Recently I realized that we never really made a complete Blender Institute tour after this project started. Sure, there was Ton’s first round trip waaaay back, but we needed something new, shiny and classy like this to show you how great this place actually is! Luckily Nathan, our master of rigging, animating and hugging, agreed to improvise a very sincere and pertinent guided VIP tour through the marvels of our beloved work- and living- space.

Welcome to the Blender Institute!

Ogg file

For two days we have Roemer around. For school he has to do a practical assignment to focus on the future and get more information about which direction he wants to go to. And luckily he choose Blender :) He interviewed Sacha about the externals helping out the Peach team to get to movie finished on time.

Download the .ogg file here.

as we mentioned earlier, it’s getting quite busy over here. and now that the Apricot Team is moving in finally, it’s gonna get even more busy! Last friday we had Bart from BlenderNation over to do interviews with us… i shot a fun little timelapse video during the entire day. it’s interesting to see how often people get up from their chairs, how much coffee we drink and how crazy our heads bob around…

enjoy!

watch the movie in .ogg format

As the schedule starts to get close, we recently realized that we are not going to be able to finish on time. We now have finished animation for less than a third of the film, and we only have about six weeks to go before all animation has to be locked, so that we can get all the final renders out on time. Weeks are going by with a few shots coming out here and there, which is not going to cut it.

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So far our workstations haven’t been mentioned much, partly because it’s not as fun as furry animals but also because they don’t break down!

Now the artists are working hard and don’t want to “waste time” blogging, I’ll go into some details about our workstations.

Hardware

At the moment we have 8 workstations…

5x Maqina C6850DC 3D Blender Workstation’s
(Dual Core 3ghz, 4gig ram, GeForce 8800 GTS)

2x Maqina X5130DC Workstation’s
(Quad Core 2ghz, 4gig ram, NVidia Quadro FX 1700)

1x Maqina X5345QC Workstation
(8 Core 2.33ghz, 8gig ram, NVidia Quadro FX 1700)

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I’ve been teaching the guys and girls here how to play the renowned Dutch student card game “Toepen”, which doesn’t have winners, but only losers. Obviously – since it’s a student game – the loser has to get everyone drinks. Here in the institute we have free drinks, so we made up penalties for each round… and I’ve lost the round with as a penalty to make a blog post with a silly picture!

So here it is; the New Years Eve crew (minus Andy who takes the picture, and Enrico + William + Brecht who celebrate it at home) and with Campbell’s girls Cathy and India. On behalf of everyone: happy new year and let’s make it a great 2008!

-Ton-

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!)

Just before the blender conference, the physics developers got together at the at the blender institute to discuss how different physics systems can play better together and share more code.

• Daniel Genrich – Cloth
• Jens Ole Wund – Softbodies
• Nils Tuery – Fluid
• Janne Karhu – Particles

Brecht van Lommel, Ton Roosendaal and myself (Campbell Barton) needed to see what was common between the different physics solvers to make into generic functions. We also had to make a short term plan for the peach project.
By the end of the 2 days we agree’d on the underling API as well as new features needed to improve blenders work flow.

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Hey there!

things are quite busy here in the Blender Institute, even though Peach hasnt officially started yet. ton is doing an awesome job finding appartments for the peach team, organising the blender conference, managing the sponsors, getting studio equipment and doing millions of other things – all at once (right now i see him talking into two phones by the window)! and while i’m trying to assist him as much as a feeble mind can, i still need to finish my tutorial dvd. at the same time sacha is working on refining the script together with arno kroner (via e-mail), it looks really cool! anyway… i believe we are going to see a few more details posted here about these processes (soon-ish… but please bare in mind that we’re still in pre-production and nobody is actually committed / contracted / sold their soul to peach already), so for now i’m just going to post some fun trivia… be warned.

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Here’s a quick tour in the very cool office where we’ll make the Peach Open Movie. Most of it is undecorated and unfurnished still. But, we keep that wallpaper!