Recently I’ve been writing a tree maker to speed up our tree creation pipeline, but generating nice looking trees turned out to be a lot harder then I expected.

Having a tree generator where you hit a button and pop out a perfect tree is the artists dream but realistically they need a lot of control as well.

The main difference between this and other tools is that it doesn’t do all the work for you.

We had to compromise in a number of areas: what we expected the artists to do by hand, amount of detail and artistic style. Also with the time limit, how good should we expect the trees to look anyway?

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Prologue

Italy, September 2007

After a lengthy discussion on kino3d.com, the Italian Blender community sends a “suggestion to fix Blender’s arealights” to the Peach Team, thanks to their double agent codenamed “Env”.

Blender Institute, a couple of days later

The Peach Team answers: “and in return the Italian community starts a fund raiser to get us an espresso machine?”

Two months later

The postman rings at the door at the Blender Institute, delivering a giant box. “Great, Sinterklaas is early this year” Ton thinks… but when he opens the box he’s totally surprised seeing the package contents. A genuine original italian design espresso machine! Everyone runs to the kitchen to get Enrico demoing how to make real espresso. “The first 10 cups will taste horrible” Enrico knows. But we’re used to horrible coffee anyway… so there we go… and even though we have to learn when to press the stop button in time, it’s already awesome coffee!

But… oops! Where is the arealamp feature? No feature, no caffè… and that caffè is tasting damn good! So…lets find where that code is… back later!

-Ton-

(Thanks anfeo, bullx, Chrysophylax, deskplus, e-falcon, fabrixxm, Gillan, hdd, ingoenius, IzE_Design, jazzroy, kino, lozetta, lsscpp, MArco, marioamb, Nono_Nano, pKrime, renderdemon, Rickyx, Stefano, the_nis, Tpor, UncleZeiv, Yota_VGA!)

Witness weekly (week 47)

In this weekly overview Jan Morgenstern is giving the studio a visit. Furthermore in this edition you can experience the latest weekly about environment design issues and the animatic and sound.

.ogg video file high quality (280 MB)

Creating an animatic was the first project we worked on together, its also finished!

In this interview Sacha (the director) speaks of its place in the production pipeline, how it was made and some features added to Blender that helped speedup the work flow.

download the video in ogg format (better quality)

every friday evening we have a weekly meeting where everyone shows their work of the past week and discuss how to schedule the next one, making important decisions about story, styling, animation and so on. these meetings can be long and tiresome, yet at the same time a lot of fun.

so last time i went around with my camera (which is slightly less crappy than the one that the blender institute owns) all day to capture the atmosphere of a typical peach work day, talks about animation, style of the movie, blender development – and of course the final weekly meeting at the end of the day. i hope this is a bit more ‘immersive’ than a regular interview type documentary… just to give you an idea how much fun it is to work on this movie! yaaaaay! happyhappyjoyjoy! :o)

enjoy!

download the video in ogg format (better quality)

i’m hoping to do this more often. especially next friday is going to be interesting when our composer Jan Morgenstern is coming over for a short visit. so stay tuned!

.andy

Serious business….

Short interviews with Sacha how to model a walnut, how Enrico still is trying to finish the environments, William trying to figure out what the true identity of the bunny is and Nathan is dancing with the chinchilla :)
The Google movies are dark but you can also download the .ogg files.
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In some early deformation tests it became clear quickly that rigging our fat characters was going to be a challenge. For skinny models bones correspond well to the different parts of the body, but for fat models they do not, and there is a lot of overlapping influence. With a lot of corrective extra bones and shape keys we might have been able to get reasonable deformations, but part of this project is of course to tackle these problems head on, instead of having our artists waste time endlessly tweaking the deformations! So we decided that we needed a mesh deform modifier, as detailed in Pixar’s SIGGRAPH 2007 paper.

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It’s magic to watch Nathan (aka Cessen) rig the 3d characters.

He uses various methods, depending on the kind of movements we want them to make and their body type.

Brecht, Ton and Joshua Leung (from New Zealand) have been writing features and addressing bugs Nathan found… These will get their own blog post soon!

Nathan can’t hold back a hug when us TDs code an especially useful feature :)

For a look into the rigging process, watch Nathan demo the rig for ‘Rinky’ the squirrel.

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Hi all,

here are some color tests of the main characters by Enrico (rabbit) and Andy (rodents).

Both Enrico and Andy painted over the 3D models, all modeled by Andy (based on the director’s designs).

Peach out,

Sacha