Ninjas going postal, fresh blood needed :D

Artwork Works in Progress
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Our work on the (sadly, fictional) Ninja Delivery Services advertisement is going splendidly! The video is now over 1 minute long, and things are slowly beginning to look like, well, things :yes:

We have a full task system, allowing people to claim and submit tasks, which we then update into the video and regularly re-render the whole thing (we are at fifth rendering now). A website, State of Flux, has even been designed to accomodate the work process, allowing access to all tools, manuscript, and Vimeo channel (the most current video render is directly accessible from the front page. It’s the small video in the title bar, just click Fullscreen).

If you want to see the video, go to SoF and Fullscreen the video in the title bar. It is still advisable to read the brief/simplistic manuscript, found under “The Project”! If not, things can still be pretty hard to understand :slight_smile:

If you want to participate (we have upped the available tasks to 24 now, including modelling, texture, rigging, and one slightly odd one), PM me or post in this thread to receive an invitation to the Dropbox used for the project!

Long-term plans…
The Ninja ad is a very interesting project, but in reality, it is just meant to be the first field test of the system. State of Flux is being designed to facilitate collaboration movies, and once the ad is completed (and made public, complete with .blends), a new project will be started, bigger and more challenging. It is already being drawn up, but will remain undisclosed until the ad nears completion.

The aim is to create a way for collaboration to be much easier than it is today. That way should be easy for anyone to participate in with whatever time and effort (and skills/challenges) a person wants to commit, as opposed to having to swear loyalty to a project from day 1 without knowing where that project will even go. What we are doing is experimenting with available tools and organizational structure, and once it really, truly works, a guide will be created so that anyone might start similar movie projects more easily. Hopefully, State of Flux, or another such website, will even make the entire organizational structure so near-automated that we can all focus on what we really want to do (create movies), and not on what we currently have to do (constantly organize people and make sure they do what they promis to).

That’s the dream, anyway. For now, the Ninja Delivery Services advertisement video is the reality. So if you feel this is for you, please let us know, and come be a part of it :wink:

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I will be trying to switch the discussion from the old thread into this new one, so let me be first to say:

Well, I claimed and completed the human skin. It’s just a very basic material (color and a color cloud texture, assign seperate, more red version to lips), but I think it looks nice, for now…
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13988401/Human.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13988401/HumanClose.png
Images are in the Dropbox Public folder.

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Question: can I use particles or smoke simulation for the explosion? :eyebrowlift:

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I have no idea what i was watching.

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Let’s try and see where it takes us! Just upload it as a completely seperate file, with only the explosion in it.

Haha, sorry, forgot to mention: It is still advisable to read the brief/simplistic manuscript, found under “The Project”! If not, things can still be pretty hard to understand :slight_smile: We’re just so used to it by now we rarely think about it, I guess :slight_smile:

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Ahh, more tasks ^.^ I’ll have to see how my day goes tomorrow to see if I can get to some of em. As for the “odd” task - I’ve been playing with the smoke sim quite alot and still haven’t figured out how to do good explosions :confused: I’ll keep playing and see if any magic springs up, and if that’s the case I’ll claim the task and get to perfecting it.

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Hello! I’ve been watching your threads for a about a week. I’m not too good at modeling, (if you do a search you can be find my space ship) but I think I can contribute somethings to this project. I’ve been dabbling with the “Ninja Delivery Services” caption animation, but I still feel it’s missing something. I have yet to officially claim the task.

I also have an idea about the explosions, but it needs a lot more fleshing out.

edit: uploaded it to youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqBtHJJd4Rk

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@QS Dragon: You’re racing against Paragon on the explosion thing, let’s see who gets there first (but seriously, I hope to see both your results, maybe the best option is a combination of them!).

@bmargoat: you don’t have to be an expert modeller to get involved. Lord knows I’m not. One part of all this is letting people get some experience and become better at Blendering, while being part of a team. Also, I watched your title text, maybe the bouncing is too cartoonish (the cartoonish characters will be replaced by lifelike ones)? I like the font, though, it looks elegant and yet aggressive :slight_smile: Looking forward to seeing what you come up with, and future involvement!

Edit: Ecrivain has asked me to put together a long-term list of features that would be great to have in the Tasklist. If anyone has ideas, let me know! (I got plenty myself :D)

Edit: I just made some task changes. The two tasks for the nightclub (exterior/entrance and interior/dance floor) have gone unclaimed for a while now, as has the underpass where the hero lands after the car explodes. I have made them concept drawing tasks instead, just in case it is because nobody really has a good design in mind for them; this way, someone can quickly draw something up (put the JPG or PNG in Dropbox), so that a modeller has something clearer to work from. So, we have our first three actual Concept tasks, people :smiley:

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Got the carseat done, and I noticed Paragon uploaded a very cool render of the new eye!

Carseat.png275×540 18.7 KB

Procedural%20Eye.jpg1024×1024 156 KB


…and BA has a new interface for inserting images. Very neat-o! (yes, I say ‘neat-o’, I am that old :o)

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Concept, hmmm, if only I wasn’t so bad at drawing (I tried to get my GF to draw up a night club floorplan since she’s much better when it comes to 2d than me but she refused :confused: )

As for the explosions, god I have a headache… I swear the simulator just hates people. Either way I’m going to upload some files for you and Paragon to look at, perhaps you can make some sense of them and learn a thing or two!

