Monthly Archives: May 2012

Production update – halfway!

by - 2012/05/31 17 Comments Production

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-

Robot Arm Spin #2

by - 2012/05/30 25 Comments Rigging

Been a while since I’ve posted stuff for you all. So here’s the robot arm as it is at the moment. Made a few changes since last time, notably the arm attachment and the new chain saw. Also filled in a few gaps where there was empty space. There’s even the first bit of weight painting I’ve done on this project :P

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Weekly – May 25

by - 2012/05/26 24 Comments Artwork, Production

Here’s my random pick from last week’s ‘weekly folder’.



Here’s one of the shots we’re currently working on; tracking, keying, cleaning, masking, adding 3d environment & props, add guns, light bolts, robots, light design, composite and final grade! Hopefully that’s something we can show next week.

-Ton-

The old church and more

by - 2012/05/24 29 Comments Artwork

My first blogpost as a mango artist; I really like to show everyone the development of the making process.

I started the mango project as a production assistant helping Ton with some production stuff for the shooting days. After that I started modeling. I have been doing this for a long time for myself and now I really like being part of the mango project as an artist.

Down here you can see the development of a couple of parts I’m working on. It’s not finished yet, but I’m happy to share it with you. I’m only doing the modeling and texturing as my specialty is environment development. Today I started working on the city skyline; I wonder if it is possible to make it look photorealistic.



Color Spaces

by - 2012/05/23 29 Comments Uncategorized

There’s now a page with some basic explanation about Mango color spaces on the wiki, and a package of frames in 2K in a few different color spaces (about 250MB). There are linear EXR’s with ACES, S-Gamut and Rec. 709 chromaticities, and sRGB PNG images with and without the ACES RRT (film like look) applied.

If you want to try grading in a current version of Blender, the linear Rec. 709 EXR files are the ones to use, since those are in the color space Blender expects. the same usually goes for other applications without ACES support. Below are some images without any film like look, and without tone mapping applied to deal with bright colors, just the result you see when loading the Rec. 709 EXR files in Blender.



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Venom’s Lab 2: new training DVD!

by - 2012/05/21 10 Comments Production, Random

Pablo “venomgfx” Vazquez is working here in Blender Institute on a new training DVD; episode two of “Venom’s Lab”. It’s aimed at people who know Blender’s basics and who want to learn al the techniques to create wonderful characters in Blender.

Here’s the trailer:

The DVD is going to be finished in 3 weeks, pre-orders are being accepted via the Blender e-store now! The profits of our training DVD series goes directly to making project Mango possible :)

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