random environment, rodent & rabbit renders
Posted in Development, Media Gallery, Production by andy
it’s starting to get a little rough around here…
there are about 6 weeks of production time left. our fearless team of animators – sacha, william, nathan and our external keyframe shifters – are working hard to get the last couple of scenes of our movie animated. enrico and i am both working on “finals” – a little underated sounding description ton likes to give to the task of texturingmodelinglightingcompositinganddoeverythingelsetogetthemovierendered.
so as the animation department is churning out an average of 3 shots per day (of mindboggling quality), the finals output is ranging from 3 to 5 shots per day (of ~130 / 13 scenes overall / 9 minutes of movie). at this point everyone is already working crazy hours, so we apologize for not having a lot of time to post (quality) blog updates. but instead of just throwing a couple of rushed renders into the gallery and letting people figure our their context by themselves i would like to share some more information with you! :)
here are a couple of test renders from the environment that enrico worked on last week. it’s coming along very well. both places are from the climax of the movie, there are no characters, no compositing and the lighting is probably going to change. in the first couple of weeks we only worked on creating a database of trees, plants, flowers, grass, props, textures, etc. to create the final scenes all these elements have to be assembled carefully. but also new elements have to be created, ground has to be textured, grass has to be mown… i’m really happy with the level of quality and detail so far. massive kudos to enrico for having all that patience, i would probably have gotten insane weeks ago UV unwrapping all these tree trunks and branches!
anyways, last week i managed to get another scene lit, materialized, composited… err… environmented (12 shots), here’s a couple of still frames in crappy low quality.
all these take advantage of the latest developments by our brave code monkey team: super fast ambient occlusion, hair particles, dupli objects, (brecht) trees, renderfarm and computer wrangling, UV editor enhancements (campbell), zmask, super high quality fusion image sampling and weird confusing user interface (ton).
the render pipeline for these is pretty straight forward, the characters get rendered (and often lit) seperately from the environment. both output additional passes for alpha, depth, ambient occlusion, id numbers, etc. the elements are then combined in the blender compositor, color corrected and finally saved to openEXR format.
i made a little animation to visualize to show the various passes and effects, click the image on the right to watch the video in ogg format (youtube version coming up)
and to finally get things even: here is a less crappy (i hope) snap of the river shot.
enjoy!
.andy
ps: i lost my coffee somewhere in the office, has anyone seen it?
January 28th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
wow…
January 28th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Nice update. The fully composited shots look lovely, as do Encrico’s environments.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
doh!
January 28th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Awesome!
January 28th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
hope, no-one has drank your coffee(gor their sakes..!)
ps. the river’s lookin’ ALOT better, as you guy’s promised! *drools* :)
January 28th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Wow….just Wow…..
The renders look great. Just imagine all of this stuf with a camera flying over it. This is going to make a mark.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
That is just simply amazing. If you wanted to get this quality out of still images, would you need to run the separate renders out and re-composite them, or is there another reason its done like this?
January 28th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
This is all blender made?
When is this available to buy?
January 28th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
wooooow !!!
This is so amazing…I can’t wait any longer for the movie to be released !!!
January 28th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
mWm you can pre order it now :
http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info.php?products_id=97
January 28th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
*drool*
The movie clip looks awesome too, with the animals moving…
January 28th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
The animation in that video is absolutely amazing guys!!
Can’t wait until it’s finished!!!!!!
January 28th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Wow Andy, fantastic stuff! If you consider these low quality then I know for sure I’m definitely going to be mighty impressed with the final renders.
How are you managing all your assets?
Are models appended or linked into scenes so that, say, if you update a model standalone .blend then any changes automatically get propagated to the scene?
It would be interesting at some point to find out in detail how the production pipeline works for a typical scene from start to finish. I hope this area gets documented somewhere along the line (e.g. a video with a voiceover).
January 28th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Superb job, these kind of posts definately increase pre-order sales. I feel so happy ;-p
January 28th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Nice environments. Are these tree with the wizard_curve2tree script? I hope we get a tutorial soon.
January 28th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
just being a little picky. in the pic bbb1.jpg, the red squirrel. the line of action in the shoulder is funky. maybe up the right shoulder or lower the left one, cause a the moment those seem reversed. Probably in movement it’s all right
January 28th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
WOW , great render guys , nice job !
