Animation!
Posted in Production by WilliamIt’s december (already?!) and Amsterdam is drenched in rain and hail. The dutch are eating pepernoten, celebrating the arival of Sinterklaas and getting their shoes stuffed with chocolate letters. Meanwhile at the Blender Institute, work goes on. In the last few weeks I have been testing Nathan’s rigs trying to define the animation style and workflow. Some of these tests can be seen below:
.ogg video file high quality (617k)
All this has been leading up to an important production milestone which is final animation. From this week on, each animator will have to spit out 15 seconds of animation each week, or 4 every day for us to be able to complete the film. Scary but true! Luckily we got a few nice things to help us:
- mirrors for posing reference:
- animation books:
- Joshua Leung (Aligorith) has been refining several parts of the animation system, including nicer path visualization and tweaking:
- And of course our new italian espresso machine will come in handy too!
December 4th, 2007 at 1:16 am
loooove the animations. great work and style! can you share some of the news on the animation system ?
December 4th, 2007 at 1:49 am
They’re all looking great. I especially like the classic look of the animation on that last creature. Made me smile!
December 4th, 2007 at 1:52 am
I assume the ogg video will be posted soon?
December 4th, 2007 at 1:58 am
It really look like you ripping Hollywood out of this Package. This time a little bit more shifted to the left side =)
December 4th, 2007 at 4:03 am
INCREDIBLE! I can’t wait to see more!
December 4th, 2007 at 5:20 am
on the one where he drops the ball, he should pause longer when he looks all shocked
December 4th, 2007 at 5:44 am
Great. Really brilliant animations there. I like the last one best. Similar to Chuck Jone’s road runner animations.
December 4th, 2007 at 6:30 am
Great stuff! The last one has really smooth movements!
That 15 seconds a week sounds pretty scary though. It’s not easy animating high quality stuff quickly.
Good luck
December 4th, 2007 at 7:35 am
Beautiful animation!!!!
December 4th, 2007 at 7:37 am
beautiful animation!!!!!
December 4th, 2007 at 10:20 am
Great work guys! After peach, the animation pipeline will be very professional.
Another project with CG mixed with live action and Blender will be ready for anything!
December 4th, 2007 at 10:23 am
15 secs a week sounds scary ? we’ve to do 8 sec. a day !!! But that’s for tv show, and the quality is really good :D
December 4th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Well… Early on in my past project I’ve made about 20secs a week, but I had cloth stuff and so. In the last scenes my performance raise to a stuning 10secs a week… and is the fastest I can :P
December 4th, 2007 at 11:53 am
!^_^ Sorry, instead of 20secs I mean 5 secs, my bad :P
December 4th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Wow guys! The animation’s already looking better than Elephant’s Dream. I’m so stoked to see more progress as the movie develops!
December 4th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Really great animation, William… Keep it up!!!
This movie’s gonna be so awesome!
December 4th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Nice! There are some really good animation in there, some stiff stuff in the end, but most of the anim tests in the beginning were really nice!
If you guys keep this up, I am *really* looking forward to the movie.
December 4th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
absolutely amazing. I think I will be buying Peach for sure
December 4th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Great Animations!
The first and end Character´s Movements (animation) from this Video Demostration reminds me the Scrat Character from Ice Age 1,2!
Very fast Rapid Hectic movements!
maybe you already watch the Ice Age 1,2 Film over and over again to Study some Character Animation also!
Great Job! …al the best!
December 4th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
just looking at the last 3 posts or so I notice the coffee machine being mentioed. does this short film have something about coffee in the main plot?
December 4th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
the coffe machine is doing his work!
I just *love* the last animation, it’s awesome!, it is the way I would like to animate some day… some day :/
really inspiring, go on!
December 4th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
woa! the animations look amazing! i specially loved the last one, it’s great!
December 5th, 2007 at 1:56 am
A inspiration film: RATATOUILLE from Disney-Pixar. Smooth movements in rapid sequences :)
December 5th, 2007 at 4:05 am
Very good quality of animation. Good luck !
December 5th, 2007 at 4:07 am
Don’t drink to many coffees ;)
December 5th, 2007 at 11:41 am
Great work! Puhleeeeeeaaaaaaseee publish ogg version of the video!
December 5th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Hey! The last cutscene of the squirrel running up the tree with motion blurring looked great!
December 5th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Great work!… before I started to see the video I got a little nervous about how it was going to look, but when I saw the first character, I felt happy about how things are going, it looks so smooth, natural, not CG… Congrats William!
December 5th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Looking good william, some really nice acting going on. I love the chinchilla with the ball, spot on.
December 5th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
@RisteSekuloski, only Ton was able to upload files to the server for a while which made getting the youtube and ogg files both up at the same time a hassle.
Now I have a login and can drag and drop them in nautilus which makes it a no brainier.
If anyones interested, heres how the videos are encoded.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Bf-institute/systems#Video_Settings_-_Compressing_DV_to_OGG_Theora_.28for_the_blog.29
December 5th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Here’s some source material for ya :)
icanhascheezburger.files.wordpresscom/2007/11/funny-pictures-cat-couch.jpg
December 6th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
\o/ .ogg file!!!
December 8th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
very nice preview, just want to mention that very asymetric eyelids movement and little mamals wearing nuts all around the place have been seen together already in some very famous 3d animations…
December 9th, 2007 at 7:17 am
I would really like to see how Nathan creates these rigs. How the curves make certain thing do stuff, how scaling a bone makes a finger bend, etc. That would be great… if you all are not too busy….
December 10th, 2007 at 12:09 am
Yeah, me same like Anthoni.
And where’s the weekly, I was really waiting for that. Hope to see some new stuff soon and keep up the good work!
December 10th, 2007 at 8:22 am
*APPLAUSE*
December 10th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
To Ton: The next open movie you should assign a guy to keep up with the news.
—
It would be nice to follow along and see how to make those cool rigs.
December 11th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Really nice work, well done!
December 11th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
I need to practice my animation. :(
December 11th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Excellent animation!!!!
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:06 am
This is simply stunning work.
Please don’t spoil this with voiceovers done by dutch people trying to speak english tho!
hehe!
January 14th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Kudos on the Animation :) Nicely exagerated. I was pretty skeptical after ED (but then full size humans are tough to animate) but this makes me excited :D