It’s time to give a quick summary about our progress since the last production report!
First and big: Nikolai Mamashev have finished mesh modeling for Koschei – the main villain of Morevna series. Here is our cutie:
Some screenshots from our work process (cryptic Cyrillic symbols included):
And here is a video showing discussion of Koschei’s concept.
The model of Koschei at its current state will be published for free download and reuse under CC-BY license. The link for download follows in the next post.
You might notice that the model still needs texturing and rigging.Unfortunately, by this moment we have exhausted all funds collected through our last crowdfunding campaign and Nikolai stops working on the project for undefined period – until the time when I will find some funds to get him paid again.
Nikolai has started his work on 16th of January 2018 and initially (as it was mentioned in my previous report) we expected Nikolai to work till April 1st. But luckily we managed to extend this period till April 24th, 2018. In summary for this period Nikolai have created a full-featured 3D model (textured and rigged) of Ivan’s Car and created a 3D model of Koschei (mesh only).
Having both of those models will simplify our further animation process and greatly improve overall visual quality. This also establishes a good foundations for our future work, since both models are taking part in other episodes of Morevna series. Much thanks to everyone who supported our crowdfunding campaign and made this happen!
Meanwhile Anastasia Mayzhegisheva continues to work (her efforts are covered by the money coming from our Patreon page) and here are some pieces from her working process:
And some animations (made in Krita):
In March, as part of our trip to SuzdalFest, we organized a meeting of Morevna fans in Moscow (MorevnaCon). We took this event as an opportunity to complete full edit for upcoming episode. Anastasia helped me a lot with editing (actually, I can see she is steadily really growing into assistant director). The full production snapshot was demonstrated at MorevnaCon and now it is also available for our Premium Patrons.
In-Production Content
So, what’s next? Anastasia will continue to work on the new episode – we still have a lot of scenes that do not require full-featured model of Koschei. Still, soon or later I have to find a way to get Nikolai back to the project, so he can (at least) complete rigging and texturing. This isn’t going to be solved immediately, since I have some other tasks accumulated in my queue and demanding my attention. Here is what I have in my list (read: what you can expect soon):
- Release Synfig 1.3.7. Write a detailed development report summarizing the work of our new hired developer Artem Konoplin for the past 1,5 months.
- Establish recurring donations for Synfig, to make sure we can keep our new hired developer Artem Konoplin working on Synfig regularly.
- Release a testing package of RenderChan for Windows (let’s call it “alpha version”).
- Write a long-due report about the status of work of Ivan Mahonin on assistants feature for OpenToonz.
- Release OpenToonz 1.2.0.3 (and, possibly, OpenToonz 1.2.0.4).
- Cook dinner (not so epic, but no less important).
Taking down all those items most probably will take a month or two. But that really worth it, since success of Morevna is heavily tied with our software development activities. And in the meantime I will keep you posted with new production reports. So, stay tuned!
Our work is possible thanks to awesome people who supporting our project with a monthly donations through Patreon platform. Thanks to their support we can continuously dedicate our time to this project and bring you more interesting and useful stuff!
My special thanks to our new sponsors:
