Our first assignment was to create a short film in 5 days, written by Ton Rosendaal.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

You can read more about it on the mango blog:

http://mango.blender.org/production/kickoff-workshop-day-5/

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on physics for Mango. The video above shows a few of the tests I’ve made. I wrote about it on the mango blog here:

http://mango.blender.org/production/more-physics/

and also here:

http://mango.blender.org/production/pyro-and-destruction-01/

Pre-sale of the Mango DVD just started! Pre-order to support open source development and improve Blenders VFX pipeline.

http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info_n.php?products_id=143

Also, David Revoy has made some awesome concept art for Mango. Go to the mango blog and check it out!

http://mango.blender.org/production/new-concept-art-by-david-revoy/

It’s official. I’m going to be working full time in Amsterdam on Project Mango!

http://mango.blender.org/production/the-mango-artist-line-up/

For me the project doesn’t start until March 2012. That means I still have time to prepare and practice on stuff that will be relevant to the project.

Out December my plan is to become a little bit more comfortable with concepting robots, with a combination of 2d and 3d tools. After that I’ll probably do a small VFX project just for practicing things like tracking and general FX-work.

This is going to be cool

So I bought Corel Painter 12 on a sale a couple weeks back and have been learning the software, watching painting-tutorials and practicing. Bellow you can see a collage of images I’ve made the last few days. They are all unfinished sketches just made for fun (and of course for practicing digital sketching/painting).

Yesterday I removed the old demoreel and replaced it with a new one. And today I sent in my application for project Mango to Ton! Fingers are crossed..

For you who don’t know what project Mango is. It’s a open movie project in Amsterdam.

Here’s a link to the project-blog:  http://mango.blender.org/

Check out the new reel on vimeo, youtube or download it directly from here

http://www.kjartantysdal.com/reel/Reel_2.0_720p.mp4

http://vimeo.com/25556399

http://youtu.be/5cVM38uordA

This image is a frame from a short animation I did for my demo reel.

The background plate was shot in 720p with my handheld Panasonic DMC-TZ10 camera. It was rendered in Cycles, with a custom HDRI-environment. Additional passes was rendered with Blender Internal and comped on top, like AO, Shadow and Velocity-passes.

I’ve used HDRI’s for years, but I have never actually known exactly how make one from scratch… until now

Real life shiny ball to the left, and Computer Generated version of the same scene on the right. That is really cool!

Unfortunately Gimp does not support 32-bit images so I had to use Photoshop to create this. It would be really nice to be able to create this kind of HDRI with open source software. Hopefully Gimp will support 32-bit in the future.

I’ve spent a bit of time organizing all the objects in the scene. Everything is now named properly + fully rigged and should be ready to animate!

2nd reason is that I’ve been very busy making a HiRes-model of the Viking Mech from the Starcraft 2 game.

Here’s a Blender-screenshot with a “cycles render” on the left + openGL-wireframe to the right.

(click on the image above for HiRes version the screenshot)

I’ll post more about this project later

Here’s an update of the Hydralisk-project. It’s just 1 frame of a short animation that I’m currently rendering.

It’s rendered in Cycles, with additional passes rendered in BI.