David has been working on a smaller, but more aggressive troll character. Perhaps David will post about what he has been working on in a future post. I know he has plans to make another modeling time lapse video so be on the lookout for that.

I’d like to personally thank everyone who helped us out with animation. We got many people who were more than happy to send us a few animations. They all look wonderful and I’m excited to make use of them.

We still want to release a demo as soon as we can. We are slowly making our way towards a release. I think I speak for all of us when I say we don’t want to release a demo unless it is fun. The pre-demo was short and bland because we rushed it out without spending enough time on making it fun. The demo will include some different gameplay elements, a good taste of combat, and a boss battle that is actually challenging.

I can’t say when the demo will be ready, but the moment we pinpoint a date, I will let you guys know.

Finally, I would like to make a shout out to Team Aurora. Over the past few months a couple friends and I got together and talked about our futures. We all felt that the professional game industry right now does not reward or encourage innovation and good unique design in games. We want to work in a field where we can make games that we find fun and innovative, rather than games that will make the most money. So we formed Team Aurora. We recently announced the first game currently in production – Grey. If you want to find out more, read about it here.

Since I am committed to finishing Sintel The Game, I will not be directly involved with the development of Grey. I am still a member of Team Aurora, but my time is going to be focused on Sintel The Game.

That is where you guys come in! Bellow is a link to the Sintel rig blend file. It also comes with instructions and a rig layer guide. What we are asking is that you either improve the current animations that are in the file, or make your own! Its up to you.

Suggested Animations

High-priority animations:

Low-priority animations:

Requirements

Use the latest stable version of Blender 2.58

Notes

If you don’t see an animation you want to do, be creative! Anything helps.

When you are done, upload the BLEND file to blendswap.com with the tag “sintelgame” (no quotes)

Also: send us an email with a URL LINK to the hosted blend file to jon@sintelgame.org

You can use other hosting as long as the URL is sent to us.

Anyone who contributes will get their name in the final game’s credits, even if we end up using the animation or not.

Thanks in advance! Any questions can be directed to jon@sintelgame.org

Download

3 files: ~17 MB Download

Next on my list was the Troll Cave level. This hasn’t had much attention since it was first made, so a lot of work was needed. It took some time, but I eventually got it to look pretty decent if I do say so myself. I added some light crystals (like from the cave in the movie) to add more detail and depth to the environment. I ended up re-texturing almost everything in the scene which made the level blend together a little bit better. I also added some mist, which helps make the level seem larger. Here are the screenshots, old and new.

Finally, we have the tutorial level. In the pre-demos the tutorial level is a plain all white scene. This was done because we simply had not completed the real tutorial level. The actual tutorial takes place in a garden in the town of Garway. Now that I had the time, I went ahead and started creating the garden. As of right now the main portion of the scene is complete, but there are still some final touches I want to add.

The docks level has had its poly count considerably reduced, without impacting the visuals I may add. Its also been adorned with voice over’s from the talented folk over at the digital bard  (no need to read those pesky subtitles .. Unless you want to of course). We’re also taking steps to up the fun factor of the level, so look forward to some interesting game play improvements in the not too distant future.

The cave troll has been receiving some much needed T.L.C. Unfortunately he seems to have intimacy issues, and since we can not afford therapy  you’d better prepare to engage with a much more formidable opponent. On top of his new found aggression, he’s been joined by an equally deadly companion. If you think this all sounds a bit unfair on Sintel, fear not as her combat system is currently being updated.

The bandit model is now game ready, you can check out a time-lapse of his transformation from high to low res below:

Geoffrey has been undergoing a complete revamp and many new characters are in various stages of development.
Below is a time-lapse of one of the new characters head being created:

Continuing our efforts to make Sintel the game look as good possible we are also experimenting with new material set ups, depth of field and even screen space ambient occlusions.
One of the new material effects can be seen below, its still a work in progress but we think it shows promise:

OK so I may have been stretching it a bit when I put real time SSS in the title. As  I’m sure you’ve realized it’s  a fake SSS effect, no subsurface scattering calculations going on. However it is real time and does not have any discernable effect on frame rate. (The slow frame rate in the video is due to the video capture)

Finally I know a lot of you  want to know when we will be releasing the demo. I’m afraid we still can not give you a firm date, as there are still many things we wish to add and improve.


The demo itself was quite hastily put together. Although we have been working on the game for quite a while now, most of our time has been spent on research and design; meaning we had very little in the way of completed assets. As a result the main bulk of the pre-demo was created in the short time between Christmas and new years, culminating in a very long nights work which saw myself and Jon working right up until the deadline on new years eve.
Below are some in game screen shots and some production images from the pre-demo:

While we are reasonably happy with how the pre-demo went considering the timeframe in which it was put together, it’s no where near the standard we are aiming for. Many of the game play ideas which we are really excited about have not yet made an appearance.

The official demo release will include an updated and more polished version of the levels displayed in the pre-demo, along with a host of new features/characters/objectives. Which if all goes to plan will result in a longer play through time and most importantly a more fun gaming experience.

In other news, Noah will be returning soon, David is sculpting and converting characters to their low poly versions, and I am working on improving the fighting system, making it less awkward. Also, we got a twitter account. You can follow us for more frequent but smaller updates.

