Sintel: about the technological art
So it was 2011 ... Ahead of the new year is the year of the Dragon. Traditionally an important and successful year, the year of battles and victories. The previous year was spent in a typical setting of patent unrest, rebuilding the code bases of a multitude of products and the constant development of technology. And yet an article about something else. The story will be about a girl named Sintel and a dragon from the short film Sintel , released by the Blender Foundation more than a year ago , but which has become a huge incentive for the development of Blender's 3D editor for the whole of 2011. Of course, this article would be good a year ago, but better late than never.
The devil is in the details. In the framework of computer science, there is no such project in which it would be possible to avoid a transition to a simplified model that does not correspond to the real world. An example is lighting, hair, fabrics and many other things. Therefore, there will be many clickable images ( caution, traffic! ). All models and scenes from the film are distributed under the license CC-BY 3.0 and are available as svn archives of the project.
So let's get started.
The plot begins with a battle scene on the territory of the dragon's land. We meet the main character in the mountains when she is attacked by the Guardian. A tired and frozen girl can beat him with his own spear.
')
Let's go back to the scene. The scene is represented by a set of polygrids, executed by the method of sulpting. In its pure form, the snow surface occupies about one hundred megabytes. The fog is implemented as a cube with particles.
When viewing the old versions of this place we are in for a surprise: there are three guards instead of one.
Here they are: from left to right - Smith, Lao Tseu and Dark. In addition, another guard inside the city was planned. Four models with full rigging and facial emotions, but the final casting passes only Lao Tseu.
Back to the plot. Losing consciousness, she notices a yurt not far away, and, with the last of her strength, she takes a few steps and falls backwards ...
New scene. Sintel wakes up from the voice of the owner of the yurt - the shaman who saved and sheltered her.
(image resolution 4096x1744).
Here the effect of subsurface scattering is clearly visible through the fingers practically luminous from fire. Subsurface scattering in all scenes is a mandatory attribute of the skin and adds a significant amount of realism.
A little about the model Sintel. This is an extremely complex model with a large grid and huge textures, using it on Core2 + 4GB of RAM is almost impossible, so I will describe the Sintel Lite model ( link to the model ). It has about 800,000 polygons. At the time of creating the model, the modellers changed the method of creating hair several times. There is a traditional look of hair in the form of polygons with a hair texture. This method is actively used in the gaming industry, but even with the possibility of animation using soft-body physics, the result is not very realistic. The result is much better when using special algorithms. However, at that time, the hair simulator was in an unstable state. During the creation of the simulator was stabilized and as a result we see the hair from the particles. In the full version, 25 thousand hairs are used (for comparison, the average person has about 100 thousand of them). The trajectory of the movement is determined for each hundred hairs, as a result of which strands are observed parallel to the hair that goes along. The hair physics in Sintel is not used, on each scene Sintel is combed manually. And this is what the Sintel Lite model looks like before and after the render:
Sintelle's narrative returns us to her hometown, the day she met the dragon. Sintel is looking for food, holding in his hands a 250,000 polygonal fruit of durian .
Around active flies fly. And only in ultra-high resolution, you can see that among the midges there flies another tiny head of Suzanne . But here attention Sintel draws sound from the roof.
What is worth paying attention to? That's right, on the background, blurred by the effect of depth of field . Behind this effect is another low-poly model of Suzanne.
The dragon wing is damaged; the fluid simulator uses the Navier-Stokes equation to calculate the movement of blood drops. Sintel helps heal the wound.
New scene showing the departure of the night and the arrival of the dawn.
New day in the city. Dragon Scales runs / flies around the city, which allows you to see a lot of small details. First, it is the inhabitants. Immediately catches the eye of Brooke, the main character Elephants Dream . Prug came from 2005, so he is bald and even without eyebrows, thanks to which there are only 238,000 polygons in it. And 12 more such random characters.
Who needs solar lighting? The scene with the city is covered by 40 directional sources.
Dragonling runs after the hen, Sintel runs after the dragon. At the turn, Sintel dispenses a basket of fruit with 10,000 polygons in each. The city is littered with high poly garbage with even higher poly statues.
