Weeklies

Weekly #23: January 23, 2015

26 January, 2015 |  7 Comments | by Elysia Brenner

Welcome to another week of Project Gooseberry work! Watch the full presentation (1 hr 15 min) in the video below, or skip to the highlights in this post to see what everyone has been up to!


The Highlights

 

New Faces

Gabriel Caraballo, better known to many of you as Eibriel, has joined the studio for 2.5 months from Buenos Aires, Argentina to help Francesco with the pipeline project, as you might have already learned from the blog post from earlier in the week.

There was also a fresh face at the weekly presentation: in addition to frequent guest and PhD candidate Sybren, we were joined by web developer Edwin Knip, who will be working on the Blender Store and the subscription side of the Cloud.

From the Director’s Chair

Mathieu has continued improving and re-arranging the animatic. You can see the latest version of the opening scene at the start of the weekly video above. Or watch the full currently 17-minute animatic (adding in those actor performances has padded the time a little for the now) on the Blender Cloud.

Mathieu also started out this week getting into the sheep island mood when he took advantage of an intense Monday fog, as you might have seen in this blog post and video.

Character Development

Juan Pablo has been playing with the Franck sheep character, making a series of poses to show him in different states. He calls this one "Into the Storm" — see this and 6 more poses on the Cloud.

Juan Pablo has been playing with the Franck sheep character, making a series of poses to show him in different states. He calls this one “Into the Storm” — check out the 6 additional poses on the Cloud.

Meanwhile, Manu has been fitting Franck’s sheep form with more fur. Check out his glossy, fuzzy face in the turntable render, then head to the Cloud for 3 additional renders…

...Including this full-body view of Franck wrapped in his fur.

…Including this full-body view of Franck wrapped in his fur.

Sarah took on Franck’s caterpillar form, making him as colorful and detailed as the jungle where he finds himself. See this turntable below, and then head to the Cloud to check out 4 caterpillar renders (with special focus on the texture, fuzz, and eyes) and 2 .blend files, plus 2 graphics showing how she managed to drastically reduce render times this week.

Victor has also come a long way, thanks to Andy, who spent a lot of time this week working on his clothes. Check out the two turntables (of Victor’s full body plus with his new jacket wings detail) in the video below, and then head to the Cloud to check out 8 more stills from Andy’s grooming process.

Hjalti has released a new version of the animation of Victor climbing out of the washing machine in the final scene (with some extra additions, like door animations, etc.) — this time with live reference footage from Reinout, the actor who plays Victor, and Hjalti himself.

Also see Hjalti’s lipsyncing process step by step in this blog post and video, including an early animation render by Andy.

Several members of the team are now turning their attention to Tara, with Angela collaborating with Daniel to get the model totally ready for rigging. On the Cloud you’ll find 2 .blend files and 2 infographics explaining the changes and giving you a chance to play with the basic starter rig yourself. This week the attention will be on building a full mouth rig.

Pablo focused on adding fur and other details to Tara. See how her look changed over the course of the week in the 4 turntables in the video below, and then go deeper into the details with all the many iterations of her fur and eyes (17 in total!) on the Cloud.

This is what Tara looked like by the end of the week, long legs and all!

This is what Tara looked like by the end of the week, long legs and all!


 

Features in Development

  • Lukas spent time this week merging his hair system work from the Gooseberry build into the Master build. See his thorough and nicely presented 2.74 hair release notes for all the details.
  • Lukas’s latest hair feature lets you place a hull around bundles of child hairs, which can then be combed, etc., and (much to the team’s delight) made all different colors. This is meant as a debugging visualization feature rather than some sort of anime hair builder. See Lukas’s demo at 19:58 in the video above.
Child hulls in place and colored!

Child hulls in place and colored!

Using the child hulls on a model.

Using the child hulls on a model.

  • Nicholas sung the praises of VOGL, an open-source tool by Valve that records every OpenGL action to play back later frame by frame wherever you like for easier OpenGL bug testing.
  • Meanwhile, Nicholas has got Ptex working better in Blender: it’s now possible to do some painting directly on 3D models and render in Cycles. Next up, even more improved functionality!
  • With Gabriel’s help, Francesco has got the render farm working at 100% now! Rendering should be much more user-friendly with more power and faster rendering times from here on out. See his demo of the new system at 1:07:33 in the video above.
  • It wouldn’t be a Gooseberry weekly without throwing around the word “BAM“. The latest news is that the new asset management system has been deployed for everyone in the studio!

What do you think? Are things progressing as you expected?


7 Responses

  1. JG Loquet says:

    Lots of things going on, hard to keep up ! Great to see Ptex is coming along :)

  2. Reavenk says:

    PTex!! I’ve waited so long for a version that would be rolled into the official release!

  3. Jakub says:

    I love the camera in the sequences. Also characters are excellent! This is gonna be amazing !

  4. mike kelly says:

    That’s a lot of major improvements tried to cheat last week , before the 23rd. I took the newest updates from bl ui properties and c/p them into my build from the 21rst. It worked for viewport spec but not for hair sim Lol. Then everything came in Friday. So. ,,,,, should have been patient. Great job guy’s. Things are looking really good. The hair improvements are impressive. With asset management coming and ptex this is goingto be a big year for blender

  5. goos says:

    I’m finding the hair shader highlights not so natural. Is it using cycle brdf hair shader ??

  6. Dale Beach says:

    I wish I could watch the Weekly live, but I am working at my day job when it happens, and cannot do so. I’m glad it’s always available soon after.

  7. “With Gabriel’s help, Francesco has got the render farm working at 100% now! Rendering should be much more user-friendly with more power and faster rendering times from here on out. See his demo of the new system at 1:07:33 in the video above.”

    Has the Netrender addon been dropped in favor of brender?

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