Morevna Project

Just found amazing resource dedicated to slavic paganism. Honestly, for me, grown in Russia, this reading was full of discoveries. Just two quotes:

Koshchei. Koshchei the Deathless for his supposed invulnerability; noted for being the abductor of beautiful princesses. He is a powerful wizard or demigod who gains immortality by keeping his fiery soul hidden. He kidnaps Marena (Mara, Marya Morevna), the Russian goddess of death. He tells her the location of his soul, which she tells the story’s hero (usually a son or husband: Dazhdbog, Prince Ivan, Prince Astrach, etc.). Koshchie is the son of Vij, lord of the Underground, and travels on a war-horse or as a whirlwind.

Marena, Mara, Marya, Morevna. Russian winter- and death- goddess. In one myth, she is a sorceress and enchantress who turned the sun-god Dazhbog into an ox. She refused to change him back until his father Perun agreed that they should marry. However, she later left him for Koshchei, son of the Underworld lord Vij. They conspired to kill Dazhbog, who was searching for her. She drugged him, and Koshchei threw him down a well. Finally, she nailed him to a mountain in the Caucasus, but the goddess Zhiva rescued him. Dazhbog finally had his revenge.

Despite this unsavory tale, Marena survived into Christian times as St. Mary, the consort of St. Ivan, who is Dazhbog.

And surprise! Something I wrote in screenplay is really have much in common with some concepts explained there, while I really thought what I devised it by myself! If you are someone who wants to dig deeper into Story, than that page is for you. Happy Halloween.

Yesterday, stumbled upon nasty bug in blender 2.48(a). Explode modifier behaves really differently comparing to 2.47. This is the simple example file:

You can see what the parts of exploded object detached not only from object itself, but also from nearest area (which is 1,5-2 times larger than the object). The things become even worse when spin and rotation applied to particles.

It took me some time to figure out the cause of the problem - SubSurf modifier. It was applied before particles modifier, but if we swap their order things will return in place.

Another way to fix the problem - is just to apply SubSurf modifier to mesh. Anyway, in blender 2.47 Explode worked with SubSurf irrespective to their order. A bug? Or bug fix?

Finally managed to incorporate latest changes into demo storyboard paper.

We left numbers of the existing scenes untouched and as result numbering across the storyboard became a little inconsistent. It is handy to refer to shots by numbers - each shot in separate directory with corresponding number. So we decided what it’s better to have inconsistent numbers somewhere, rather than mess up with directory renaming (which also involves fixing Makefiles). At the end we have much more important things to do, aren’t we?

Download: English, Russian.

Yesterday, genete and dooglus worked on the ugly rotation bug in Synfig and today finally fixed it! This bug was considered as a blocker for us and that fix making me especially happy. Just compare by yourself:

• Before: rotation-before.avi (0,6 Mb)
• After: rotation-after.avi (1,3 Mb)

There is not much changes in this snapshot, except the one most noticeable. Yes, my bad, we violated the storyboard. But changes worths that - at the start we need to properly introduce antagonist forces and make them more “uniform” at the same time. Achieving that we got increased tension at the start, while exposing less of direct violence on the screen.

Currently, most of the project development happens in two main directions - producing an adorable layouts for characters and making more detailed animatic. That’s our top priority tasks now among others.

Last month we got much attention from the community. We would like to thank guys at BlenderNation, PlanetBlender and everyone who blogging and spreading the word about us. Thank you!