Just a short post (I have lots to do at work, but I need a slight distraction to clear up my brain)… My Sintel DVD has just arrived, and one word to describe it: overwhelmed!

For those of you who don’t know what Sintel is, it is the third open movie made by the Blender Foundation to showcase the advancements of Blender (particularly the Blender 2.5.x series).

Technical goals for Blender 2.5.x are:
* High detail multi-res modeling (sculpting) and render (micropolygons?)
* Fire/smoke/volumetrics & explosions
* Compositing using tiles/regions, so it becomes resolution independent
* Crowd/massive simulation (fix animation system to allow duplicates)
* Improve library system for managing complex projects
* Deliver in 4k digital cinema (depending agreement with sponsor)

As was with all of the open movies, the Blender Foundation depended on donations to help fund development of the open source software application (and create the open movie in the process).

Was the price of getting a DVD worth it? In a word, yes. You’ll have 4 DVDs worth of the actual film, tutorials, scripts, the blender program used to create sintel (plus all of the .blend files to recreate the film!), and whole lot of extras! You’ll even get 4K screenshot renders of the film itself.

In this screenshot, I loaded the .blend file of the guardian fighting sintel in the first scene:

Guardian Render in Blender 2.5.x

There are funny pics like:

Indiana Jones much?

and

Bunny!

And some video recordings of the voice actors:

Halina Reijn voicing Sintel

All in all, it’s a great addition to the Blender library and 3D resources.

DVD Extras (Disk #3)

Film Credits - Was fun looking at my name in it!

From the Durian/Sintel Site:

So! exciting times here at the Blender Institute, today is our very-really-thistimeforsure last rendering day, next to some color grade we need to do still, but then is time to grab those big .EXR files and convert them into friendly DPX’s for the guys at Cineco to do magic with it and turn them into 21312 stills of 35mm chemical glory.

That means we’re getting close to our (real!) Premiere, so in order to help us make some noise, 3D World is widely covering Blender topics on October’s issue, Sintel will be on cover + interview time with Ton (Producer), Colin (Director), and William (Animator), and even BBB got a column in “A list of the all the Best CG shorts out there”

In addition to this, I decided to make some unofficial wallpapers for all of you to enjoy – just click on the links below.

Hi all,

Sorry for the long delay in posting. Been quite busy lately (real life and trying to make ends meet – poor developer here ). Anyways, there’s a new WIP render of the Sintel Open Movie by the Blender Foundation. Remember it’s a work in progress (some bugs in blender build causing some problems in the render).

Anyways, here’s a youtube video of the wip:

Also, two weeks ago, a trailer of the Sintel movie came out:

All in all, it’s an impressive feat for the Blender team considering they are both working on the movie, plus working on improving blender as well!

And here is what you windows guys are waiting for – an installer for the blender 2.5 alpha 2 svn build date 5-28-2010.

Get your windows blender installer build at the ostalks ibiblio mirror now.

I’ve been following with much interest the new Blender Open Movie Project (codename: Durian) just recently named Sintel. As always, every blog post of theirs has added excitement to my part because this is one of those times that Blender, an open source 3D application, gets features that match or (hopefully) exceeds software that is released commercially.

One thing that got my attention was the paint-over of the 3D model of Sintel, the lead character:

And the cloth simulation that is under development as shown in this video here:

Cloth Test 01 from Project Durian on Vimeo.

They are already very impressive, and considering that the first and second Open Movie projects were successes in their own right, the current project has already, in my opinion, surpassed the first two.

So impressed was I with the upcoming features to be added in Blender (this project is considered an action-based short film), that I supported the Blender project by becoming a dvd-sponsor during pre-production.  And that my friend, is a new story altogether.