When preparing my talk for FSCONS, I planned to make it a journey into the project history. Unfortunately, I was unable to keep it within the time limit and that made me felt unsatisfied. This is why I’ve decided to write all my thoughts on that into a separate blog post here. Also it’s a good chance to put into a single place some historical/documentary videos that were buried in the blog history and to recall particular events happening during the last few weeks, as a huge part of them wasn’t covered in my week reports.

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( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Ok, here are some quick and hot news from the past week.

Nikolay successfully finished overpaints for the last backgrounds. Now we have all backgrounds completely finished. Also, he took a chance to redraw some keyframes that we were not satisfied with – and hey, they are much tasty now!

What about me? As planned I have successfully done mysterious extra work on 3D models of vehicles. That was quite significant improvement and I’m totally satisfied with the result. My best thanks to Chris Kuhn (aka kuhn0362) for provided 3D model.

Another thing to mention – Yu Chen translated the storyboard of Morevna Project Demo to Chinese. You can download it from here. In addition to that, he have made a translation of original Russian fairy-tale about Marya Morevna, which our project is based on.  Right now he is heading to bring the full Morevna screenplay into Chinese.

That’s all for today. This week we will be working on polishing out the final animation, special fx and compositing. The release is on 10th of November, remember? We have to hurry! Have an awesome week, everyone! ^__^

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Last week an important milestone was reached – we have managed to close all white gaps in the Demo. That’s it, all backgrounds are in place now.

Though, some of background images are still pending for overpaint. There are seven of such left at the moment. I’m sure Nikolay will finish them before the end of this week – that will be our next milestone.

Among other achievements, we also have finished the work on shot 07 – a very complex shot where we have 3D turning camera. In such case we cannot directly do overpaint for backgrounds, because camera is floating in 3D space and background is always different. So we  took existing overpainted image and unwrapped it as UV-texture right onto 3D model of battlefield. I was very worried about the result, because I wanted this shot to fit seamlessly with other 2D shots. Also, I wasn’t sure that single overpaint texture will be enough and we expected to draw additional overpaints for particular camera angles. But at the end it turned out that one texture is enough and after some neat compositing the result looks very well for my taste. I’m very happy about it. ^_^

Unwrapping overpaint into textures

Talking about Blender, I have to mention that when we migrated to Freestyle-enabled Blender we hit a strange issue – one particular file started to render upside-down. I wouldn’t pay much attention to this, since I always can flip the image during compositing. But then it turned out that on some systems (our main rendering server, for example) it renders fine, with no upside-down effect! After some investigation we found that the problem with incompatibility of different versions of OpenEXR library. So, our blender builds are fixed now, you can get them from software page, as usual.

Another thing to mention about software – is there someone out there who uses Remake (our lovely automated-rendering system)? Please note that we made a bunch of important fixes to it during the last few months and you are strongly encouraged to use development version. Most probably the new version will be released together with Morevna Demo.

What’s next? I’ll keep working on compositing, bringing the whole animation to the equal color feel and adding lightning effects. Also I will keep polishing the animation, fixing issues and adding the particles effects. Another target for this week will be doing extra work on 3D vehicles. That’s the plan. See you next week!

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

It’s the 1st of October and it’s hard to tell which stage we are now on – because we are still finishing backgrounds, making 3D, putting it all together and polishing it all at the same time. In my previous production plan we have October planned for “Sound and Compositing”, but you can guess that the pure month for just that is too much. Right, I especially planned October as an “extra month” that we dedicate to put all odds and ends together. And we are putting them.

We have most key backgrounds finished and the only tricky part left is to unwrap some of them into 3D scenes – we need to do that in several places. Besides drawing backgrounds, Nikolay also working on polishing animation. He examines the basic tweening done by me and fixes it so the characters animation look solid and smooth. It turns out well, but there is still a lot to be polished.

Marco (Chotio Productions) have finished animation of the last soldiers for shot 07. Now he is proceeding with animation for the main characters. He will make animation of Ivan and Morevna dancing for shots 38, 41 and 55.

I have worked here and there on 3D backgrounds again and compositing. In addition to that I have finished coloring the 3D models of Ivan and Morevna. Also we have updated the blender build again – you can get it from our software page.

Ivan and Morevna models by Linil Komban and Somnath Karande

That’s all for today. Sorry for meagre report this time, but I have to hurry – still lots to be done today. Have a great week! ^__^

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Can you believe it? Last week we have finished the “Vectorization and Tweening” stage and now we are officially working on “Backgrounds and 3D”! Hurray!

The most hard stage was “Drawing Keyframes”, but “Vectorization and Tweening” was the most time-consuming one. And it’s over now! (yes, I would like to repeat it again so you can see how epic this moment feels for me ^__^).

,

Last week I and Nikolay both worked hard on vectorization routines and also we got some help from our community friends here. While I was finishing with the last characters and keyframe merging, Nikolay spent half of the week working on backgrounds. He works very fast and enthusiastically. I really should hurry to prepare all files for him in time.

There is one more person who was contributing very actively to the project last week. It is Marco Antonio Real Adame (Chotio Productions). He has made an animation for his last soldier model and made another two soldier variations!

Soldier models (variations)

Looks like he will be the one and only contributor of our soldiers community call and he gets even more serious about contributing to the project – he plans to take on the animation for the main characters as well. If he covers us here, then we will be able to dedicate much more time to backgrounds and make them even more awesome. Well, probably you can understand what I mean.

Working on background for shot 01

My hands are itching to post fresh “production snapshot” of the Demo, so you can see yourself all the work done. But I should hold myself, because I don’t want to spoil you the impression of watching finished result. And of course those, who really want to take a sneak peek – they are always free to take sources and build snapshot by themselves. Everything is open, jejeje. ^_^

Most probably from now on I will stop publishing the screenshots too. The reason is the same – to avoid spoilers. I guess that will make my weekly reports even more boring… But who knows, maybe I will not be able to handle myself and will take to post a few dozens of exciting ones? Time will show!

( 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!

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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.

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…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!

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.

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Meanwhile Nikolay struggle with keyframes, Erik Castillo has finished the promised 3D model of soldier. I was a little worried about the lack of such model, because we need it in shot 35 for keyframes drawing (this is a very complex shot where the soldiers are thrown into the air). Luckily Erik did best to cover us here. Now I can proceed to playing with shot 35.

Also we will need soldier models in shot 07 – it is where camera does a long turn around Ivan and Morevna and soldiers getting up from the ground and surrounding them. For this we will need 5-6 variations of this basic soldier to use all them in shot 07. It will be the next step. Stay tuned!

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.