The Cog Project

an independent film by Colin Litster produced using BLENDER

This is the website of an independent 3D animated feature film called 'COG'. Over the coming months I will post images, movies, and explanations of progress on this long project.
My ageing galvanised hero will take you to the beginning of creation, the 4th dimension, and through to love and retirement. ...... and hopefully make you laugh.
The project is being produced in Blender, the OPEN SOURCE & FREE 3D creation suite, developed by Ton Roosendaal et al.

• December 2004 I have been working on a special animation to aid music production for the film (More Info Soon). It contains sequences, elements, and scenes from the feature. Lava is one of them so here is my concept. Click on the image to see a short looping animation. Here's a larger example.
  Lava-large(640x360 1.6Mb)
  
  
  
• November 2004 A very minor update to the website to cleanup problems with consistency between IE and Mozilla. I have also taken the opportunity to re-engineer the wave crest movies as there was a bad jump in the animation due to the wave effect ending 50 frames before the end of the animation. In the tutorials section I have indicated new tutorials in the making.
  
• October 2004 Work on Cog revealed #2 is going well although as this is a much more complex scene I have been taking greater care over its production. The creation of props for this second trailer has taken me logically into developing a candle flame. There was a request following my flame concept last month so here it is.
  (Candle-Concept)
  Whilst experimenting with particles I discovered a neat way of creating nebulas. This effect was produced by freezing a simple particle system, with the Time IPO and applying textures and colour. Click the image to show a 3D fly-through. Here's another example, as a fly-around, demonstrating the 3D nature of the effect. A few proto stars have also been added. Nebula-concept2 (1.4Mb QuickTime) One final large example with a distant nebula background. Nebula-concept6 (3Mb QuickTime) I've taken the basic idea and implemented a cloud fly-through. Cloud Fly Through (614Kb QuickTime) Tutorial soon.
• September 2004 Elemental forces have been at work here as I move from water to fire.
  flame-concept1 (dark background example) These examples were produced using procedural textures only, mapped to a plain. There are in fact multiple textures and alpha masks but all from the blender inbuilt procedural textures. I will be producing a tutorial after the next cog revealed trailer.
  
  
• August 2004 While recovering from my heart attack I have been 'relaxing' learning new packages (FLASH MX 2004) and also experimenting with wave crests in Blender. Although progress on 'Cog' has been delayed, I have taken the time to redesign this website. I am currently working on the next Cog Revealed trailer and once that is completed the new site will be made active. In the meantime I have uploaded 3 new movies to show some of the progress in making realistic water within Blender. wave-crest, Crests2, Crests3
• June 2004 Following a short holiday I unfortunately suffered a heart attack. Progress on Cog has paused until I become fit again. That's about 6 weeks, so progress will be slow. Whilst in hospital I have had many new thoughts on the production which I fully intend to finish.
  Life is fragile and I realise how lucky I have been. Your thoughts are appreciated. Cog.
  

The film is dedicated to my great friend Roger Finch who tragically died in 2003. Roger was an inspiration to many non-professional film makers encouraging them to dream, persevere, and achieve the impossible.