( 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 )

We are happy to announce that the new Freestyle-enabled packages of Blender are available for download now. Please note, that those packages are not exactly Blender 2.63, but much more like 2.64 RC1 (with FFMPEG and Freestyle features). Enjoy!

Illustration by Jikz. Distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA.

( 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!

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.

(more…)

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)

2012-09-20 EDIT: The call is closed.

See details

2012-08-20 / EDIT: The deadline is extended until the September 20th!

Hey, everyone!

There was so much response about our previous call, so we decided that it will be bad to waste your attention just on two models.

Let me explain the situation. Right at the moment there are some artists working on the model of Ivan. No one is working on Morevna yet. EDIT: And now Morevna in the work too. But the thing is that we will be able to accept only one model of Ivan and only one model of Morevna. And at the same moment I keep receiving mails from awesome people kindly offering their help for the project. If we will have 4-5 people working on one model and just one of them finally credited, then it will be waste of resources, that will be unfair and kind of disrespectful to the Blender community. Of course, the target of our call was not only to get models, but also to find people who we can attract to the project in the future when the time will come. And of course, some people taking this work to (im)proove their skills and as result we will have amount of CC-licensed content available around. But still, for many of artists mention in the credits, the fact that their model is accepted and used is a very important as motivation.

That’s why we’re taking the moment to post the another call, which will extend the opportunities to participate.

I’m talking about soldier models. Right now we have a basic soldier model, created by Erik Castillo:

You can download it here:

soldier-1.zip

But for Morevna Project Demo we will need a lot of more soldiers to appear. The idea is to create 5-6 variations of this basic soldier. For example, change the body constitution, cloth elements, head shape, hairs – everything in your hands! In the Demo the soldiers play a role of punky bandits at some meaning. So you can free your imagination and the variations could be quite radical or funny.

Please look at the wiki page for more information about soldiers.

So, all you need is to download the model above, play with it and send it back to us! Easy, fun and safe. ^__^

This idea to attract the community for creating soldier models is surely not belongs to me – I have stolen it from the Durian project. Although in case of Durian the idea didn’t worked as expected, I think in our case it could work because the low-poly models are enough for us and we have no such demands as “photo-realism”, “high resolution textures”, etc. We will use models in long-distance shots only – that’s why it’s ok to keep them low-polygonal and low-detailed.

The cool thing about soldiers task: in case of Morevna and Ivan models we can accept only one (best) work. But in case of soldiers we have no limit in accepting results. 5 or 6? More? No problem! So the probability of model to be accepted and you get credit is much higher. The only requirement is the quality of the model. ^__^

Models are expected to be:

• Made with Blender.
• Low poly. We will use them for long-distance shots only.
• UV textured.
• Rigged with bones, IK.
• Intended to use with Blender Freestyle rendering engine. Though, the internal renderer is fine too.
• Provided under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Just in case if it wasn’t clear in previous call, I will outline few important moments:

• We can’t offer any monetary compensation for the models – everyone is working at Morevna Project Demo on a voluntary basis at the moment.
• If the model gets accepted then we guarantee the mention in the credits. Please note, that in order to be accepted your model should be provided under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution license. It means that you don’t mind if your model will be used/reused/modified in this or any other project as long as you are mentioned (credited) you as an author.

The models are accepted before August 15th.

So, join our efforts! Army MorevnaProject wants you! Contact us!

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.