Trailer Video + VPaint 3D mesh export

July 8, 2020

Hi everyone,

I have finally finished a trailer video for VGC Software, I hope you like it, and that you will share it on social media!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwYgUhQBAkE

This video should be featured in Hand Drawn, an upcoming documentary about hand-drawn animation:

http://www.handdrawnfilm.com

For making this video, I used Blender, Kdenlive, Gimp, Inkscape, Audacity, and obviously VPaint. Only open source software, as you can notice!

This was my first project using Blender, and learning how to use it for the last few weeks was a great experience. I could have just made the whole thing with more OpenGL code in VPaint, but I thought it would be more convenient to use an actual 3D animation tool to design the camera trajectory, and I'd get as bonus shadows/reflections, and other niceties that we can easily get with a path tracer (Blender's Cycles) but not so easily with OpenGL.

Also, learning to use Blender was something I wanted to do anyway, in order to get some inspiration for the interface of VGC Animation and its Python API. Indeed, this video was a good opportunity to learn some of the Blender Python API, which I used to set the position of the "frame planes" in the intro shot, and set their appropriate PNG textures.

Finally, note that VPaint now has a new feature which will be part of VPaint 1.8: it is now possible to export the "space-time mesh" as an *.obj file. I needed this in order to import the mesh in Blender.

Now that this video is finished, I'll take a little break, then resume work on the UI of VGC Illustration. The next step is to finish the integration of the FreeType and Harfbuzz libraries into VGC, in order to be able to render text in the UI (buttons, menus, etc.), and eventually render text within the authored illustration/animation too.

Thanks again for your support!

Boris