So I was travelling last week and started from scratch on the plane.  This is a first stab at another main character.   She's rendered in cycles.

Meet Sue...

A quick progress on Joe:

Still working on it.....

I'm not stopped on the main project, I've been working with my brother on another student film.  As the material is his I'm not showing any of it here .... yet.  My brother teaches grade schooler's animation classes and here is their last project:

I did a lot of modeling on this project, it was modelled in blender, animated in poser and rendered in vue.  For the next project we're converting over to blender internal which will replace vue.  We are still using poser for animation since that is what the kids know how to animate in.  I am still working on my big project, but just between working on the next animation with my brother.  Not to worry, all of the experience I am getting in rigging and simulation will be reused on my projects:)  Here's a quick progress on the truck:



Exterior House Progress.

Still modelling...... 23,500,000 vertices.  Dupliverts rock.  Trees come from arbaro.

Working on an exterior.

This was done in cycles, have a ways to go yet.  This is the exterior to the interior house shown below.  Lot's of grass fences and windows to add, but coming along nicely. 

On a separate note... I've been trying to learn animation so I can start moving characters around in the sets.

Still playing with Cycles.

I think I'm going to be modelling for years, needed some cars (nothing fancy)  I want to concentrate on story some day and flashy cars are going to draw your eye away so I picked 2007 Chevy Colorado, pretty boring.  Still needs a lot of modeling and material work, but coming along nicely.

Count these as learning....

So I've been trying out cycles the new render engine for blender and was doing some tests for it.  I'm still uncertain what the final renderer for the movie is going to be.  Blender is going through major rewrites right now and it's really hard to commit and do a bunch of work only to have to do it again later.  Knowing that blender's internal render api is being rewritten right now I may wait until the api is working with luxrender before I really start working on materials and characters.  Up to now most of my work has been modelling which is why most of it isn't on this blog since I haven't put the materials on the models and rendered them.  I am also trying to learn real shader system way of rendering which is a tricky business.

Kitchen

So I've been working on a set for the film.  This is a house that the Dad and Son live in.  I'm starting with the kitchen and working out....

You Can take it with you....

This isn't an image from the film, but I took a bunch of the prop models from the sets and put them on the trailer.  This was an idea I had for a poster with a message:)  I also used this to verify the pipeline and flesh out some bugs in luxblend.

The Teenage Son

Here is the actual main character.  I have put a LOT of work in to him and I will put a lot more but I wanted to post him up.  He was done in blender 2.5 and rendered in the internal renderer.

The Father the Professor...

So here are my attempts at one of the main characters, the father.  He is a college professor and researcher.  This is not meant to be photo real, these characters are hopefully meant to be similar to a pixar type film.  Even they have a tough time pulling off 'real' and I cannot hope to set the bar that high, but I do hope to beat them in art and style, which will take a LOT of work.

So for completeness here is the first set I did which was done in blender 2.49.

Glasses the Movie Blog....

I am an amateur filmmaker and back in the day I have produced two feature live action films.  It is my hope over the coming years to produce (in my spare time) another.  Due to my lack of resources I will be using mainly open source software and this film will be entirely computer animated.  The background to this blog is one of the sets I designed in blender 3d and rendered in luxrender.  I hope to slowly add more and more artwork until I can develop the entire movie.  Up to this point I have been using blenderartists.org and luxrender.net works in progress forums, but I decided to create this blog so I can coalesce all of the art of this project in one location.  I also hope I can use this blog as a sounding board so others can give their opinion (please be tough).  This project will not be successful unless I adhere to the absolute highest artistic standards.  I also want to be up front and state that this is a Christian film.  I am a Christian and one of the things I learned about my first two films is that if you are not passionate about the content of the film you may as well not do it.  That being said I do not mean in any way to slight other religions or beliefs (although the content of the film may do so, I have absolutely no intention of angering opposing opinions I merely want to articulate my own) and I encourage all input (preferably constructive).  I humbly thank you for reading and hope you enjoy this blog.