Witness the Weekly
Posted in Media Gallery, Production, Random Fluff by andy
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
November 19th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Right, work, work and work. You’re doing great. Nice to see all that fat animated, too bad we couldn’t watch ANY progress from andy :P
November 19th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
no spoilers please. this is all great, but not spoilers :D
November 19th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
yep. i made sure that there are no spoilers (no relevant ones at least)… after all we dont want to give away too much :)
.andy
November 19th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Haha, you simply must dig the happy dance =P
Btw, I got a question for you guys, do you use the regular Ubuntu Gutsy or are you using a special build like Ubuntu Studio?
November 19th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
Regular Gutsy 64bit
A lot of details about the system setup here…
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Bf-institute/systems#Client
November 19th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
“Screw the tree maker! Oh, Hi Campbell!” — PRICELESS!
:D
November 19th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Let’s go Peach Team! :D
November 19th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Am I the only one who thinks that Campbell really looks like Peter R. de Vries with that mustache? :D
November 19th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Great Weekly! :-)
I only can’t undestand why the presentation was done on Apple with OSX… :-(
November 19th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Daniele: it’s because the computer in the meeting room is an older mac that we still had from the Elephants Dream days. we only use it for presenting stuff. the linux computers we use for doing the actual work are in the studio room.
November 20th, 2007 at 1:58 am
Hey guys, is the jiggle on that bunny dynamic or hand animated ?
November 20th, 2007 at 2:11 am
It’s dynamic.
November 20th, 2007 at 2:55 am
Daniele: Does stuff lose its value due to the fact that it is presented using a non-open-source OS? I think you’re going a bit too far ;)
November 20th, 2007 at 6:20 am
Nice pun: “stay tuned” (after talking about jan) :D
November 20th, 2007 at 11:05 am
dr_oxy, Gianmichele: it’s animated
November 20th, 2007 at 11:19 am
dr_oxy, Gianmichele: perhaps I will have to do a demo of the bunny rig for the blog at some point. As Andy said, the fat jiggle is hand animated, not simulated. The bunny has fat controls for the belly, chest, and neck. The animators use these to add jiggle as well as to preserve the shape and volume of the model if the automatic deformations fail.
November 20th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Oh ;) Hand animated “Flesh Wiggle”…thats pretty hard work, one flaw and it all seems artificial, so KUDOS for the daring approach ;)
With Dynamics for the “Flesh” even crappy animation can work ;) No…I am not kidding about that, I wish I had dynamic weighted meshes, it´s sooo much easier than having to hand-animate that all the time. Imagine doing that and having to work with that detail thorough the entire movie ….gaaaahh!
Oh well – Wish you the best of luck – and a lot of fun making it.
(Looking extremely much forward to the Hair/FUR options) ;)
November 20th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Oh…and just in case I get a gazillion comments like “use Softbody” then the answer is – NO….really *NO!* Trust me.
November 20th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
JoOngle: animating overlapping action (such as fat jiggle) is actually not very hard or time consuming if you have the right tricks up your sleeve. Moreover, this is supposed to be a cartoony movie, so I think the more realistic (and less controllable) fat jiggle of a dynamic simulation would probably feel out of place in the final movie.
November 20th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
I asked the questin cause the jiggle seemed too stylish to be dynamic. It would be great to have something like tail bouncing, with dynamic (asking too much for a viewport realtime spring?) that can be blended with hand animation.
November 20th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Happy happy happy happy happy.
That animation of the big bunny doing that surprise loop is just amazing with the fat. It really made be believe that he was…just fat. Was it with the mesh deform things?
November 20th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Nathan: I don’t agree with you. If you’re going to have constant movement of a “jelly-fat-body” it’s going to be apparent in every move, and that WOULD be time consuming if you want it to be exaggerated to the degree often needed in animated movies (especially true for toon-style movies).
I do however agree with you that a lot of it (especially the exaggerated action often used as the follow up to anticipated moves) and overlapping action can with a huge advantage be used as a part of the animation done by hand (or be it motion capture as i may).
November 20th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
JoOngle: well, feel free to disagree. But I simply don’t find overlapping action to be very tedious. I suppose the other animators can speak for themselves if they wish.
November 20th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Hej JoOngle!
In the animation tests I have done so far, the fat jiggle was extremely quick and easy to add. Good poses and timing is hard, but the overlapping action is straight forward.
I’m working on refining the animation style/character – hopefull it will only be better in the finals.
November 20th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
i dont find overlapping action that hard. it’s probably very complicated if you want to make things move realistically *all the time*. but i think the idea is that we’re using it rather selectively (only when it’s needed) to fit the style of the characters / movie / animation. so in this case it’s pretty straight forward.
November 20th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Really? It’s hand-animated? I was sure it was dynamic from the creases on (around? who knows where the bones are) the legs. Is that just shape keys, then?
November 20th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Good to see another video ‘pop-up’.
You’re doing well over there I see. Do you actually get paid to work on this Andreas?
I smiled when some of you misunderstood (forgot her name).
‘I have never seen a movie with hair’
;P
– AniCator
November 20th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
I had to do a double take on the facial hair too. I guess Campbell and Brecht are practicing for the fur coding…
Hope you don’t mind the paparazzi talk guys, it comes with the territory!
November 20th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
What a creative team! I bet u make good friendships also. Ur inspiration for us!
November 22nd, 2007 at 3:42 pm
i’m a 3-d movie dropout , not that my talent was lacking, rather a million other details. This is interesting and fun and good looking.
What you want me to be less than honest? :)
November 22nd, 2007 at 6:00 pm
I have never asked this before, but this is nudging me too much now. Is Ton’s voice electronically distorted (by intention or microphones can’t handle all the frequencies of Ton’s voice) or it is actually like that? Just asking. Don’t flame me for this.
November 25th, 2007 at 8:00 am
Yay! We have an Aussie in there…that’s great!
(I’m from Brisbane, actually. Where’s the Aussie from and what’s his name?)
Good weekly, by the way – love the group interaction factor…
November 27th, 2007 at 12:55 am
So who is who? I know these guys by their artwork, not by their faces.
No females working on the project eh? Must be stressful.
(p.s. OS X rocks!)
November 27th, 2007 at 1:20 am
Nevermind, there is a woman on the team, isn’t there…
November 28th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
I know a guy that hand animated CLOTH for is movie and it wasn’t that hard ^_^