( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

OK, we’re one step from finishing “Vectorization and Tweening” stage. There are just two shots pending for my review and a few soldiers to vectorize, which in fact are background characters. Be sure – we’re squeezing most of our free time to get this stage finished sooner.

Vectorization and Tweening status (10.09.2012)

The most of vectorization work last week is done by Nikolay. My work is merging keyframes together and tweening. At the same time I already have started some work on backgrounds. This is necessary to prepare the ground for Nikolay, so he can proceed to this task immediately as soon as vectorization stage will be done. The good thing  is that comparing to previous stage we don’t need to invent anything here. The technology is pretty much established and well described on the internet. See tutorials here and here for example. I’m sure it will be no problem to implement the same workflow with existing open-source software.

Working on background for shot 59

Also, we have started reparations to render project in full resolution (1920×1080). Too early? No way! We already hit a few problems. Some of them we were able to fix quickly, but at the moment two of them remains.

First of all it is a parallelization problem in Synfig – right at the moment it doesn’t support more than one thread in commandline rendering. Of course we can always tell Remake to run several jobs at once, but that’s not effective regarding to the memory consumption (considering that there us a shots requiring more than 3 Gb of RAM to render).

Second problem is more serious – we have hit a bug which leads Synfig to crash when trying to render animation with Warp layer at high resolution. It is really blocking issue and right now I’m looking for workaround.

This is all my news for today. Have a great week, everyone!

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

This weekly report I will start from an announcement that as of September 1st our vectorization “competition” is over.

And here’s the final results:

• Jcome: 26
• LoboZamora: 17
• Pixelgeek: 4
• Animtim: 3

It’s obvious that absolute leader in that competition is Jcome! Congratulations! ^__^

The vectorization competition was started on July 22 and finished on September 1st. During that period the community successfully vectorized the amount of 30 keyframes. It is a really significant help for the project. The results of such community involvement are evaluated by me as a big success and valuable experience. We plan to continue extending and improving such practices as part of our future activities.

My big thanks to all participants and congratulations to the winner!

_____________

While the vectorization call is over, the call for soldier models is still open and we received another submission from Marco Antonio Real Adame (Chotio Productions. Here it is:

Now Marco is willing to proceed with animating this one in the same way as he did for previous model.

_____________

…And I guess many of you remember that the 1st of September is also a deadline for our “Vectorization and Tweening” stages. Sad news here – we didn’t managed to finish everything in time. The current status can be found on the image below. As you can see there is still few major shots pending, as well as some minor works.

Tweening and Vectorization status (03.09.2012)

We hope to finish everything on this week and proceed to the next stage as soon as possible.

That’s all for today. Let’s keep working hard!

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Hello, my dear reader! It’s only a few days left before the 1st of September, which is not only the Knowledge Day (in Russia), but also is a deadline for our “Vectorization and Tweening” stage. We are working very hard to get everything done, but looks like we are going to get an extra week to have everything finished. On the other hand, we are ahead of schedule with 3D works, which is good. The rest of September will be dedicated to  backgrounds painting and 3D works, as planned.

Tweening and Vectorization status (27.08.2012)

Few words about our  community call for soldiers models. For some reason it is not gained much popularity, but we got a few interesting submissions. One of them is made by Marco Antonio Real Adame was mentioned in one of my previous reports. But besides making soldier variation, Marco decided to go for second stage and created an animation for it, which will be used in shot 07. Here it is:

Due to lack of submissions for soldiers community call we have analyzed our schedule and decided to extend the deadline until the September 20th.  Everyone who wants to have some fun with soldiers and get the mention in the credits is welcome to participate!

And of course, here’s the usual statistics for the vectorization call:

• Jcome: 26
• Pixelgeek: 4
• Animtim: 3
• LoboZamora: 14

That’s all for today, we are getting back to work. Have a great week!

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Do you hear the ground trembling? Yes, the release date of the Demo is approaching. The critical mass have been reached and we suddenly made significant a break through.

Tweening and Vectorization status (20.08.2012)

Can you believe? For main characters it’s less than 10 shots left to do!  All the rest is just background characters, 3d models and polishing. Of course that’s a lot of work too, but hey, how sweet that feels when you see something suddenly turns from random  pieces into solid whole!

The vectorization competition is going on and it’s a big help for us. Here’s the current statistics:

• Jcome: 20
• Pixelgeek: 4
• Animtim: 3
• LoboZamora: 13

Good new for all participants – we have no more foot closeups to vectorize! I can imagine how much you all “liked” such tasks. ^__^

When we working on Morevna Project we always learning. And everytime when we find new trick, new workflow or new effect – we always feel happy. The discovery of the last week was the Luminance blend method for shadows. Previously we used Onto blend method, but this week we have found that Luminance can give a much better look in many cases. Compare yourself:

Unfortunately, for dark colors Luminance gives a it weird results. Right now we are combining both methods, depending on the situation, butI’m starting to think on creating the new blend method which will combine the best of two worlds. Still, i can’t tell for sure if that possible…

And yes, this week we have an exceptional number of screenshots to show. Enjoy!

OK, people, today we are ready to announce the results of our community call for Ivan and Morevna models.

One month passed by since we published the call and during that period many artists worked to create the models of the two main characters. It was an exciting for me to meet so many enthusiastic people and see everyone was working so hard to deliver the best results. But in we end we can accept only one model of Ivan and only one model of Morevna. So, on August 15th we got final submissions and defined the models to be used in production.

