Caldera in Festivals

We are thrilled to report that our podmates Evan Viera and Chris Bishop have premiered their new short, Caldera, at SXSW. Chris Bishop is of course now wielding his supreme anim supervisory-fu on Tube. Congratulations to the whole Caldera team, and the excellent Bit Films mentoring and independent production program at Hampshire College that helped the movie happen. Look for it at festivals and thereafter in full release on the web!

comments fixed! [or not]

Turns out commenting has been broken for quite a while, with mainly only spammers being able to comment
I’ve ‘fixed’ this with a really, really ugly hack, but at least you should be able to comment now. phew!
EDIT: it appears they are not fully working, only for logged in users, we’ll investigate.

Cycles + Internal Test

Made a test from  Bassam’s tutorial on using cycles and internal together. The result is not terrible, but not perfect. Used another model cause cycles crashes during render (too many objects) and doesn’t work with multiple UV layers like internal does.  Cycles is good to use but it has a lot of limits so far.    Not suitable for animation yet – too slow and crashes often.  Maybe for statics and interiors. Difficult to work with lights – it seems only be possible to change intensity. Internal also has problems with SSS : for instance, no shadows in ShadowPass. Anyway we won’t use cycles for characters yet, maybe for environments. Now to make some more tests! I’m looking forward for further developments in cycles.

Note from Bassam: If this is Dimetrii’s ‘not perfect’ result, I think his perfect one would give me a heart attack brilliant as usual.

Gilgamesh materials and textures

Наконец то я доделал текстуры и настроил материалы для Gilgamesh. Долго делал, было много проблем, которые не давали сосредоточиться на процессе. Пока выглядит не очень шикарно, но в общей сцене с композом и другим освещением будет что то другое.      Сейчас появилось время и можно заняться тестированием рендера Cycles+Internal. Неоднократно с Bassam мы говорили о вожможном использовании рендера Cycles в некоторых шотах. Будем мы его использовать или нет, незнаю. Всё зависит от тестов и от развития самого рендера. Думаю, сейчас он будет в быстрих темпах развиваться, т.к. его собираются использовать в Mango. Результаты тестов обязательно выложу, посмотрим что получится.

At last I’ve finished textures and materials for Gilgamesh. Took a long time cause had a lot of personal problems and couldn’t concentrate.. it doesn’t look too awesome right now, but i think in the scene and with compose and right lightning should look different. But I’ve got some time now and can start testing render cycles+internal. Several times we with Bassam talked about the possibility of using cycles in some shots. are we really going to use it or not – I don’t know. It all depends on the tests and the development of the renderer itself. I think it’s going to evolve fast because it will be used in Mango. Here we have some test renders.

Combining Blender Internal and Cycles in one render

Since Cycles is the ‘new hotness’ we naturally don’t want to exclude using it for our renders. However, Cycles lacks some features and support that Blender internal has; such as SSS, volume shaders, strand rendering, particles, A.O. and probably more. In order to use it at all we’re going to have to combine our renders, and we need a good way of managing this.

One side of this is the compositor: you can put a Cycles scene into a file, an Internal Scene, and then render them both from a third, compositing scene, that pulls in renderlayers from both. So far so good, but! if you have have objects linked into both scenes, what to do about materials? Cycles materials and Blender materials are different… or are they?

Turns out nodal materials are our friends, because they can contain both Cycles shading nodes and Blender internal nodes… nifty, right? so all you have to do is use nodes in internal, and then both will work.

If you feel like you need more in depth explanation, check out the video tutorial below, and download the included .blend file.

The Blend file has been uploaded to Blendswap, here! By the way, don’t forget (as I initially did) to keep your render resolution the same in all files, or all hell with break loose(tm)

Spring internships posted!

Hey folks, a bit late on this one, but Spring internships have been posted on bitfilms. If you are interested in spending in spending a few months working on lighting, modelling, crowd sims/other simulation or animation (or a combination of the above) have a gander at the doc and send your resume/reel/cover letter in! we’d love to have you on the project.

