Hello all. A friend of mine, Aaron, from the USA came to visit the Peach project last week. He put together a video and a blog post for all of you:

The condensed version of a week in the life of the Peach project:

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It’s a couple of months before the premier and there are lots of things to do. Not only the most obvious (finishing final animation) but also finishing scene construction and render preparation so that the first of the finished shots can be shipped off to the render farm. A simple calculation revealed that at the current animation pace the project won’t be finished in time, so four external animators have been found and hopefully with their help the timeline will become reasonable again.

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8 minutes

13 scenes

154 shots

12000 frames

5 characters (plus a butterfly)

10 weeks left to animate it all

…and this is what happens when you have an insane animation schedule:

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(Music by AcidMan: http://www.beatpick.com/AcidMan)

hi there!

well here i am again, and the characters are finally completed! as a peachy xmas holiday present we decided to publish some posters / wallpapers to decorate your desktop!

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Over the past couple of days I’ve been working on the fur grooming of our main characters (Furry & Funny, remember?). Even though it’s still an ongoing work in progress, we would like to share some of our progress and workflows with you!

The first character I managed to finish was the chinchilla (lovingly nicknamed Gamera). Especially due to the numerous improvements in particle generation, editing and rendering the results are surprisingly good. Now we’re able to brush our characters in real time and render 2 million hairs in HD resolution in about one minute. Thanks to Jahka and Brecht, our fearless developers!

In the first step a particle system is created on the character mesh, it’s important to get an optimal distribution as a basis for the parent particles. However, sometimes the results are not perfect, so a lot of times I have to add particles manually.

This is done in the next step where the particle system is set editable (aka. ‘baked’), so each individual particle can be modified by hand, either using the particle edit brushes (add, comb, puff, smooth, cut, etc.) or pulling them around one by one. This is also where the overall growth direction of the fur is defined. Another important factor taken into consideration is how the rig deforms the character.

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After being cut off with the internet for almost one and a half day we are finally online again, hoera!

While I am writing this I am thinking of the times internet didn’t even exists and now I feel helpless without. What happened.

Anyway soon more about all the great work here in the studio :)

Or see Nathan animating for a group of course participants :)

It’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:
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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! (more…)

Another look at rigging with Nathan, he’s just done with rabbit. This is more complicated, with all that extra fat to move about, great facial expression controls too!

well, see for yourself.

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Thanks to Andy for shooting the footage.

Recently I’ve been writing a tree maker to speed up our tree creation pipeline, but generating nice looking trees turned out to be a lot harder then I expected.

Having a tree generator where you hit a button and pop out a perfect tree is the artists dream but realistically they need a lot of control as well.

The main difference between this and other tools is that it doesn’t do all the work for you.

We had to compromise in a number of areas: what we expected the artists to do by hand, amount of detail and artistic style. Also with the time limit, how good should we expect the trees to look anyway?

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Witness weekly (week 47)

In this weekly overview Jan Morgenstern is giving the studio a visit. Furthermore in this edition you can experience the latest weekly about environment design issues and the animatic and sound.

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Creating an animatic was the first project we worked on together, its also finished!

In this interview Sacha (the director) speaks of its place in the production pipeline, how it was made and some features added to Blender that helped speedup the work flow.

download the video in ogg format (better quality)