Cosmos Laundromat

This week’s round-up of Gooseberry project work was a long one, clocking in at 1.5 hours. Watch and your reward is the full layout and animatic to date (a longer-than-final 17 minutes), livecast in full for the first time. Or, you know, just skip to the highlights below!

Highlights

The New Layout

Hjalti made this layout of Tara’s first appearance…and disappearance (continuing on his scene from last week). But the director always has the final cut! Visit the Blender Cloud to see the latest layout for the entire pilot. (Or watch the weekly video above.) Recognize any of the stand-in voices from watching the weeklies?

In the full current version you’ll also find Sarah’s latest layout of Franck and Tara’s treetop talk to Franck’s final fall (the latter above).

Manu’s Models

Here’s a hint: the machine model matches the timer. The one on the right has been put through some dirty vertex color testing to give it that rancid rusty finish. Curious about how that works? Manu made a handy graphical explanation:

Renders & Textures

Despite some problems with random crashes, Pablo churned out a few renders and texture tests this week of caterpillar Franck and his jungle foliage. 

Finding Franck’s Face

Victor’s Visage

Holy Holey Trees!

 

 

 

It turns out it’s kinda difficult to model the fused tree roots Sarah had designed for the jungle world. So Sarah spent some time this week working up a solution using a skin modifier. Voilà!

Software Stuff

Lukas continues to experiment with Franck’s fluffiness by adding more resistance to curly strands of hair and placing them in a virtual windtunnel — that would be the after on the right, of course.

Lukas also experimented with how to make more realistic grass fields (for the island) more quickly. His solution was to use dupli for faster rendering: first he created detailed patches of 100 strands of grass, then combined these into bigger “blobs,” which he could then clump around a full field for realistic waving in the wind.

For Antony, last week was “widget week.” In his lamp experiment, he manipulates overlapping spotlights cast by the lamps of his choice. Next, he uses a camera in a landscape model to capture the depth of a shot (the yellow marker is a new widget marking the camera’s current depth of focus). Finally, the node-viewer widget shows your model in the backdrop. (The first two widgets have been incorporated into the Gooseberry branch, with the third to follow soon.)

Also…

• Sarah and Hjalti have been playing with their animation tools, working on things like handy little fixes to the graph editor.
• Hjalti also spent much of his week on bug reports, rig testing, and playing with shape keys for Victor’s rig (to be able to move his face for layout).
• In the livecast, Campbell demos a project he’s been working on (that’s not yet ready for release). Skip to 1:14:20 to see how he’s making it easier to draw shapes on and create cut-outs of 3D surfaces in Blender.
• Francesco is working on an easier system to upload assets to the Blender Cloud. (Literally at this very moment he is working on this.)
• Francesco and Campbell have been testing the asset manager infrastructure (BAM!). Expect a full report coming up — but the news basically is that they are ready to move forward with more features.
• Francesco worked with Mathieu on some SVN issues…leading to a new project structure (next).

A Sense of Structure

Pablo and Francesco played with folder structures, setting up a folder system above for production to track files more easily. (BAM! should name the files automatically.)

Curious as to who’s carrying this all out? (And who exactly those people are in the livecast, or not in the livecast, every week?) Elysia has put together a new Team page for this site with bios for everyone involved in the project so far!

So…any questions? :-)

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