In the last post Malcolm mentioned ‘big news’. The big news is that we plan on releasing a demo to the public pretty soon. We made a small incomplete demo for the blenderartists.org competition but we want to polish it up before we release it. We’ve been working hard on improving gameplay systems based on the feedback we got from the pre-demo.

Recently, my graphics card went out of commission. My computer has been having issues for months but it finally gave out this week. I am currently running an extra card a friend had lying around. I would replace the old one, but my motherboard is too outdated to support a newer card. Looks likes I’m going to have to build a new computer sooner than I thought.

The reason why we don’t update as often as we’d like is because I have very little free time. I am a student, and I’m employed as a Conceptual Game Designer. Any spare time is spent doing homework and working on Sintel The Game. I will do my best to give you guys more news about whats going on. Thanks!

I have however been given the official word from Jon to tell you all that you should expect something HUGE! within the near future. Also you are more likely to find quick updates on our facebook page at:

http://www.facebook.com/SintelTheGame

Till our next post; thank’s for reading and we greatly apprieciate the great feedback we’ve been getting.

Because the bandit was the first character I had made for the game I was not totally certain about the style I’d try to create him in. As a result he has been subject to quite a lot of change during his creation. Even as I write this, I have only just finished re-modeling  his head (below is a time-lapse of the process).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60rk7WhxHOo

Below is just a quick mash up of the new head on the bandits body. Its only temporary but I wanted to check how well it fits. Seeing it altogether often gives a better read of the character; I’ve already seen a few things id like to go back and tweak .. But that’s a post for another day me thinks.

Heads in Sintel the game have some unique properties: some main characters like Geoffrey have their own unique mesh; however, many of the NPCs have interchangeable heads. We hope this system of “switching” heads and other accessories will enable us to fill the game with a variety of different looking characters whilst keeping unique asset creation to a minimum. To make head creation easier and to allow our system better flexibility, all NPC heads are created from these two base meshes, modeled by Noah.

The work flow used to create the in game characters varies from model to model and often includes a bit of back-and-forth between myself and Noah. Generally however I will start a character in blender by creating some very simple box meshes. From there I’ll either use the sculpting tools in Blender or export out to ZBrush. I use the sculpting tools to rough in the character and try to get a feel for the type of person/animal/monster its going to be. I often work with a variety of different reference images, from which I attempt to take the best bits.

The fact that I often don’t have a clear idea for the finished character is one reason why I like working with simple geometry. The lack of solid/defining topology allow lots of different ideas to be tested quickly and easily. Once I feel I’ve got the overall shape down pat ill move on to defining muscles and other secondary details. At this point I have to make a decision whether to continue working with the simple geometry, or to create some new geometry which better defines the form. Again the decision made here varies a lot, but as a rule of thumb I usually create new geometry if the object has clothes or a lot of separate accessories, and stick with the basic geometry if the character is relatively simple.

If I do create new geometry, I always try to keep individual parts as separate objects (the bandit for instance is split into 11 objects). This can be advantageous  for a variety of modeling tasks as well as normal map creation.

Once I’ve finished creating the character and the rest of the team have had a chance to look it over and give their comments and critiques, I send it over to Noah. This is the point where the in-game character is born. Noah builds geometry over my sculpt maintaining as much of the form as possible whilst keeping the poly count low. Once this re-topology step is complete we have both a high and low poly version of the asset. From this point, all that’s left to do is bake down all the tasty high res detail into the lowpoly mesh.

And, voilà, we have a completed in game character. Well, minus texturing, rigging, weight painting, animation, game logic….

Waaaay back when we were featured on BlenderNation and everyone subsequently complained about my Sintel’s eyes, David Revoy (concept artist for Project Durian) was kind enough to not only blatantly show us just how ugly our model was, but also offer hints on how to fix it, by sending along this nifty animated gif!

When working to make our in-game model resemble David’s paint-over as much as possible, everything went pretty smoothly (if you can call tearing one’s own hair out while trying to learn the ways of proper hair modeling/texturing “smoothly”) until I hit a brick wall known as General Lack of Knowledge of the Texture Face Panel.

The reason I’m telling you this is not because I think you care, but because I want to thank “wiseman303″ for helping me sort out the Texture Face settings via #gameblender, and even lending an awesome add-on he’s written for 2.5 that makes the Texture Face panel much more useful (Unbeknownst to the user, or at least me, the Texture Face panel affects only the active face, not all selected faces, making you think that Blender is just being a jerk if you’re not perceptive enough. Wiseman’s add-on enables the user to copy the Texture Face settings of the active face to all selected faces.)

I would give you the link to the add-on, but I’m afraid I don’t have it anymore, and I’d rather not just upload the file I have, as it’s probably outdated anyway. Perhaps someone can help out via the comments?

Anyway, to cut to the chase, here’s New Sintel in all of her updated glory, along with some wires!

Over the past couple weeks we’ve realized that it would be a good idea to gather some hardware info so we can determine the minimum requirements for the game. We can also find out if we can bump up the graphics or if we should dim them down.

So we made a benchmark!

A few things to note: