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:
.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! Read the rest of this entry »

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.

While sipping from an excellent cup of coffee I’ve worked on the area lamp render fix, as promised to work on in exchange for the incredible espresso engine!

The above images show the old situation, with and without shadow. Note that the light doesn’t really make the sides of the sphere become lit, and for shadow this even becomes totally terminated.

This is the situation as now in svn. Now, for every possible shadow sample, an area light calculation is done from that position. This clearly gives much nicer light on the sphere (but note that the floor is identical). With a shadow render, the self-shadowing effect of faces are visible. I’ve not included terminator code for resolving phong imperfections… that fights with the whole idea of soft shadow. Better to use as small faces as possible now.

(More work on this will be done of course, this is the first commit, need to do more tests for quality)

Grazie mille!

-Ton-

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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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!)

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)

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