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!

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…

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.

Big thanks to Vyacheslav Yastrebcev for the model of Ivan’s car. ^___^

Some weapon layouts from ByeZif and Ivashka:

OpenSource software could evolve really fast and dramatically change behavior from version to version. Those changes could produce regressions. That’s why it is necessary for all Morevna Project  members to use the same versions of production software.

Blender is included in the repositories of all popular linux distributions, but usually without FFMPEG support. Though, it is easy to obtain appropriate binary from blender.org official site. Situation with Synfig Studio is worse. We’re using development version from SVN, because it contains some nice recently developed features and have more bugs fixed. From time to time it is happens what we discovering new bug, and if it is fixed we are not waiting for the release and jumping to next SVN version.

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Yesterday, stumbled upon nasty bug in blender 2.48(a). Explode modifier behaves really differently comparing to 2.47. This is the simple example file:

You can see what the parts of exploded object detached not only from object itself, but also from nearest area (which is 1,5-2 times larger than the object). The things become even worse when spin and rotation applied to particles.

It took me some time to figure out the cause of the problem – SubSurf modifier. It was applied before particles modifier, but if we swap their order things will return in place.

Another way to fix the problem – is just to apply SubSurf modifier to mesh. Anyway, in blender 2.47 Explode worked with SubSurf irrespective to their order. A bug? Or bug fix?

It’s time to tell about the way we organizing usage of the same models in various scenes with blender.

Imagine we have a model of… mmm… bike! And as you could see from storyboard bike is appearing on many scenes of Morevna Project demo. We do not want to include the full copy of a bike because every time we will change the original model, we will need to re-insert it into each scene and (sic!) animate it again.

Consider, what it is unavoidable to make changes in the model after it already inserted in the scenes and process of animation already begun. We can’t design the model from start till the very end – there is always something to fix during the usage. Also it could be handy to insert unfinished yet model to the scene to see how it will look, and let one artist to work on the scene and other continue develop model (like we did for truck model in scene 54).

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Marya Morevna’s bike layout.

Denis has managed to assemble all parts of the 24th scene into his first animation for this project. I suppose some of our readers are already saw this katana. The background is kindly provided by Carlos López González.