Peace :-).
January 28th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
WOW!!! Great work! Can’t wait to have the DVDs in my hands!:-)
January 28th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
I thought you guys hadn’t anything that was quality enough to show to the public? So you just fixed this in one day!
I’m having total confidence in you all :)
The river shot looks better when i see it here on screen. Makes the intro setting have “tranquility” (which is in good contrast with the rest of the movie, so don’t remove it).
I wish you all a lot of “Zen”, cause it is going to turn out fine…
greetings
January 28th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
The river shot is actually looking pristine (from my point of view). I really like the transparency on it.
P.S. Now the world will really know how evil squirrels can be!
January 28th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
thumbs up. :)
January 29th, 2008 at 12:12 am
Just another post bla bla and great job!
January 29th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Sweeeeeeeeeet! Looking real nice!
January 29th, 2008 at 12:53 am
will the grass move correctly if they walk through it? how will this be solved?
January 29th, 2008 at 12:58 am
horace: a recent commit by janne karhu made it possible to use force fields on baked static particle systems (so basically grass and fur)… this is what we’re using and it seems to work great so far!
.andy
January 29th, 2008 at 1:34 am
Hmm.. Incredible work guys. I am relly looking forward to see all that stuff “In action”. That with “moving baked particles” is pretty handsome.
January 29th, 2008 at 2:25 am
Anyone knows whens the movie coming out? available to public? April ?
January 29th, 2008 at 3:30 am
If it looks half as good as this, and I don’t hear “Emo” repeated anywhere in the dialogue, I’ll be a VERY happy camper!
Rock on guys. You’re creating something completely unheralded in the open source world. Forget the hours and just feel the lurv! You guys are open source artist rock-stars! ™
January 29th, 2008 at 4:40 am
Wow, looks so greeeeaT!
January 29th, 2008 at 5:36 am
Don’t smack me. But two things I’d like to say in regards to the river scene.
The rocks need some adjustment. They look more like plastic right now than a rock.
And the um..lily pads? I think thats what they are should have some wetness to them, maybe a little puddle of water in the center of the leaves. I’d deform the shape a bit as well, much too straight right now.
I think thats it. Except maybe some translucency to the leaves, flowers, etc. But that all depends on the style you are looking for.
Everything is really shaping up. I look forward to tearing it all apart (the files) when its released.
January 29th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Nice job you guy! I can’t wait for the movie to come out. But if I may be a little critic I think there is a problem with the grass in environment_test1.jpg
It seems to almost disappear as it gets close to the ground. Maybe the Ztransp is inverted? But anyway it looks great! keep up the good work!
January 29th, 2008 at 5:59 am
So are those clouds images or volumetric….I love the grass in the new river test.
btw…it was NEVER crazpy
January 29th, 2008 at 6:45 am
It’s looking fantastic guys. Brilliant work! We miss you all.
January 29th, 2008 at 10:26 am
I have my jaw somewhere below table. It’s AMAZING! It looks very “pixar-ish”, which is ok, i guess. I’m looking forward to make a screening in our local student’s club.
January 29th, 2008 at 10:39 am
anyone know what this “super high quality fusion image sampling” is that andy is talking about?
January 29th, 2008 at 10:53 am
WOW!!! this is really amazing!
January 29th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Hey! Don`t use “texturingmodelinglightingcompositinganddoeverythingelsetogetthemovierendered”
That`s to much for my eyes!
Good rendering.
I think the big rabbit looks like Ton , face expression.
January 29th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Wow …
I would like to see more of these compositing videos. They give an idea how complex this all is.
January 29th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Great work guys, texturingmodelinglightingcompositinganddoeverythingelsetogetthemovierendered
I must say that is a bit of a mouthful, even for Ton.
But I like where this is going. I agree the grass in the environment test 1 shot looks like its fading as it hit the soil. But I am sure you guys are on top of that already. That little animation at the end is nice as well, thanks for sharing.
January 29th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Nice! Now the river looks really cool, the plants are really nice too! Good work!
Now for the sour-a** critique, I must say that the forest ground looks a bit too flat and spoils the mood a bit as the trees and leaves look really good.
