Today I came across a news report abou the status of “Freestyle” in Blender, which reminds me of the animatio style issues I’ve been contemplating for Lunatics since the beginning: just how realistic will we want the graphic style of the series to be?
We’ve crossed a pre-production milestone — the modelsheets for the eight colonists (our main characters) are completed. Daniel is now moving on to the artwork for secondary characters. This puts us on schedule for our (recently slipped) delivery goal of early May.
This last week, I mostly spent getting up to speed with Blender’s scripting interface for Python. I have to admit to being a little anxious about this, but it’s really pretty simple stuff once you get started (that’s always the hard part!). Daniel’s working on the model sheets. And I’m starting to write the structural parts of the book we’re creating as part of the production process.
Well, the holidays went well, and now it’s back to work. This week, I’ve spent on defining the spec for the model and design sheets to get Daniel started, and also working on some additional reference research on Soyuz to support modeling the Soyuz re-entry (and ascent) module which we’re going to need for an early animation test.
As you can see from the widget on our front page, we have just launched our Kickstarter campaign to fund pre-production artwork development for the series. This includes the character design and model sheets, the set plans, and plans of the vehicles that appear in the pilot episode, “No Children in Space”. It will also support Rosalyn Hunter in making final revisions to the script.
We’re getting everything ready to star our first Kickstarter campaign. This will cover pre-production artwork some 3D modeling necessary for the pre-production phase, and an animatic of the pilot episode with a temporary soundtrack.
This week I learned a lot of new thing about modeling in Blender — basic stuff like how to properly use edge loops and how to set up path-based animations. And I created a nice fly-around video of my LTS Shuttle model.
This week we’ve started get character design concepts from Daniel Fu. I’ve also been working on modeling the Soyuz “Transporter-Erector”, which will appear early in the pilot episode.
This week we’ve started working on initial character designs with character designer, Daniel Fu, of “Daystorm Productions”. Daniel is the author of a webcomic series, “The Retriever” and has an excellent portfolio. Daniel was my first choice o this project, because I’ve worked with him before, because he has a lo of artistic range, and because his designs have a good sense of volume and 3D form, which will be essential for our designs which will be modeled in 3D.
First weekly progress report: Google Group for project discussion. Also: positive response from a character designer, and technical development is proceeding on some important packages for animation.
After a few days work and weeks of procrastination and fretting, the Lunatics website is finally starting to make some sense and become quasi-functional. Yea!
