work (all scenes and shots numbered and quantified)
  • Sebastian finishes the tracking training dvd this week, Francesco assists on dvd design and html work.
  • Everyone does a blog post, of course!

Image: a tree across the institute already has leaves. It’s spring soon!!!

Weekly – March 16

by - 2012/03/18 5 Comments Production



Every friday at 18h we’ll drop our work and gather together to do a short presentation of work. We always have a couple of guests then as well. This friday we had Tony Mullen here, the girlfriends of Sebastian and Jeremy, and Filmmore VFX supervisor Willem Zwarthoed. Willem worked for me 11 years ago (with Bart!) on the website and for Blender support. Since his film academy graduation he works for Filmmore, mostly using Maya and Nuke. Willem shows us some cool Amsterdam vfx work he did for “Sint”. Check the docu here.

Every artist then showed his work and progress of last week; which is mostly doing tests and designs – also to get ready for animatic work. I’ve copied a random selection of graphics just for your fun. Most of this had been discussed here already, or will be next week!

(If you like to attend a weekly, just mail me to make an appointment. We prefer to limit to a just few guests each time, we cannot handle masses here! ton at blender.org)

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