Furthermore – the grass (seem to me) to use “fade out to ztrans” in both ends…that´s not good as it doesn´t seem connected to the forest-ground. It´d be much more convincing if it faded to a darker color instead, perhaps with just a TAD of fade-to-ztrans ;)
Cheers.
January 29th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Tcrazy, the clouds are matte paintings (animated matte paintings…)
January 29th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
@andy: what’s the rendertime of the images with the bunny? do you consider them final, or there’s something else to work ?
January 29th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Wooowww andy tu roooxxe !!! OMG !!
January 29th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Wow…I love how fluffy stuff looks
January 29th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Wow, that is frigging awesome!!! The characters look soo cute :D
January 29th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
This is somewhat beautiful…
January 30th, 2008 at 5:04 am
if that is the crappy quality, The good quality must be amazing!
January 30th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
amazing grass, fur, and texture.. BUT
the ground and the trunk suffer sooo much of being flat!!
i’m sure the abandoned microdisplacement would really change the look of everything shifting to a more complete pro-look.
especially the ground, it’s so evident that’s flat, it’s disturbing the excellent quality of everything else.
January 30th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
‘but instead of just throwing a couple of rushed renders into the gallery and letting people figure our their context by themselves i would like to share some more information with you! :)’
Andy I’m around the corner (with your coffee!)
January 30th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
wow!
great work! I can’t wait to see this finished!
January 30th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Looks fantastic!
BTW, I believe that andy stated that the ground has yet to be textured.
January 30th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
just being asking myself, there’s grass
(hair) and alot of it is there a raizon?
or just because blender can do this now?
January 30th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Keep rocking guys ! your latest previews are awesome !
can’t wait to see more renders or animatics ! ;)
have fun !
January 30th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
piet: no, unfortunately there are no raisins in our movie. Would be cool though.
January 30th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
:( I was hoping there would be voumetric clouds.
Hey could env or andy right a tutorial on how you made that grass when your done with peach…and a tutorial on that trees from curves would be nice too.
January 30th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
This movie isn’t supposed to be “Pixar-ish”. Pixar makes great movies, but I’m pretty sure Peach is not aiming to copy Pixar.
Go go Peach team!!
January 31st, 2008 at 1:02 am
I admit to be a novice to the blender world, but have been following the progress of this film throughout its various stages…In the latest stills, I still don’t seem to notice much in terms of bump mapping…everything comes off as very smooth. Is this an animation/style choice, or is this part of limitations of the program?
January 31st, 2008 at 4:52 am
The preview renders look great! I’m already glad I pre-ordered a DVD. Truly inspirational! Keep up the great work.
January 31st, 2008 at 6:31 pm
–> Meestro actually the peach team is using some(on the trees for instance) however because this is going to be somewhat ‘cartoony’ I think they’re going for that smoother look. Blender actually has a very powerful ‘type’ of bump mapping called normal mapping.
Here’s a link that talks about it: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Bump_and_Normal_Maps
January 31st, 2008 at 8:26 pm
I can´t watch the ogg file… =(
where is the you tube version!?
January 31st, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Uhm, where’s the upcoming Youtube version? ;)
January 31st, 2008 at 8:32 pm
(Apart from that, to say something positive once in a year: Yes, the renders look amazing)
January 31st, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Oh my! Looks marvellous! I especially like bbb4.jpg because of the subtle diffracting flares! Nice details!
Dani
February 1st, 2008 at 8:45 am
Thanks Sergeant Oreo. Since when is Pixarish such a desired adjective. I think Pixar does great stuff, but not everyone has to be like them. I think the renders look great and am looking forward to the final movie
February 1st, 2008 at 10:03 am
While I think it´s natural for people to “compare” against what they know to be perceived as the best “eg. Pixar”…
…I´d say the Peach team should shoot for better! If you shoot for the best, you´ll always be second…but if you try to do YOUR very best…there´s a chance you´d outshine them all.
This teams efforts are by FAR the best I´ve ever seen in an independent CG-movie with such a small team.
Keep going guys!
February 1st, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Well , get one here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0RDU6zAa-c
February 1st, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Thank you!(tube) :)
February 3rd, 2008 at 5:52 am
You need watermarks on those renders.
February 4th, 2008 at 6:26 am
shocked……amazed….(drools over keyboard)….