Thursday, October 21, 2010

A girl and her Wyvern. It's a beautiful thing.

A lot of you have probably already seen this but it's new to me.



It's... it's very dusty in here. Hang on a minute...

OK, the really amazing thing about this short film is that it's basically a demo reel to show what the open-source animation program Blender is capable of. Here's a brief explanation, from the short's YouTube page:

"Sintel" is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1,000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film.
This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world."

"Sintel" premiered on the first of October and already hit one million views on YouTube by the end of the week. The creators expressed their joy in the way only an animator can, "seems we’ve made everyone cry!"

Pretty amazing. I love how they've demonstrated everything their software can do while producing a short that gets me, as an animation fan, a heck of a lot more excited than, say, the "Megamind" trailer.

Be sure to check out the production blog, which has some wonderful treats like this super-adorable early concept art and creature designs.

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Announcement... really more like a disclaimer/apology in advance: I hurt my back pretty badly a couple of days ago. I'm in the "original injury is starting to feel better; too bad all the other muscles who had to compensate for the first injury feel worse" stage. It basically hurts to do anything besides lie down.
So basically, it hurts to sit up and type. I'm hoping I can find some way to work around this; I want to have *some* content for Halloween.
Yes, the holiday season has snuck up on me again. This, then, is getting older; "every year is getting shorter" and all that. I'll have some fun with that little existential crisis prompt while staring at the ceiling later. Oh shit.

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Sketch of the Day!
I haven't been able to upload anything new at the time of writing this, but I promise you the Pink Dinosaur Sketchbook project is still going.

Pink Dinosaur Sketchbook 10.6.10 sketch

OMG, this is AWESOME!!!

Pink Dinosaur Project 10.6 - So very awesome

Bwahaha...