Morevna Project

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.

(more…)

This week we have continued with applying new battlefield concept to the demo shots. We have made it till the shot 35, which was reworked in the 3D fashion.

Shot 35

Agian, Nikolay Mamashev end up with some amazing pieces of animation (as usual based on Eeonora’s drafts). Here’s one of them.

And when it all comes together it looks so yummy!

Shot 32

At the same time Vyacheslav Yastrebcev is working on adding details to the new battlefield concept.

Shot 01

That’s all news for the past week. Stay tuned, because we have prepared a few tasty things for the next few days!

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.

That’s all for today, have a great week!

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:

Shot 01

Shot 07

Special thanks for building models: Abolfazl Kanani, cody glassman, Sebastian Erler.

P.S. Updated blender packages are here.

Here’s another update for Pencil fixing few minor issues:

• Blank keyframes are saved correctly now. #7
• Fix Ctrl+Z keybinding not working under some circumstances.
• Fix some keybindings to be more conventional.

Download now

As usual, the source code can be found in this git repository. All changes are made against the Pencil SVN190.

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.

Continuing the theme, brought up in this post. Here’s the second animated short, created by the elder group of kids:
http://munchausenproject.wordpress.com/.

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.

EDIT: The sources are published at GitHub now.

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”.

View/Download OggTheora video

(more…)

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

Let’s take a look back and talk about the project path, the problems – past and current.

(more…)