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About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

18 Comments

  1. Loved watching that. Speaking as a modeller it looks like a fun interesting project for animators.
    It's great that all this is being documented. Good educational tool.

  2. Good stuff. Sintel is shaping up nicely.

    I love the fact that the fight will evolve and become more natural because you are letting the ACTUAL fighters come up with ideas i.e grab the knife and cut at the same time.

  3. And the moral is, if you see a blonde girl in Tons part of the world, play nice or she could just possibly kick your butt!

    Very cool acrobatics.

    Really hope it manages to transitions into the final Sintel product.

  4. Had to watch it twice to double-check where that knife came from - awesome technique but people without 3D and/or martial arts training may miss something that subtle. So it might need a slow-mo or closeup, maybe a sound effect or music hit, but DO NOT just ditch it!

    I thought the moral was, a knife doesn't do 1-3 points of damage, it can kill you. Either that or the moral for animators is that fast attack speed isn't just superhuman framerate but better choice of technique and eliminating wasted motion.

  5. @young_voter: Nice play of words! xD

    Keep up the great work everybody! A quick question though: Despite it being less fun to do, couldn't motions like this be Motion Captured for easy reference?

  6. its too expensive and not as stylised, could blend it all together but you run the risk of stiff animation.
    characters will be stylised compared to live action so it takes a lot of clean up to pull off.
    It'll be better to hand anim everything on this considering budget and time.

    but yeah more money and time mocap would be a good base for the actual animations if it was to look more realistic than the style they have chosen.

    ultimately though I'm sure they'll all do a good job they seem pretty talented so far.

  7. If you have 2 cameras (synced), then as you advance frames you can move armatures to match body positions (and basically get the same thing). If you wanted to just follow the frames, putting targets (white squares or circles) on shoulders, elbows, writst, hips, knees, ankles, head, etc., to make it easier to follow. You can probably do a more stylised animation without, but for (me) it would be a great starting reference. Putting more time into a film like this will mean a better result (much like storyboarding, screenwriting, etc.). Sometimes some of the background stuff doesn't show up on screen, but more often than not it does. Also remember, that for every minute screen time, expect to put in at least one hour of behind-the-scenes work (although thats the rule for live film, animation should be longer).
    Bob

  8. I absolutely love this! Fighting and filmmaking... not to mention tricking... all in one video. Too cool! :-D

    The girl kicking the one guy who hits the mat is so cool.

    At 2:08, look at the shot of the guy in the air. It is awesome.

    When the guy tumbles onto the mat, he basically recreates the Wilhelm scream.

    And the ending... is perfect.

  9. I agree the knife slit thing is awsome and needs a slow mo, possibly a "matrix" and possibly a double or triple take. It could even zoom way in and watch the clothes fall apart and layers of flesh open up in glorious slow mo. However, I feel strongly that it will cheapen the film if the guy dies instantly from just a slash to the chest. make sure it gets the jugular or throat, or don't make the guy fall down dead. IMHO

  10. @ Bobster - I've often thought about the using two (or 3 if you use one above as well) cameras to fake motion capture, even the idea of targets at key joints. I've just never had a chance to try it. I even came up with a name for it - faux-cap.

  11. I really wish we could put our live action shoots of fight rehearsals we do here at our studio, NDA's are super, super tight here tho :(

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