Nice seat, and the eye is gorgeous! nice work for both of you :wink:

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If someone just goes straight ahead and models them, nobody is going to protest :slight_smile: They have just been sitting there for about a week, while other things have come and gone, so I assumed nobody had an idea of how to model it without a concept for reference :confused:

As for the explosions, god I have a headache… I swear the simulator just hates people. Either way I’m going to upload some files for you and Paragon to look at, perhaps you can make some sense of them and learn a thing or two!
I fear the simulators. I spent a week of vacation back with 2.47(?) trying to learn the fluid simulator well. I got some nice results, but never anything i actually intended. Those things are hardcore, and I am not smart enough for them :frowning: Good luck to both you and Paragon in trying!!

PS: I am doing some really weird experiments on the whole linking thing, and if you run across ANY tutorials beyond the basic “click here to link it into your scene”, let me know! There is precious little out there on the matter, and either I am doing something completely wrong, or I am doing something insanely advanced. I would like to find out which it is :eek:

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Claimed and finished the night club concept drawings. I can’t get to the drop box so I’ll post them here.

Attachments

stage.jpg1024×745 177 KB

front door.jpg1024×745 129 KB

dance club layout.jpg1024×745 49.5 KB

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PM me your email, I’ll invite you to the Dropbox. And I think we have our nightclub interior designed right there :slight_smile: Now we just need someone to model it :eek:

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Awesome, this looks like it will be a heckuva fun scene! and now that I see it before me, I realize this is probably going to be the single hardest scene of the entire animation, second only to the car scenes. Reason: everything in this place is gonna be animated o.o ohh gosh!

Pipeline : outa curiosity, I was wondering about or style. You say you want really realistic, I was just wondering if you’ve seen the movies FFVII:Advent Children and/or Beowulf? From all the animated movies I’ve seen those two were probably the most realistic I’ve come across, as well as the most adult oriented. Aside from avatar of course :wink:

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I own both FF: Spirits Within and FF: Advent Children. FF:AC is, IMHO, a bit Anime stylized (no surprise, I watch Anime :D), but simply does it so well that you don’t think about it. FF:SW is probably closer to what I am thinking. Not that we are copying anything, of course, but it’s nice to have a benchmark. Beowulf I have a friend’s copy of (always forget to return it). I am rather torn on that style. Some of it is great, some of it is clunky. But yes, we are talking that general direction. I would cite a dozen different examples of lifelike animation, but I think liamkemp.com is a good place to start (it has a few really impressive videos), and there are tons of good work out there for realistic stills (like Jacques Defontaine).

Now, all this is of course high-level pro work, so we are limited in achieving that quality. But my hope is to get simply one model really working, with high quality, and make it the foundation for other models. This is one reason I keep asking to avoid image textures, if possible: I feel we should make something we can easily alter. If skin is a material from built-in textures, we can alter tone, roughness, etc. to be any kind of skin we want. There are limits to that, but I want to push them as far as we can.

Wow. Bit of a rant there :o

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Quality won’t be a problem if we take our time and be patient, focus on what’s important and do our research. Here’ a good article describing the “new techniques” of FF:SW (when they were new XD) but I found some points interesting… you can skip the first 4-5 pages all about Aki Ross and her figure >.>

About your completely procedural skin shader - that’s both a yes and no. Yes is the base of the skin shaders should be procedural, with the procedurals being all the micro poly detail (I’ll look around for an article written by pixar about their SSS technique where they describe their method using some really interesting procedurals and stuff) but the characters also need an image map. Image map for stronger color detail and procedural for skin detail.

Edit: dunno why it didn’t attach :confused: (here)

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@QS Dragon: Did you forget to attach the article? But yes, some things will be images. Even those should be fairly swappable, though, like 2-3 maps for freckles (mix and match for different “styles”), 3-5 for wrinkles (more maps, more wrinkles, and some options for variation), and such. A few will be unique, like a tattoo or notable birthmark. But it is surprising how much customization is possible with a few tools. What I just really don’t want is “projected skin”, since it would need redoing for just about every major character :frowning:

But yeah, we’re definitely on the same page. About the patience, too, although it’s damned hard to wait :slight_smile:

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HAHA I here ya XD
I didn’t want to wait to start modeling that club, but my gf was over last night and we spent a good 6 hours watching Bleach o.o So tonight I plan on working on several of the tasks :wink:

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Great to hear! I will probably take one or two of the ‘big’ tasks myself tonight. I have been a bit worried that activity has died down after starting the new thread, but it’s good to know it is building up again. I am still amazed how much got done the first week, and hope we can get the same kind of momentum for the remaining work. We’re about 1/3 through the entire project, I estimate!

You know what, after I get the writing done on the Linking ‘blog’ thread I am planning to get done, I think I’ll go do the IK rig. In fact, I’ll go claim it right now :wink:

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Well, since it seems in the end no one is taking the forest tree task, I’ll just claim it myself XD