7 Oct
/ by Lee
Our first listen to the music as it came in this evening, unfortunately Basse could still only hear the voices in his head.
Last week the team were lucky enough to have Jan Morgenstern here in the studio to talk over music and sound for the movie. We were of course very excited to hear what would be conjured up in the coming week…. (and then) Today we were shocked to see a whole medly theme in our mails! Heh, and we thought it was going to be a normal work day. Expect to see Jan’s spectacular skills heard in the teaser being released next week!
7 Oct
/ by Matt
Move over Z Brush, take a hike topology brush, because Blender now has a new high-end tool that’s sure to impress. Presenting: The monkey brush! With just a few strokes of the mouse, your meshes can now be transformed into primate-y goodness! (MPEG4 video)
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3 Oct
/ by Bassam
We’re finally in the driver seat! Yesterday, Ton and I went over a list of to do items for the animation features needed for project orange. Today, he committed IPO drivers in blender (the top of the list).
Currently this is limited to using object transformation or bone poses to drive any IPO curve you want.
Here’s a rather boring little video showing this feature in action: face-slider test. As you can see it’s incredibly useful to have a 2D slider controling 4 different facial shapes at once.
Continuing the test, I added more controls to the face, and now the setup looks like this:
The pose you see in this screenshot is entirely made with the custom controllers.
Further, you can replace the custom controller with a bone; use bone rotations to drive shapes for automatic muscle bulges, flesh compression or even cloth wrinkles. Andy made a nice little test anim to show cloth wrinkling and twisting as the character moves his arm.
cloth shapes
[edit] ok, as promised, here’s the .blend file for the scene… again, you need the most current cvs to run this – and there are a couple of wrinkles with actions and drivers yet- they’ll probably be fixed very soon, but they might mean you have to choose between normal armature animation and drivers for now: driver controller test file
[edit] Ton fixed the updating problem for bone drivers.. the jaw/look and eyelid controllers should work fine now, including live updating in the viewport.
29 Sep
/ by Toni
Orange is not a huge studio, but of course we still need proper technical setup for fluent workflow. By putting the six workstations and a fileserver in place, connected via a gigabit ethernet, the basic infrastructure was built during the first weeks. Pre-production began using a plain shared filesystem, but now as we entered production phase in the sense that scenes are put together for the animatic, we decided to use a versioning system instead.
A major reason is ensuring that no-one ever destroys work by others, which can happen easily with filesystems by simply saving an older version over a newer one made by someone else in the meantime. But our tech-savvy animation director Bassam figured that even advanced features like branching, i.e. making an alternative version of the movie-in-the-making, might be useful later for e.g. testing changes in the main characters.
We chose Subversion (svn), a popular CVS replacement, as it is friendly for basic operations such as renaming files. It will be interesting to see how well it works for blend files and other animation source data, such as large textures,and whether it fits in the way artists work individually and in collaboration.
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28 Sep
/ by Andy
hey there!
okay i have to admit it. this decision was quite hard to make: our characters will have hair – and not cartoony hair, but believable realistic hair!
so for me that meant, dive into blender, research and hope that i’d find a solution. admittedly, to this day there were only few convincing hair renders done in blender.
– dupliverted curves are ok for fur, have a nice appearance, but tend to look too repetitive and produce jaggyies in render
– particles are good for overall control of the hair system and material appearance but look crappy when rendered
– the fiber script has the ability to style hair in a good way, but produces heavy heavy heavy meshes
– the beast script looks ok and renders fast, but still has that card based look to it which is not acceptable for long flowing hair.
sooo… this was kinda tricky. duh!
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27 Sep
/ by Basse
Hello! Yes, yes, I am here also, believe it or not.. I just have been slacking on these blog entry writings. Not exactly my cup of coffee, but hopefully I get more into it later on. Maybe not, ok. but. had to write something, so here it comes: THE ROBODOCK REPORT!
There is a annual festival in Amsterdam called Robodock. It’s a mixture of circus, music, art, movies, robotics and everything that goes BOOOM!.. it looks and feels like straight from Mad Max. Naturally, we had to be there.
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26 Sep
/ by Lee
First day of Animatics, nothing more fun then making things without care of detail! I can’t help but smile.
Just a quick update on Pre-Production progress =)
After a lot of great outcomes in the concept stage, we have now reached the infamous ‘Animatic’ stage.
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26 Sep
/ by Matt
We’ve had a bit of a problem to solve over the last weeks, to do with texture painting on the Macs here. GIMP is one of the few open source image editors available on Mac OS X, and it works pretty well, but with one major issue – it doesn’t support tablet pressure sensitivity, which is vital for texture painting. GIMP is based on the GTK+ toolkit, which has not yet been ported to run on Mac OS X natively, so GIMP uses Apple’s open source implementation of X11, which does not pass tablet events through to applications.
We got in touch with some GIMP developers, who were quite helpful, giving us ideas of how to proceed, with a developer contact at Wacom sharing some hints as well. Unfortunately all the options (hacking GIMP, or X11, or paying a developer to work on a proper Mac OS X version of GTK+) were not very nice, leaving us without much luck. I then remembered a post on drunkenblog mentioning a little open source Mac application called Seashore.
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23 Sep
/ by Bassam
Yesterday we had a meeting with Pepijn, the script-writer (He’s the guy standing up in the lunch photo below.) We discussed the script and the characters, and made a few changes. The script looks quite good, and gives many opportunities for interesting scenes and animations. He also suggested a new title that fits the story better: Elephants Dream. The next revision of the script will be the final one or very close to it. I’m itching to spill the beans about a few fun details, jokes and surprises in the new story, but the rest of the team is telling me to save something for the viewers of the movie. I myself usually avoid knowing too much about a movie before I watch it. What do you think?
(Lunch after the meating…. guess what Matt had for lunch!)
20 Sep
/ by Lee
Well things are quite in motion and going strong. We made some time this morning to gather up some photos of pre-production through September and get them up on the Media Gallery. You can find the new and improved Studio Orange, the team buying much needed Amsterdam Bikes and the previous ‘weeklies’!
We’ll be updating periodically as we go along so expect some more soon, we all love a bit of photography here :D
Enjoy!
Our first listen to the music as it came in this evening, unfortunately Basse could still only hear the voices in his head.
