Blenergetic: I like it! The modeling looks great so far.
Regarding the idea of the second muffin “slowly working his way over to the next spot.”: I simply can’t get my head around this. I cant see how this would be executed. Animatic? Drawings? Something please?
dante
Blenergetic, the link isn’t working for me 
I just updated the Looong post about the pending work, please check it out.
New progress on the kitchen? … no, I’ve been unable to touch it today. Maybe tonight or in the morning tomorrow.
¨slowly working his way to… ¨ hmmm… I was thinking more of a nervous small jumping to quickly get away from the freaky muffin.
ok apollux, i changed the link. try it again (although i’m not sure why the link didn’t work for you, dante got it fine) :-?
I like the stove… but it has a fatal error thoug The controls can’t be placed back there… you would burn your hands everytime, and every pot cooking would block the access to the controls.
On the oven itself, if the team want it electric then I am fine with it… your heating coil needs to be longer and more dense I think.
i think im out of my league in the modeling category, but if you give me something simple, ill be pleased to try it out. i think we should all get together on a chat on aim or something, so that we can work out all the bugs… good idea? i didnt like the ideas of the endings, i think there should just be the punchline, then he jumps, then cut to black
How exactly could the muffin hop slowly away from the first? I mean, its either in the hole that it started in or its not…
dante
apollux, im not sure whats wrong with the controls being on the back of the oven, every oven ive ever seen has the knobs there. ill work on the heating coil and adding more detail (i wont have time for the WC, but that’s ok, i’d rather do this anyways)
also, i had an idea for the credits. we could flash between the credits and the process of making/preparing the muffins every few seconds, and then cut to the full scene.
i would be happy to do easy animation (oven door opening, camera movements, etc) once the logistics are layed out.
as for the cutting between the pouring of the batter and the scene inside the oven, i think we should just do a smooth, slow zoom through the ‘window’ on the front of the oven.
I vote no credits till the end. This animation is much too short to take up what little animation there is with credits. Not that i have anything against credits (mmmm…my name…) but this animation is just too short for that. Thatts just my take tho…
dante
Give me until Monday and I’ll have some storyboards for you guys. We’ll take that as a start and go from there (at least, as far as the story goes, we have characters and a set now, so we can start modeling that now).
Whoa…photoreal? yafray? shit…idk man. I like yafray and all but i just think that using yafray is gonna add to an already complicated process that may or may not lead to a finished product as it is. I say, keep it short, simple and fun. Just thinking about the legistics now makes my head hurt…
The cook: We have to find a way to make convincing materials for skin and clothing. We also need to model and animate the clothing as well as finding ways to convincingly animate the figure. Anyone up for all of that?
We have to find a way to simulate the texture on the muffins, which will probably take more than a little tweaking.
We are looking at significantly longer render times. Now thats not a huge problem when rendering a final product, but when tweaking, its going to be a pain in the ass.
Now, I’m not saying that these things CAN’T be done. What I am saying is that for what we are doing, I don’t think the extra work is worth it.
If your going to use yafray, good luck. I’m just not sure i want to tangle with that just now…
Besides, I think that blender’s renderer is more than good enough to do the job.
dante
If all textures are UV-mapped and we use high quallity textures then the extra work to use Yafray is minimal. Mostly choosing wich light to remove, couse on Yafray usually you need lees light sources than with Blender (GI advantage).
Besides… Yafray or not, the procces is exactly the same. We have to do all the steps and when the animation is ready just render some test frames on Yafray… if we like what comes out we go the Yafray way, if we don’t like how it looks then we stick to Blender.
I agree with the instant messaging idea. I use MSN, if you are ok with it plese tell me to PM you my screen name.
how bout irc instead?
I’m ok with that, but it has more logistics involved… I think that we are all in different time zones… I’m in the Dominican Republic, GMT -4. Tomorrow I think I will be available to meet on IRC from 10:00 am, that would be 14:00 GMT/UT
To be honest, while I admire the speed with which things can be done via IRC, I kind of enjoy the open nature of the discussion here. There are a lot of projects going on behind closed doors. Why not one that has the whole process totally out in the open? In the end, I guess it doesn’t matter all that much, but I figured I’d throw in my two hundredths of a dollar.
On a totally unrelated note, I was looking back at the team list and noticed that we’re missing something vitally important. SOUND. We need voice “talent”, effects, and ambience. Can one of us handle this or do we need to go do some recruiting?
I can do voice acting, i suppose. I have all of the equiptment.
(no yafray)<–subliminal message.
i definently agree with dante as far as yafray goes. we should do everything in blender, including rendering, and then if it really looks bad then we should consider Yafray. i mean, photorealism is great, but if this is going to be a cool project just for fun, we shouldn’t get into the headaches of yafray (ok, i’ve never used it before, but it sounds complicated) unless it is neccesary, IMO
but hey! this isn’t my project! so if other people want to do yafray, then we’ll do it.
apollux, i’m still confused about what you had to say about the control knobs on the stove :-?
high five, blenergetic 
Has anyone ever done any photoreal work? I havent. And it seems to me that since this is our first project together, we should be a little more leanient regarding style.
dante
anymore suggestions for the oven?
im also going to make some small props, such as spices, jars of flour, mabey a finished pie off to the side, etc.
Just a suggestion, but how about we start with our options open? A few test renders will immediately tell us whether or not we want to use Yafray. Who among us is fairly proficient in Yaf? If the answer to that is “no one”, then we should probably stick with Blender’s internal tools. If, however, we have a Yafray guru amongst us, then far be it from me to stop them if they wanted to make a couple test renders while we’re still in pre-production.
honestly, i dont think there is such a thing as a yafray guru. AFAIK, no one has ever even made an animation like this with yafray… stil tho, using Blender would allow for easier lighting and texturing, without the bother of exporting. I still vote blender. Besides, this is a chance to show what blender can do.
dante
oh almost forgot this: 
Its not final, obviously, but i think its a start.