It is not surprising that there were people who, against the background of all coincidental coincidences, saw the silhouette of Big Buck Bunny in the sky.
The new scene is the temple of Ishtar on the mountain. Around her are not very randomly located at home.
This is how it looks without birds and post-processing:
By the way, about the birds. Often in modern animation you can see a situation where several birds flap their wings with the same frequency and phase. This is due to the fact that the animation of movements is based on the cyclical repetition of the action, for example, flapping wings. In Sintel, however, each bird is individual, and wing flaps are determined by the angle of flight, speed, and random component.
Here is the same temple with post-processing:
From a technical point of view, it’s necessary to say about the Bloom effect, which is responsible for blurring the light on the bright edges of the scene. The bright background “seeps” here into everything: walls, characters and creatures. It is also impossible not to notice that one object in the picture above strongly resembles the Blender logo :).
The model of a baby dragon at the moment of animation (before the use of sculpturing) is about 8 thousand polygons ( video model ). This is quite a bit, as it has no wool, hair or particles. But after applying 4 levels of sculpturing, 8178 * 4 ^ 4 is obtained - more than 2 million micropolygons.
Draft view with GLSL shaders and normal map instead of sculpturing:
Unlike more polygons in an adult dragon, which appears on the same scene ( video model ). Considering the four-level sculpting ( head sculpting, compressed to 6 minutes ), it turns out 5 million polygons. Below will be a render of a person with high resolution. And this is how an adult dragon looks like in the position of binding:
So, during another walk, Scales was captured by an adult dragon. Sintel leaves the city walls, sneaks through the jungle (render resolution 4k):
Through the rains and storms. Complex non-uniform fog, post-processing for imposing of a rain. The Sintel model is provided with a shape key that changes hair color, skin texture and a polygonal grid of the face and body - see the video with shape keys .
Walking through the desert (image again 4k, but the blend file ). The effect of glare from the sun (flare, not on the frame). At the time of the creation of the film in Blender, there was no Dynamic Paint functionality, so the previously drawn marks on the sand appear with the help of masks. With the release of version 2.6, this effect can be obtained much easier.
It goes on the snowy expanses. Here the effect of vignetting is best seen: darkening the image at the edges of the frame to draw the viewer's attention to the scene of action. Also visible is the artificial 3D optical photo noise. However, these two elements are used throughout the film.
The story comes to the beginning, in which Sintel sits in the shaman's hut and tells him this story. Sintel's face close-up:
In the reflection of the same person, but wounded and aged:
After hearing the story, the shaman tells Sintel where the target of her quest is. Finally she finds a cave. The cave, like a snowy plain, is sculpted. At the entrance to the cave there is a tree depicted on the handle of the keeper's weapon. The same tree - the logo of the project Sintel.
Hexagonal objects are the result of the Bokeh effect — a simulation of a six-lobe lens iris.
An adult dragon eats a cow carcass. In the low-poly model of a cow there are 1230 faces. After applying five levels of sculpture, the model has about 1.2 million facets. And all this (like most other objects) under three textures 4096x4096: color, highlights and bump-map.
The baby dragon does not recognize Sintel, after which the adult dragon discovers and attacks her. Simulator of particles and smoke in all its glory:
Sculpting on a dragon head in 4k resolution:
During the fight, the dragon knocks Sintel off his feet, but instead of killing her, he hesitates, and she, taking advantage of the moment, hits the dragon with a deadly blow of a spear - and only then sees the familiar scar and realizes that her little Scales has grown and it is him that she is only that she killed ... Looking at her reflection in a pool of blood, she realizes that not only the dragon has changed much - too much time has passed in search of a friend.
The cave begins to crumble, and Sintel leaves her, leaving the dragon's body. Outside, after some time having overcome her grief, she drops her armor, throws her weapon away and walks away. The small and now lonely baby dragon follows her ...
