every friday evening we have a weekly meeting where everyone shows their work of the past week and discuss how to schedule the next one, making important decisions about story, styling, animation and so on. these meetings can be long and tiresome, yet at the same time a lot of fun.

so last time i went around with my camera (which is slightly less crappy than the one that the blender institute owns) all day to capture the atmosphere of a typical peach work day, talks about animation, style of the movie, blender development – and of course the final weekly meeting at the end of the day. i hope this is a bit more ‘immersive’ than a regular interview type documentary… just to give you an idea how much fun it is to work on this movie! yaaaaay! happyhappyjoyjoy! :o)

enjoy!

download the video in ogg format (better quality)

i’m hoping to do this more often. especially next friday is going to be interesting when our composer Jan Morgenstern is coming over for a short visit. so stay tuned!

.andy

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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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.

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Hi all,

here are some color tests of the main characters by Enrico (rabbit) and Andy (rodents).

Both Enrico and Andy painted over the 3D models, all modeled by Andy (based on the director’s designs).

Peach out,

Sacha

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

A good story is no certainty for a good storyboard, and a good storyboard doesn’t necessarily make a good animatic.

… a nice opening sentence for my very first blogpost here, but that’s all the wisdom you’ll get from me (we know that’s not what I’m here for).

After a few weeks of storyboarding by me and Enrico, and making the animatic by William, we were able to watch the full animatic on last tuesday. Things look different when you see it in a different form, and the animatic is no exception. After watching and discussing the animatic it was clear there were ‘some’ issues, and the necessary solutions varied from better timing, slight adjustments and big changes. For me this meant back to the brainstorming and storyboarding… I skipped the writing (writing sucks). And some changes were made indeed. Oh yeah.

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Sun Microsystems has decided to sponsor the Peach project, by granting hours on their network.com Sun Grid Compute Utility for rendering of the Peach Open Movie. With hundreds of Solaris nodes composed of 64 bit CPU’s and 4 gigs of memory per CPU, Sun Grid will give us virtually unlimited power!

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Proudly present the first glimpse of the animatic: A Rabbit’s Revenge!
And a short discussion of a certain part of the movie. Enjoy!

Please notice the cuckoosound which I was forced to put in by Sacha, because some things we need to keep topsecret ;0)

Since everyone here is too busy (read lame!) to write blog stories, here’s a quick view of the studio as how I found it this sunny afternoon. I used Campbells camera, which had battery power, unlike mine, but unfortunately had no sound and no memory left on the card just when I approached Campbell… the cool trees stuff on his screen is for next time.

Everyone in the studio said “hi” btw! And they all promised to post something here very soon. This week!

-Ton-

Whee, this is totally fun! Every few hours I’m checking the boards and tables to see the movie being progressing. Making such detailed storyboards will add a lot to this project, certainly with the sketching skills of Enrico and Sacha. With this pace we’re ready in a couple of weeks! (Well, with the storyboards and animatic).

Images:
– Enrico drawing on new light table
– Brecht hiding behind two micropolygons
– William editing the animatic (I hope)
– Andy decided it was time to put on a silly hat
– Sacha directing
– Campbell has fun anyway
– The opening sequence of the movie (which now probably gets redone completely)

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