Good news for the modellers, btw, is that we’ve been tuning/tightening our modelling pipeline. I intend to post on that in a week or two once I’ve formalized the last details, so it should be easier and smoother to get your modelling chops into final shots.

I promise my next post won’t have an exclamation point on the end

auto rig post at BN!

Looks like Tal’s preview of the autowalking got posted at BN! Nice post!

This blog has been a little quiet of late but the project is quite healthy. We’ve been working hard on animation and refining our modelling pipeline to allow modellers an easier time contributing to the project. Tal and I have nailed down most of our technical hurdles in the autowalker/crowd side, which is a huge relief (those shots were always a bit of a scary looming task) and we think we can finish these shots with a great deal of fun.

stay tuned for more posts, where we share our current progress… and some news!

Currently active team

On a long term/distributed project, there’s often a flux of new, leaving and returning artists. Here’s a quick list of who’s active right now (In addition to me, who’s doing a little bit of everything and a lot of some things):

Producers + project management:

• Fateh Slavitsky and Elizabeth Ellis powering along.

Animators:

• Chris Bishop is our animation supervisor, an amazing animator and teacher- well suited to the role of supervisor.
• Jarred de Beer (previously an intern) is still animating like mad, working on 2/3 of the most difficult shots in the first act.
• Virgillio Vasconcelos Animator, professor and author from Brazil- really great, and great to work with.
• Tal Hershkovich is doing lots of roach sim and animation.
• Carlo Serra Summer intern who’s working on a nice action-y shot.
• Sarah Laufer Mad talented animator! She’s tackling a very challenging shot.
• Francesco Siddi (previously a modeller/intern) and recent blenderwiki developer.
• Luciano A. Muñoz Sessarego who I met at TOSMI and is a great animator and all around fun guy.

Modellers:

• Dimetrii Kalinin (One of the nastiest modellers I’ve seen) – he’s backed up by his brother Michael, great concept/2D artist and animator.

Sound:

• Thomas Vecchione is currently doing temp sound for the animatic;
• Jan Morgenstern will then evaluate the result, looking for music opportunities – the two will collaborate on the final sound mix (Thomas = SFX, Jan = Music)

Fall interns:

• Samantha Luo : Samantha is a UMASS student with good Blender chops: 3D Generalist
• Andreu Cabre: Another Blenderhead, Andreu is trained in graphic design, and self taught in 3D: 3D Generalist with a focus on pipeline issues.
• Roberto Roch: Our other nasty sculptor/modeller, Roberto will be working on polishing assets to get final models in shots.
• Karen Webb: Our only animation intern, she’s new (ish) to Blender but a fast learner
• Samah Majadla: Smith College student and lighter from Caldera,  3D Generalist on Tube
• Christine Stuckart: recent grad, recent Caldera intern, like Samah she is starting as 3D Generalist with no prior Blender experience.

Background characters

Первие наброски второстепенных персонажеи. Они стилизованы под главного персонажа, что бы все выглядело четко.Пока толко скульптура, возмозно их будем переделывать.
Так же в процессе другие персонажи.

English:

These are first drafts of secondary characters in subway station. They are stilyzed to match the main character. Only sculptures now so we may change them.
Other characters are under construction. Concepts are by Michael Kalinin, Modeling by me (Dimetrii). These characters will have only slight animation and simple rigs.

Moar Blender classes

Since my last post I’ve decided/discovered I’ll be giving more classes soon:

I’m holding a two intro to Blender training session in ASH (Adele Simmons Hall, Hampshire College) 126 on Tuesday and Thursday ( Oct 4th and 6th) 5ish to 7ish. plans are for a small group  (there’s a projector and computers, but also students working on projects at the same time). If you’re in the area and wish to attend, please let me know via email or comments so I can gauge space requirements.

We can also do a sneak, spoilery peek at Tube afterwards.

But if you’re not around, don’t despair! I’ll be giving an animation masterclass (fancy!) at the Blender conference in Amsterdam. It’ll cover production workflow tips from Tube and other projects, both riggingish and animationish. No spoilers, but I’ll probably be using Tube production rigs.

• CREW
• MEDIA