Here the story described in the plot ends. However, these 15 minutes were a huge impetus to the development and the motive for the stabilization of the 2.5 branch of Blender. Already today you can download version 2.61 with a new photorealistic rendering engine on GPU Cycles , a 3D tracking system , an ocean simulator and dynamic drawing .
The plans of the Blender Foundation, another short film, codenamed Mango. What will we see in it? 2012 will show!
The devil is in the details. In the framework of computer science, there is no such project in which it would be possible to avoid a transition to a simplified model that does not correspond to the real world. An example is lighting, hair, fabrics and many other things. Therefore, there will be many clickable images ( caution, traffic! ). All models and scenes from the film are distributed under the license CC-BY 3.0 and are available as svn archives of the project.
So let's get started.
The plot begins with a battle scene on the territory of the dragon's land. We meet the main character in the mountains when she is attacked by the Guardian. A tired and frozen girl can beat him with his own spear.
')
Let's go back to the scene. The scene is represented by a set of polygrids, executed by the method of sulpting. In its pure form, the snow surface occupies about one hundred megabytes. The fog is implemented as a cube with particles.
When viewing the old versions of this place we are in for a surprise: there are three guards instead of one.
Here they are: from left to right - Smith, Lao Tseu and Dark. In addition, another guard inside the city was planned. Four models with full rigging and facial emotions, but the final casting passes only Lao Tseu.
Back to the plot. Losing consciousness, she notices a yurt not far away, and, with the last of her strength, she takes a few steps and falls backwards ...
New scene. Sintel wakes up from the voice of the owner of the yurt - the shaman who saved and sheltered her.
(image resolution 4096x1744).
Here the effect of subsurface scattering is clearly visible through the fingers practically luminous from fire. Subsurface scattering in all scenes is a mandatory attribute of the skin and adds a significant amount of realism.
A little about the model Sintel. This is an extremely complex model with a large grid and huge textures, using it on Core2 + 4GB of RAM is almost impossible, so I will describe the Sintel Lite model ( link to the model ). It has about 800,000 polygons. At the time of creating the model, the modellers changed the method of creating hair several times. There is a traditional look of hair in the form of polygons with a hair texture. This method is actively used in the gaming industry, but even with the possibility of animation using soft-body physics, the result is not very realistic. The result is much better when using special algorithms. However, at that time, the hair simulator was in an unstable state. During the creation of the simulator was stabilized and as a result we see the hair from the particles. In the full version, 25 thousand hairs are used (for comparison, the average person has about 100 thousand of them). The trajectory of the movement is determined for each hundred hairs, as a result of which strands are observed parallel to the hair that goes along. The hair physics in Sintel is not used, on each scene Sintel is combed manually. And this is what the Sintel Lite model looks like before and after the render:
Sintelle's narrative returns us to her hometown, the day she met the dragon. Sintel is looking for food, holding in his hands a 250,000 polygonal fruit of durian .
Around active flies fly. And only in ultra-high resolution, you can see that among the midges there flies another tiny head of Suzanne . But here attention Sintel draws sound from the roof.
What is worth paying attention to? That's right, on the background, blurred by the effect of depth of field . Behind this effect is another low-poly model of Suzanne.
The dragon wing is damaged; the fluid simulator uses the Navier-Stokes equation to calculate the movement of blood drops. Sintel helps heal the wound.
New scene showing the departure of the night and the arrival of the dawn.
New day in the city. Dragon Scales runs / flies around the city, which allows you to see a lot of small details. First, it is the inhabitants. Immediately catches the eye of Brooke, the main character Elephants Dream . Prug came from 2005, so he is bald and even without eyebrows, thanks to which there are only 238,000 polygons in it. And 12 more such random characters.
Who needs solar lighting? The scene with the city is covered by 40 directional sources.
Dragonling runs after the hen, Sintel runs after the dragon. At the turn, Sintel dispenses a basket of fruit with 10,000 polygons in each. The city is littered with high poly garbage with even higher poly statues.
It is not surprising that there were people who, against the background of all coincidental coincidences, saw the silhouette of Big Buck Bunny in the sky.
The new scene is the temple of Ishtar on the mountain. Around her are not very randomly located at home.
