Damn, I just can’t handle myself! I never had such fun collaborating on drawings!

Me and Nikolay Mamashev drawing

Shot 50 - keyframe WIP

Shot 50 - finished keyframe

Ok, folks, guess what I have for you? That’s right – the demo snapshot! It’s just few days left before the project will be to be kicked to the new phase, so it’s good time to publish things like that. ^__^

But that’s not all! This week Nikolay finally got his Cintiq tablet arrived and he already did some cool concept drafts. He is absolutely bizarre about contributing new keyframes and I can’t wait to see them!

Morevna Draft

Ivan Draft

Morevna's Katana Sleeve

And that’s not all again. To demonstrate our approach for backgrounds Nikolay made a quick wallpaper with “realistic” version of Morevna. We hope that you’ll like it.

Morevna Project Wallpaper (1920x1080)

After two weeks of trying, searching and discussions the keyframer artist is finally chosen. This will be Nikolay Mamashev – he is ready to redraw all keyframes of Morevna Project Demo in two months. Decision is final and won’t be changed. Congratulations! ^_^

Personally I’m glad about this choice, because I know Nikolay as very responsible and dedicated person (we have worked together on some commercial projects). He have great skills in drawing as well as in vectorization and animation – which means he knows all the guts. Another good thing is that he is living in the nearby town and we will be able to work in direct contact, not purely online only. Finally, he is also a big fan of anime and have a strong faith in Morevna’s future. We are still waiting for his Cintiq tablet to arrive and after that he will be ready to start the work.

Also, we will need a support from the community to pay for his work. I’m going to start fundraising campaign next week and I really hope it will success. All preparations will definitely take some time. See you next week!

(r)Evolution of Morevna. Artwork by Nikolay Mamashev.

Erik Castillo is working on the 3D soldier model. And he did the first renders using the Freestyle rendering engine.

That made me seriously think about migrating to Freestyle-enabled Blender builds. The  Blender 2.62 is out few days ago and we already tested our repositories for compatibility. The tests show almost no issues – much respect to Blender devs. But there’s no Freestyle-enabled builds for 2.62 yet. So most probably for now we will go to Freestyle enabled 2.61…

OK, folks, are you ready? We are happy to announce that we are changing our politic for repository access.

As you might know, current production sources are stored in two repositories – ‘lib’ and ‘demo’. The ‘demo’ repository was available to everyone without any restrictions, but access to the ‘lib’ repository was limited (for contributors only). Needless to say that it was impossible to work with sources or build valid snapshot without having access to the ‘lib’ repository.

From now on our repositories go public. Yes, that’s right. You can download, share, modify, reuse them, build production snapshots – everything under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

See the Sources page for details.

I am proud to announce new version of “Remake” – unified build system for animation projects. “Remake” is an utility that automatically tracks changes in the project files and renders them.

Download remake-0.4-1.noarch.rpm
Download remake_0.4-1_all.deb
Download remake-0.4.tar.gz

This release delivers a number of major improvements and bugfixes. See full list of changes below.
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This week we were in process of choosing an artist for the keyframes artwork. Well, we are still in the process. There were a lot of discussion around that and especially about the general stylistics. It’s really hard question, because  even if you have pretty clear expectations of project style, you should take into account the human resources and their capabilities, so to make project move you should be ready for compromises. Of course artists doing their best to find the proper guiding line but sometimes it takes quite radical forms.

"Real" Morevna by Nikolay Mamashev

Also, last week much of my time was consumed by preparing the new Synfig release. So, we have 0.63.04 version out. And we have our packages updated too, but those packages are a little different from original ones. Carlos López González is very active at Synfig development last days  – and thanks to his efforts we have a new neat feature, not included into release. That feature is called “Outline Grow” – it allows to change width for all outlines inside of paste canvas with a single click, which is very helpful for tuning complex artwork.

That’s it for today. Cheers!

Priestest Sister - Shot 60 WIP

Ok, here’s another report. Finally we have new Battlefield concept completely applied to all shots. And here’s few samples:

It’s awesome to have 3D as the starting point for real background artwork. Of course the final version will not go with 3D – we plan to do complete overpaint for the most shots.  Nikolay Mamashev offered his efforts to do background – he has ordered Cintiq tablet and ready to start with this task as soon the tablet arrive (judging by our post service – that will not happen earlier than 1st of March). Meanwhile, this week Nikolay have finished tracing of shot 32 and now prepares to get his hands on Priestess Sister.

What’s next. We have successfully finished migration to Blender 2.61, so we can succesfully render animatic to show. Our next step is to concentrate on the characters artwork. We need to find dedicated artist, who will be able to work on the Morevna Demo for 1-2 months. His task will be to draw all missing keyframes and redraw all existing ones in the same style. Currently we have few candidatures and next week we will concentrate on testing their capabilities. Of course this is hard stage. But we’re moving. Stay tuned and have a great week!

For a long time people asked for the tutorial explaining how to use Stickman Template and finally I have come up with something that might be called a tutorial. In fact those videos were recorded in different time (you might notice the differences in interface elements), but watching everything in sequence should give you the whole picture. Big thanks to Anna Orlova for translation and subtitling.

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