Project widow is an animation project using free open-source software, it is being developed as a real-world production test, for the blender to Renderman bridge plugin, MOSAIC.
The animation is being developed with the help of the MOSAIC developer and the developers of the Aqsis rendering engine (REYES based render engine). The main goal is to produce a short animated film that will be shown at next years SIGGRAPH event, on the Animux booth. Animux is another opensource project, Animux is an opensource Linux based OS, which is designed specifically for the Artist (2D, 3D, sound and video), it also (to my knowledge) has a data asset managment system built into the OS, to help with managing multiple data sets (3D art assets etc).
Since we have assistance from the Animux developers, this means we also have access to a render farm consisting of 12 Quad core phenoms and 52GB of RAM (as well as 10 Nvidia Geforce cards and 5 Nvidia Quadro cards, if the project gets ported to gelato, which is an option as MOSAIC supports a multi-tude of Renderman compliant rendering engines).
For more information on the software that project widow is making use of please see the links below;
The storyline
The story line is quite simple, a spider is constructing a web in an underground subway system, during this time a subway train is hurtling down the tracks at full speed, barely holding onto the tracks as a charges towards the spiders location, it’s full beam can be seen heading down the tunnel, the spider, unaware of what is heading it’s way pauses, the air flow in the tunnel picks up, the spider releases impending doom is heading straight for it, the spider, panics and then tries to re-inforce the web that it has spent many hours building, it races around the web, laying line after line of silk, but it’s too late the train is seconds away, it roars past the spider, the displaced air ravages the web, the spider is thrown from it’s web and hangs by a single thread.
The train goes past, leaving the spider and it’s tangles mess of silk behind, the spider looks around, it starts to make it’s ascent back up the line of silk when all of a sudden a discarded sheet of paper (newspaper possibly) blows past and slices the single thread holding the spider up. The spider falls to the floor, a few seconds pass by, the spider, curled up in a ball doesn’t move a muscle. But after another few seconds it shows signs of life, it slowly gets up and as scurrys off, a few seconds later the piece of paper that sliced the thread floats down in front of the camera with the worlds “The end” written on the page (If it’s a newspaper it will be somewhere on the paper, i.e. a headline).
That is the basic storyline, we already have a fully developed storyboard (images and text for scenes). Which can be viewed here.
The project progress
So far the project has come along way, although it has only been going for a few short weeks we already have had items shown at the Animux booth at SIGGRAPH, the reception seemed quite good, so we are looking forward to showing a complete short film, along with techinical documentation and tutorials to help other artists make use of Renderman compliant render engines.
80% to 90% of the 3D model assets have been completed so far, the main character has been rigged.
We are now at stage were we need help with the animation of the spiders and train in the scenes, along with lighting and texturing/ shader writing for the final scenes.
Using blender is a must, however i can offer training and advice (PDF documents and videos) on using blender for animating, lighting, UV mapping, texturing and Animate78 should be able to help out with the MOSAIC plugin system (Shader linking and lighting settings).
The deadline for this project will be SIGGRAPH 2010, however we would like to finish the short film as soon as possible, so we can start developing a second animation to also show at SIGGRAPH 2010.
Images
More details (workflow, pipeline setup etc)
More information can be here about the current setup of the project, as well as our own research and developemt on the project.
If you are interested in this project, or have any queries please don’t hesitate to ask, you can post here, or contact me directly at this email address Daniel.Wray.uk(no_bots)@Gmail.com
With out the (no_bots) 