Hello again, all! It’s been a little over a month since the last update, and LOT has happened since then, but you’re not going to see or hear anything about most of it until later. For right now, I just get to show you guys our updated site design and the updated Sintel model!

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to the add-on, but I’m afraid I don’t have it anymore, and I’d rather not just upload the file I have, as it’s probably outdated anyway.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!

After running into Ton on the street, getting a hug from Nathan, having an awesome time at the screening, talking to Colin’s dad about Suburban Plight, and all that good stuff, we got to give Colin and the team an early demo of the game the next day. This six minute video is chopped from over half an hour of footage, so it does skip abruptly at times; sorry, but we didn’t want to give too much away! (Or bore you.)

Afterwards, we also spoke with Ton about licensing, how to involve the community in the project, and the like. It was a very productive trip!

Finally, after many late nights of working my poor vertex-pulling, texture-painting fingers to the pain, I can show you all my in-game version of Sintel! (check out the Gallery for some more, in-game, shots.)

The model itself is a much-adjusted retopology of the actual movie model, and while I used a baked ambient occlusion map as a reference later on (to make sure the diffuse map would match a baked normal map, demanded by the mean project overlords), 99.99% of the diffuse texture is my own original work. The other other .01% is the tattoo, which we decided to shamelessly rip from the movie files (in fact, the file turned up just as I was about to hand-paint my own version using an old video on the Durian site as a reference. Yes, I am crazy.)

So anyway, the whole diffuse texture is original digital painting/photo-manipulation, using every available official Durian image (weren’t many helpful ones, at times!) as reference, and textures from CGTextures.com as a starting point. From there, I created a spec map, and painstakingly baked a normal map from the movie model, which ended up needing a lot of hand-painted fixes anyway…

As you see them here, the textures still need tweaking here and there, but I feel they are near enough to completion that it’s safe to finally show off my hard work. Hope you enjoy it!