Our choice

Our choice is a work by Linil Komban and Somnath Karande. They worked together as team and managed to create both models during the call period! Here they are:

Marya Morevna

Ivan Tsarevich

Without a doubt I can say that it was a big luck to have Linil and Somnath participating in the call – they have worked with an awesome speed, staying in touch during the whole period and highly responsive to fixing every issue. I really like the way they work and will be happy to collaborate with them again.

By the way, the latest versions of Ivan and Morevna models are always available in our repository under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Read the rest of this entry »

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

What can I say about the last week? Well, we still have a lot of fun with vectorization! The production sheet is slowly clearing up and the amount of white spaces on it is not that depressing anymore. Still it’s not a time for relaxing – we have only 2,5 weeks left for this task. Of course, we keep receiving help from the community and here’s the current stats:

• Jcome: 17
• Pixelgeek: 4
• Animtim: 3
• LoboZamora: 4

Also, there is a lot of work have been done on 3D models. The deadline for Ivan and Morevna community call is approaching and this week on 15th August I’m going to announce the results.

And yes, we have finally announced official release date of the Demo. We defined this date in early March already. It was just almost random – I’ve said to Nikolay: “We’re going to release in November, but maybe it would be good to set particular date?” And then we decided it to be 10th of November. And when the invitation to participate in FSCONS  come up, we suddenly realized that this event concurs with our release date. So, we decided – hey, why not? Let’s get the first screening at the conference in Sweden! And yesterday, after receiving the confirmation of our participation accepted, we were happy to tell aloud about our evil plans. That’s the story.

So, it’s all my news for today, need to get back to work. Have a great week, everyone!

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

It’s time for an official announcement.

The Morevna Project Demo will be released on November 10th, 2012.

The release event, as well as the first public screening will take place
at Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit
(Göteborg, Sweden).

Everyone is invited to come.

As part of this event me and Julia Velkova are going to give a talk “Open animation projects: state of the art, problems and perspectives”. Well, in fact, I still need to find funds to cover my travel costs to Sweden. But anyway, release date and place are defined and aren’t going to change. Chances to see you there! I’ll keep you updated. ^__^

P.S. Errr… I guess we need to mock up a good poster about this? ^_^”

Here’s a little video I have prepared on how we do coloring using colorcharts in Synfig.

The colorcharts is very cool feature for animation projects – you have all key colors defined in one file and when you change this file, all colors are changed in the whole project. So you can dynamically tweak colors for your characters with a single click.

Colorcharts are natively supported in Synfig through the linking feature. Many people know that you can link parameters in Synfig within one file, but very few know that you can link to parameters from other files. And this is how colorcharts work – we just link all colors to the exported values in another file. See video below for detailed explanation.

Apologies for my English. ^__^

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Last week was extremely productive – we have finished a few complex shots. Although I still do some vectorization, my main task is to stitch vectorized keyframes together and tween them. Working with such complex shots with a lot of action I can feel my skills growing, I can feel how expands my understanding of timing, I challenge myself to get better results with very few keyframes – and that’s really exciting. I see I can do animation tasks faster than before and that’s a good sign. Right at the moment I can estimate our progress as about of half of the work on vectorization done  – we still lag behind the schedule, but the skills are growing and that gives me a hope to get this task finished in time.

Tweening and Vectorization status (06.08.2012)

Nikolay works all at his rage on vectorization – he is so enthusiastic that he did not  have any scruples to rework his artwork right in the process, bringing the real creative touch to some shots.

I can say our vectorization competition is going very well – thanks to the contributions of the community we have almost finished shot 34 (only last keyframe left which I should vectorize by myself) and shot 31 is finished as well.

Here’s the score stats for current participants:

• Jcome: 14
• Pixelgeek: 4
• Animtim: 3

Also, Julia Velkova finished reviewing the English translation. Now it’s pending for my final review to get this task marked as “done”. Yay!

Finally, we got some help with 3D truck from Umesh Marappa – we asked him to improve the low-poly model we had. As result, he did a full rework from the ground and now we have shiny new detalized model. Thank you, Umesh!

Truck model by Umesh Marappa

That’s all my news for today. Stay tuned and have an awesome week, everyone!

Another week passed by. The activity in the project increasing and there are lots of things I want to share today.

First of all, we are happy to get two participants joined our community call for vectorization. Don’t be distracted by the small number of participants. I should say – even one person can make a significant difference and even a little help with such a big job is significant. I want to give a special mention to Yu Chen – he is working very intensively. We are very happy he is joined our efforts.

This week we got first submission of soldier variation by Marco Antonio Real Adame. He is joined our soldiers community call on July 21st and yesterday have presented his work (see soldier-2.blend file in repository). Now he took the task to animate his model for shot 07. Let’s see how this will turn out!

Isn’t that guy is charming one? ^_^ Still I haven’t played with render settings yet…

Also the work on Ivan and Morevna models is still on the way and we already got some awesome results. But I should handle myself to announce final decisions on August 15th.

Nikolay did a great work by vectorizing all keyframes of Ivan for shot 20. Now they are pending for my review. I have been doing some vectorization too, as well as administration routines. Also, I managed to do one more important thing (that surely should have been done earlier) – set up the colorchart for the main characters. Now its possible to use common colorchart files for vectorized artwork (I hope to to post video about that soon).

  

And finally, good news for everyone who got “more than $100″ rewards from our donation campaign – the promised goodies are finally packaged and sent! My apologies for taking it so long. The tracking numbers will be provided by e-mail on personal basis.

That’s all for today. Have an awesome week, everyone!

Tweening and Vectorization status (30.07.2012)