Monthly Archives: June 2012

Blender Inside Out – for experienced 3D artists

by - 2012/06/30 9 Comments Production, Random

Here’s the latest in our Creative Commons dvd training series: “Blender Inside Out”. I’ve asked Jonathan Williamson from cgcookie.com – they have experience with other 3d tools – to make a cool collection of videos for experienced 3D artists; to explain Blender for them by using metaphors and methods they know.

The DVDs will get printed around July 10th, and get shipped to you before August. As usual – profits on our dvd bizz goes to supporting open movie projects like Mango! And as a bonus this time; it will allow us to do a bigger presentation at Siggraph – spreading free copies of this DVD to the audience as well!

Help us, order one now (or two!). Thanks!

Weekly – June 30

by - 2012/06/30 7 Comments Weekly meeting

And here’s again a random pick from this week’s presentation of progress :) Explanations about what’s what, and why and how should be posted in separate blog posts. The main quest currently is design style vs realism – efficiently using composition, detail levels, light, color and dynamic ranges to make things look photo real – and not CG. Really tough stuff. :)



My end of project post : got everything but the t-shirt

by - 2012/06/29 12 Comments Random

A t-shirt -of course- that says :  “I survived project Mango” …

But then forget the usual part about only getting the t-shirt: On the contrary ! you really get lots out of participating to an open movie at the Blender Institute!

And also ,  the project is not over , it’s actually running at a crazy pace. (So, don’t worry guys , there’s time for the t-shirts .. but make it  a Pablo Londono’s design ! )

For me, the top 2 things I got out of it,  are the opportunity to work on just what I like the most : the gloomy charm of a post-apocalyptic urban environment ? -and Amsterdam none the less- ? plus some rusty decayed sci-fi machinery ..can’t ask for better.

But perhaps more important is getting to work with the team , and just everyone was super-great, and it really makes a difference working and spending time in such an environment : I’m talking about the scary-good ninja artists in the team, but also Ton (himself!!)  and the developers (and I was lucky to meet quite a few of them!) ..it really gives a different perspective to Blender not just as a piece of code but a more complex project and network of people.

So here’s the video I recorded for the weekly : there’s an awful lot of trivial technical questions in it .. but that’s the reality of the job :)

Cheers to everyone !  see you again soon on these pages.

post-apocaliptic spring-cleaning

by - 2012/06/23 27 Comments Artwork

The env. modelling phase is really approaching the end now!

i’ve been working remotely for the last 3 weeks , and next one is my last on the project ! sigh ! but it’s time for the models to be final since further steps depend on that.

Last weeks have been basically a big post-apocaliptic spring-cleaning, going around the dome fixing and adding all the missing bits . Once you’re done ‘adding’ things, there’s always a quite important phase of going over everything again and ..clean up, complete and repair.

Continue, to read more about this and control center detail modelling  :

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Final Shots!

by - 2012/06/22 31 Comments Production

So- this last week has by far been one of the most rewarding! We’ve finally primed the pump, and renders are coming out of the farm in a steady flow. We have about 140 seconds of ‘finished-ish’ film- stuff that’s come out of the farm, and more or less works (though in a lot of cases we may through it through the farm again, just to fix something small). Meaning- we’re actually on schedule! For now….

For time-based effects and problems, we can’t see if they work or not till we send them through the farm- and sometimes the farm itself introduces glitches- so we’ve been doing lots of re-renders. But the farm’s keeping up!

I think it’s kind of amazing, actually- all of our posts have been showing the same old stuff over and over (even now I’m just kinda reposting some things you’ve seen before), but we have a ton of new finished stuff sitting around. I should upload some of that. Later!

That said: So many cool final shots! So I’m gonna do a super lazy blog post and just put up some framegrabs!

ALSO: Teaser next week?

Robots climb the church tower! Check out the eyes Kjartan painted on the back of one of em. We’re making all of the robots a bit more individualized.

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xiph.org: F65 RAW, Linear EXR, cleaned, and finals!

by - 2012/06/21 28 Comments Artwork, Development, Production


I’m very happy that our friends at xiph.org have agreed on hosting all of the files we’re producing now and in the next months. In total we expect to have 2 TB of material;

  • RAW files from the Sony F65 camera (4k)
  • Linear OpenEXR files in Rec709 gamut (4k, half float), converted from the Linear OpenEXR ACES gamut files as is output from the Sony F65 player/converter software (closed sw).
  • Cleaned OpenEXR files with alpha (4k)
  • Final renders in OpenEXR – before grading (HD 1920 x 800)
  • Final graded files, in OpenEXR, PNG, etc (HD 1920 x 800)

Here’s already the RAW and OpenEXR from two shots in the film (60 GB)! Everything will be released (entirely!) after the film went to premiere. The files then can also be used to complete the DVDs we’ll make for our sponsors; that way they can fully recreate the pipeline with originals!

http://media.xiph.org/mango/

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