OMEGA STOP MOTION PROJECT - TEASER TRAILER from Andy Goralczyk on Vimeo.

we recently premiered a 1 minute and a half teaser trailer of omega at the blender conference. everything, from CG to photographic elements, was composited together and edited in blender.

the responses just blew me away. needless to say we’re going to publish the trailer online on our blog very soon! done!

.andy

after many requests, i would like to publish the file i created at my blender conference modeling session. i’m quite happy how it turned out, considering that i always find it difficult to talk while creating something decent to look at… previous conference models of mine always turned out less than satisfactory. that’s why i deliberately kept this one very simple and stylized to focus on shape and design, rather than technical stuff, while still conveying some of the technical decisions necessary in the modeling process.

right-click > Save As on the screenshot below to download the .blend file

cheers!

.andy

flickr link

.andy

I certainly had a lot of fun, learnt a lot, met a lot of crazy people. I’m looking forward to return to the big apple.

cheers,

.andy

ehem… a little bit of advertising:

a group of artists of the audiovisual collective ICHIIGAI (!1) from my university is going to tour through new york city from august 24th to 31st!

I’ll be on board too, contributing some visuals, VJing & real-time sonic 3D graphics with blender… as well as some noise/ambient/dub-bass synthesizer stuff.

if you’re in nyc and you’re into electronic music and experimental noise art, check it out! it would be awesome to meet some local blenderheads as well. you can read more about the tour and listen to some tunes on our brand new site: www.ichiigai.net

cheers,

.andy

For the past year I’ve been working with a bunch of really talented artists here at my school on the concept, story and look of an animated short film. It’s been a very demanding year for me, both on the personal and artistic side of things (often they’re the same). Finally it’s time to go public!

OMEGA is a stop motion animated short movie which uses state of the art digital photography and high end CG to bring a unique, lively and complex look to the screen. The film will be somewhere around 8 minutes long, at the moment consisting of over 150 shots. You can read more about the movie on our temporary production blog. Make sure you check out the gallery with production stills and concepts. From time to time we’ll try to post updates of our current progress, pics from the studio and crazy sleep-deprived people… exciting times ahead!

For me this project is somewhat of a departure from pure digital art, which poses a much welcomed challenge to me… especially after kicking computers around for over a decade. I absolutely love stop motion and generally everything about animation.  Also for this project I’ve had the chance to draw crazy things, which is always fun.

An interesting detail of course for the Blender crowd is that we’ll be using Blender 2.5 to composite the entire movie (terrabytes of 3K Digital film footage). Some of the (larger) creatures and spaceships will be animated in 3D as well. Alongside with durian we hope to test and evaluate the Blender compositing pipeline in a real production environment. The somewhat cryptic results of our pipeline tests (digital SLR cam > computer > image conversion > offline processing > online processing > compositing) were posted some time ago here.

Anyways, there’s too much information to fit into one silly post, so without further ado…

OMEGA

.andy

now you can finally find a fixed version on the blender e-shop page (direct link to the .ogg)

edit: link works (again)

many apologies for the error!

.andy

edit: gee, yeah. of course… these are photos! (actually still frames…). suzanne is curtesy of the fellas at zomgwtf3d.com

After the course I stayed a couple of days to hang around with the developers who met for the blender winter camp. I took some photos, here are some of them.

Advanced Course:

Entrepotdok, where the Blender Institute is located.

Rémy Pecheux during a break

The course participants

Julia Radowitz

Paolo Donnicola

Guillaume Magnaudet

I could never really get Ton to stand still for a picture.

the blender folk’s favourite thai restaurant

Preparing for the Blender Winter Camp:

my old bike, i miss it.

I also miss melk hagelslag

OMG!!1 it’s Matt Ebb!

Martin Poirier

William Reynish

Jean-Luc Peurriere

The UI Guys

Ton Roosendaal speaks.

Campbell Barton

Enjoying lunch together is always fun.

Brecht van Lommel. Author of so many amazing things I cannot even begin to count them all.

Brecht shares his wisdom with the others.

All ears for Martin.

Spring is coming to Amsterdam.

Unfortunately I couldn’t stay longer. I miss ya’ll!

.andy

The biggest change I made to my workflow is not using Optimal Mode anymore for drawing the mesh wireframe in edit mode. Although it has its advantages for displaying the poly flow very clearly, it makes things look too pretty. Since you have no clear idea where the vertices and faces really are, the underlying mesh tends to get very messy if you don’t watch out! (This is one of the bigger mistakes I made in Creature Factory).

Using this “freeform-extrude-fill-poly-by-poly” workflow is just a personal preference of mine. It might be a bit slower than box modeling but for me it’s easier to think about the topology that way… dunno.

A nice modeling mantra: keep it quad - keep quads regular - concave quads are evil ;)

I will try and capture as much of the process as I can, modeling, texturing, shading and rendering, etc. I hope that’ll force me to finish this bugger! I based my mesh loosely around the reference provided by 3d.sk. The video is sped up 10 times.

enjoy!

.andy