Jan
13

An Outside Perspective

Posted in Production, Random Fluff by Nathan Sunday, January 13th, 2008

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:

.ogg video file high quality (39.6MB)

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.

(more…)

Dec
30

Our Animation Schedule

Posted in Production, Random Fluff by Nathan Sunday, December 30th, 2007

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:

.ogg video file high quality (2.0MB)

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

Dec
24

fluffy puffy peach posters

Posted in Media Gallery, Production by andy Monday, December 24th, 2007

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!
poster_bunny_crop.jpg
poster_gamera_crop.jpgposter_franky_crop.jpg poster_rinky_crop.jpg

(more…)

Dec
12

grooming time!

Posted in Production by andy Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

chinchilla_crop.jpgOver 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.

chinchilla_parents.jpg

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.

(more…)

Dec
11

Meanwhile in the studio

Posted in Production by Margreet Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

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 :)

Shoes laying aroundPair of shoe laying around

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

Dec
04

Animation!

Posted in Production by William Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

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:
.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! (more…)

Dec
01

Nathan’s rabbit rigging demo

Posted in Production by campbell Saturday, December 1st, 2007

nathan.jpgAnother 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.

.ogg video file high quality (28 MB)

Thanks to Andy for shooting the footage.

Nov
30

Trees

Posted in Development, Production by campbell Friday, November 30th, 2007

curve2tree screenshot

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?

(more…)

Nov
29

Jan Morgenstern visiting Amsterdam

Posted in Media Gallery, Production by Margreet Thursday, November 29th, 2007

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.

.ogg video file high quality (280 MB)

Nov
22

Making the animatic with Sacha

Posted in Development, Media Gallery, Production by campbell Thursday, November 22nd, 2007

nov21.jpgCreating 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)