This week we were busy updating demo shots for the new battlefield concept. Currently we have updated all shots in the range of 01-16, and hey – it looks quite nice!
Shot 06
Shot 09
Shot 14
At the same time Nikolay does tracing and animation based on the keyframe drafts by Eleonora.
And of course the process of updating shots for Blender 2.61 is continued. At the moment the most issues are resolved and we need just some time to complete the transition process for all shots. It was a little distracting when I haven’t found possibility to control animation time with F-Curves like I did in 2.49. After spending some time digging I have realized that I can use Synfig to do time-control effects (like slow-mo or speedup).
Also, I was a little worried about the first shots in the demo – the view from the top at the start is a really tricky shot. But after reworking sequence layout I was able to achieve the impact I was satisfied with.
January 15th, 2012 by Konstantin
Tags: 3d, blender
Finally, we have started updating Morevna repository for Blender 2.61. As you might remember we have used 2.49 before and of course we have many issues during migration. At the same time we started ultimate rework of battlefield concept. Here’s a few WIPs:
We have updated Pencil packages. Please grab them from the packages page. This version is different from the official one and includes all our previous modifications, as well as following improvements provided by davidefa:
Export movie fixed. Audio layers are mixed with video now. To select video format use an ‘appropriate’ filename extension (ex: .avi, .mov, .mpg, .mp4…), movie framerate is selectable (but output codecs don’t support all framerates, a safe and usual choice should be 24, 25 or 30 fps).
Audio playback fixed
Minor fixes in audio layers ( corrupted audio passed end of ‘audio frame’ )
Improved undo/redo functionality
Fixed saving animation (removed ‘optimization’, now saving is slower but safer)
Added fps parameter in saved animations
3 ‘layers’ of onion skinning (configurable trough edit->preferences->tools, to remove a layer set its opacity to 0)
Added import movie (frames are imported at the current fps, there is no check to limit the imported frames)
Other minor fixes (moving selection on bitmap layers, moving layers, load and save dialogs…)
The source code can be found in this git repository. All changes are made against the Pencil SVN190.
This is a kind of experimental project too, demonstrating Morevna’s technology applied to for creating cut-out animation. The full sources will be released soon (most probably as remake project in git repo) and there’s a hope that this little cartoon will continue to evolve.
OK, thanks to the help of Genete, we have resolved our issues with PayPal, mentioned in this post. Now we are able to accept donations in case if there will be any. The donations are handled as Pledgie campaign, so the list of donors is visible.
Recently, as of one of my jobs, I was involved in experiment about teaching open-source animation to kids. For me it was interesting to test the technologies we use in Morevna in the unusual environment. And now I’m happy to announce the first result – animated short of the younger group (9 -12 years old) entitled “Amazing Sentence”.
OK, let me announce the project status in numbers:
Of course this is a kind of approximated statistics, but anyway – it shows. And I guess you have noticed that finally we have the project animatic completed at 100%. Yay!
So, what do we have? After 3 years of development the project just passed the preproduction stage. As a whole Demo it is hardly crossing 50% boundary. I think it’s reasonable to ask question
Why?
Let’s take a look back and talk about the project path, the problems – past and current.
I am proud to announce new version of “Remake” – unified build system for animation projects. It’s purpose to automatically track changes in your project files and render footage.
This time we have delivered a number of major improvements, and “3″ in release number have some symbolic meaning – among rendering of Blender and Synfig files we got support for rendering third type of animation – Pencil, we got new rendering mode that allows to get stereo 3D output and finally files of mp3 audio format are supported as well.
Here’s a shots in progress I’m currently working on. Again, this is all about animatic stuff.
Shot 55 camera synchronization
Making animatic for shot 56 in Pencil
Meanwhile, Nikolay Mamashev is back to the project for the whole summer. He is working hard on animation for shot 16. This is a real crusade, really boring work. Shot 16 showing soldiers’ foots running towards us.
