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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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.