I’m pleased to welcome our new character modeling expert, Bela Szabo (a.k.a. “contmike” in some circles). This puts us back on track for a crowd-funding campaign launching late in this month, if everything goes as I expect.
Sadly, Andrew Pray, who created the character model for “Georgiana Lerner” that we’ve been using in our animations up until now, is no longer with the project. He’s an art student, and is no longer able to commit to the amount of work that the character modeling for “Lunatics!” represents. This is a bit of a blow for me as a producer and for the project. It means we’re going to have to take some time for re-grouping. Certainly we’re going to have to fin someone new to do the character modeling for the project.
Although we’re officially on a short hiatus, I am still doing a little work on weekends, and we have also recently been joined by Chris Kuhn, a very talented mechanical modeling artist who is currently working on the Soyuz launch system which features prominently in our pilot episode. I’ve also had a chance to do some more tests with character models, shading, lighting, and rendering — pictures, links, and video after the fold…
There are a lot of exterior space shot in the 2nd half of the pilot episode, and I decided it would actually be easier to do rough animatics of these in Blender than to sketch them all — and it will certainly look better. So this week I’m doing a lot of quick renderings in Blender. So far it’s going pretty well, although am still a little behind where I hoped I’d be. There’s still a good chance I can get the animatic finished this weekend if “real life” doesn’t get in the way too much!
Three more renderings of components for the “Soyuz-SF” interior set. We are creating this set for our “Teaser Trailer”, which is also an animation test and an opportunity for our modeling team to practice working together on the project. This is the periscope (Soyuz uses a periscope for piloting because the Orbital Module is in front of the Descent Module — from which the pilot flies the spacecraft). ( Flickr Image) Completed main controls for the orbiter (These models are by Cosmin Planchon with display graphics by Timothee Giet). ( Filckr Image )
We have extremely busy working on the Teaser Trailer for “No Children in Space” for the last couple of days and the collaboration seems to be working out. I think we’re all learning a lot and getting the team together. And I want to show you this cool model…
We are pleased to announce our core team of seven very talented artists for modeling, rigging, and animation: Andrew Pray, Cosmin Planchon, Guillaume Côté, Sathish Kumar, Vyacheslav Yastrebcev, Timothée Giet, and Gorka Mendieta. They will be working on the “teaser trailer” for “No Children in Space” and some animation tests, all of which will be released during our Kickstarter campaign (which launches THIS FRIDAY – JULY 20TH – “MOON DAY”).
We’re currently doing five things simultaneously: casting voice actors, reviewing applications for 3D artist internships, finishing our pre-production Kickstart work and rewards, training on the software, and planning for our next Kickstarte which will pay for the production of the pilot episode, “No Children i Space”. Everything is complicated and interlocked, and I am very busy camper. But this is pretty fun, I have to admit!
I took a little time to spiff up the website, which was looking a little neglected. I also sent out queries to some of the musicians whose work I am hoping to relicense under By-S for use in our soundtrack. So far I’ve gotten one positive response, and one slightly unclear one. But I’m optimistic.
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?
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.