This is how it looks without birds and post-processing:
By the way, about the birds. Often in modern animation you can see a situation where several birds flap their wings with the same frequency and phase. This is due to the fact that the animation of movements is based on the cyclical repetition of the action, for example, flapping wings. In Sintel, however, each bird is individual, and wing flaps are determined by the angle of flight, speed, and random component.
Here is the same temple with post-processing:
From a technical point of view, it’s necessary to say about the Bloom effect, which is responsible for blurring the light on the bright edges of the scene. The bright background “seeps” here into everything: walls, characters and creatures. It is also impossible not to notice that one object in the picture above strongly resembles the Blender logo :).
The model of a baby dragon at the moment of animation (before the use of sculpturing) is about 8 thousand polygons ( video model ). This is quite a bit, as it has no wool, hair or particles. But after applying 4 levels of sculpturing, 8178 * 4 ^ 4 is obtained - more than 2 million micropolygons.
Draft view with GLSL shaders and normal map instead of sculpturing:
Unlike more polygons in an adult dragon, which appears on the same scene ( video model ). Considering the four-level sculpting ( head sculpting, compressed to 6 minutes ), it turns out 5 million polygons. Below will be a render of a person with high resolution. And this is how an adult dragon looks like in the position of binding:
So, during another walk, Scales was captured by an adult dragon. Sintel leaves the city walls, sneaks through the jungle (render resolution 4k):
Through the rains and storms. Complex non-uniform fog, post-processing for imposing of a rain. The Sintel model is provided with a shape key that changes hair color, skin texture and a polygonal grid of the face and body - see the video with shape keys .
Walking through the desert (image again 4k, but the blend file ). The effect of glare from the sun (flare, not on the frame). At the time of the creation of the film in Blender, there was no Dynamic Paint functionality, so the previously drawn marks on the sand appear with the help of masks. With the release of version 2.6, this effect can be obtained much easier.
It goes on the snowy expanses. Here the effect of vignetting is best seen: darkening the image at the edges of the frame to draw the viewer's attention to the scene of action. Also visible is the artificial 3D optical photo noise. However, these two elements are used throughout the film.
The story comes to the beginning, in which Sintel sits in the shaman's hut and tells him this story. Sintel's face close-up:
In the reflection of the same person, but wounded and aged:
After hearing the story, the shaman tells Sintel where the target of her quest is. Finally she finds a cave. The cave, like a snowy plain, is sculpted. At the entrance to the cave there is a tree depicted on the handle of the keeper's weapon. The same tree - the logo of the project Sintel.
Hexagonal objects are the result of the Bokeh effect — a simulation of a six-lobe lens iris.
An adult dragon eats a cow carcass. In the low-poly model of a cow there are 1230 faces. After applying five levels of sculpture, the model has about 1.2 million facets. And all this (like most other objects) under three textures 4096x4096: color, highlights and bump-map.
The baby dragon does not recognize Sintel, after which the adult dragon discovers and attacks her. Simulator of particles and smoke in all its glory:
Sculpting on a dragon head in 4k resolution:
During the fight, the dragon knocks Sintel off his feet, but instead of killing her, he hesitates, and she, taking advantage of the moment, hits the dragon with a deadly blow of a spear - and only then sees the familiar scar and realizes that her little Scales has grown and it is him that she is only that she killed ... Looking at her reflection in a pool of blood, she realizes that not only the dragon has changed much - too much time has passed in search of a friend.
The cave begins to crumble, and Sintel leaves her, leaving the dragon's body. Outside, after some time having overcome her grief, she drops her armor, throws her weapon away and walks away. The small and now lonely baby dragon follows her ...
Here the story described in the plot ends. However, these 15 minutes were a huge impetus to the development and the motive for the stabilization of the 2.5 branch of Blender. Already today you can download version 2.61 with a new photorealistic rendering engine on GPU Cycles , a 3D tracking system , an ocean simulator and dynamic drawing .
The plans of the Blender Foundation, another short film, codenamed Mango. What will we see in it? 2012 will show!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/135583/
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