Hi everyone!

We’ve been so busy with the project that we forgot to update de blog ^^

First, I’d like you to meet our second CG character, « Bear ».

At first we planned to make it really look like an animal, but we changed it for a more abstract, more « rock-golem-like » shape. Note that we kept the ears to make it coherant with the « forest creature » theme . The texturing is not finished here, I still have to apply some moss on it and finish the shading. I won’t say more about it because I don’t want to spoil the end… it may not look wonderful, but the scene will be in a very low light setup, so we won’t see modeling imperfections and I chose not to abuse on the displace modifiers to shorten render times

Chris changed the edit of the film because with the studio shots, if we were to follow what we planned at first, the movie would be way over 9 minutes long, and some parts quite boring. We trashed some shots and shortened others. The movie now lasts aproximatively 6.30 minutes with the credits, and it’s WAY MORE interesting to watch. While doing that, he made a « neutral grading » for the whole movie, because it’s been shot on 2 DSLRs, with different lenses (well, we shot with a 50mm 1.8 most of the time, but still). Chris is now working on the Rabbit integration and it looks very good!

On my side, I made a lot of physical simulations using Bullet from the game engine to animate Bear. I had to do some R&D to be able to create realistic-looking moss and I am now working on dirt particles.We’ll render with Cycles, and as particle hair is not yet supported, so we’ll use both Cycles and Blender Internal to render shots where particles are needed: moss and dirt. I also had to do a cleanplate for one of the exterior shots where there was a sign on the background.

Here is a video where you can see what I’m talking about for the use of both renderers (by the way, I found this trick a while ago on the Tube Open Movie production blog, thanks Bassam Kurdali!) and I packed a few particles tests in it. These tests may look pointless and weird, but they are useful: testing particles with objects in motion, objects with a subsurf modifiers, interraction between several particle systems and emiters, objects as particles, different setups… Note that this video contains a spoiler on « how Bear will come to life ».

I still have to animate Bear and for that I’ll have to do a basic rig for it. Then, We’ll put togeter Chris’ cave, my bear and the greenscreen shots.

We have less than a month to finish the whole project + render it and add sound effects and music… (delivery date is june 14th and the Jury will see it the day after!)
It’s gonna be a busy month!