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.
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.
Heya guys! So this is my first post on the Peach blog, gh!
We are working hard to define the last version of the story by the animatic now, while the coders are refining great new features to be used in the movie.
Btw, Brecht, Ton and Campbell are too busy with a lot of new stuff at the moment and they have a priority list to work on, and because we could need volumetric clouds and realistic sky generation for a few shots, this post is meant as a call for help by external coders who can offer a good code for this.
Keep in mind that this is not a priority for Peach, we could easily (and probably better) do beautiful sky and clouds by matte painting; but since in this moment we have the occasion to add new features to Blender, why don’t have a try?
Here are a few images of the “MakeCloud macros” for Pov-Ray made by Gilles Tran, released under a Creative Commons License; they make a very good example of what we are looking for in terms of the visual quality:
Volumetric clouds would be nice, of course, but every other code that can give such good results is welcome. And, besides the clouds, we are expecially looking for sky color gradients simulating light at different moment of the day.
So, come on! You could have the opportunity to be in the movie credit list as coder for amazing stuff, and also to have the eternal gratitude of all the blenderheads around the world. If this is your case, just post here and someone will get in touch with you. Gh!
The grey-haired guy
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.
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.
More updates on the production:
William Reynish came over to Amsterdam yesterday to get the full briefing, and of course we had to check on him (and he on us!). This went all great, he’s a funny guy even! Welcome to the team dude!