Spring Open Movie - Production Report

good morning good morning I still have a voice so welcome to the third day of the blender conference only fun a little remark that is one cancellation the talk after this talk at 11:00 about fabric design has been cancelled so we move the salons talk about comics to this place so everyone can enjoy it Wow look at that good so it's 11 o'clock enjoy the next talk from the spring team [Applause] [Music] good morning good morning that sounds like unexpected mmm I'm gonna try it and use my normal voice so glad you could make it here welcome to the spring production report for those of you who don't know what spring is it's the current open movie production at the blender headquarters here in Amsterdam and this is this presentation will be just kind of a status report because we're not done so just to give you a little overview of what it is so for those of you don't know spring is kind of a seven minute short film that we're making and we are currently a kind of in the middle of production and the idea is that we we finished around spring next year hopefully and we of course we have the whole staff of of the blender Institute foundation studio at our disposal everyone is really great supporting us but the the art team behind that we're just like four four guys four people so very normal looking people so and of course there's tonin francesco supporting us and then the the awesome developers there so the idea is that for this film we are currently using 2.8 blend to point eight in production which is sometimes kind of scary and since the code Quest happened this summer we we fully switched to blender 2.8 and we are using it every day the ideas that were also be suffering a lot and hopefully will be suffering for you so there will be less suffering later on so so as I said this is just going to be a kind of a status report and I want to just keep you up-to-date as to where we are and how we got until this point and well I'm not gonna like this okay but so to explain you how this whole project started I have to unfortunately talk about myself so I'm the director of spring so it was kind of yeah it kind of came from my weird brain so I'm from I was born and well I wasn't born there but I was raised kind of in the south of Germany Germany very close to Switzerland and France and for those of you who know that region it's it's very beautiful and mountainous so while I was what I was growing up I did mean my mom we did a lot of sort of hiking trips and the Alps which is absolutely amazing just the environment there and it kind of deeply inspired me for for the rest of my life just you know to help me create things because this impact that nature had on me was was so great and as you can see on some of these pictures it's a what I find the most remarkable is that you just walk up there to an altitude about like you know like 3,000 4,000 meters or so and you just walk amongst these huge rocks and you feel very insignificant so then of course as I grew up I got to be a professional nerd it's the proles yeah yeah lots of hair that is less hair so well that was 16 years ago oh my god then over the years of course I got a chance to you know being involved in blender I got the chance to contribute to all these amazing projects and sometime last year there was this idea hey and you might don't you want to pitch something and we were at that time we were almost done we were done with the agent 3 to 7 production and AIT and francesco we were doing and pablo as well we were doing these regular story sessions i think it was like wednesday night at the studio just after work getting together learning about story development pitching ideas to each other and trying to develop their their own thing and francesco was constantly poking me hey hey you have this thing lying around so i was kind of trying to develop that idea that into a working pitch so and i did that so these are some really early crappy pictures that i like i gave a presentation at the old studio and that room without air in the back and what I pitched was essentially something that was based on all these childhood memories so the idea is that I wanted to tell a very simple straightforward story no no dialogue mainly just images something that really evokes a sense of awe in you so the story is about a little girl and she is she's kind of a shepherd but we don't really know she has a dog so the girl is called spring incident incidentally and the dog is called autumn and they live in these mountainous areas and they descend into a valley that's covered entirely in clouds and underneath these clouds and this valley everything is frozen everything is dead and they have to somehow bring life back into it by rounding up these strange I wouldn't call them steep but by rounding up these strange creatures so it was really just based on like all this inspiration I got from nature and like the also when you're a child you kind of expect like beyond like behind every rock took some somehow something magical is happening that just happens out of reach from us that's something we just almost can connect to but we can't because we're just humans so the idea with this film is that we we show that basically so I was also inspired a lot by by the works of Studio Ghibli of course because everyone likes them so when I'm a very visual person so but I couldn't like as we decided I'd direct this I wanted to have someone else who has a very strong sense of visual art direction so I really I really wanted to work with DeVito mwah you might know him he has this amazing webcomic called pepper & carrot and he is super successful successful and I guess this huge fan base and I really wanted to work with him like because he was working on sintel I wasn't working on sentosa never got the chance to directly interact with him I really like his his style because it's somewhere in this weird mixture of French anime kind of European stuff you can't call it manga or anime because it's not Japanese of course but but yeah so I really wanted to work with him to to find the style of this film so we we kept the chance to collaborate for one week I was invited to his studio to his house in France and we wanted to come up with what is the main character about like what what does this girl look like because I at this point I had no idea I wanted to have it a blank slate so we spent a week trying to he was like amazing he was drawing so many so many little sketches and at some point he just had he had the picture of the character there and it was amazing because like it's something that I I couldn't imagine that just happened to be there and it was perfect so um these are just some some videos that I shot so in this week we he was on the first day he was just drawing with with watercolors and and ink and then he immediately just went into creature because that's his his whole workflow with open source using open source tools and digital art so I was I was trying to keep up with him all the time because at this point the story wasn't flashed out everything so I I spent some time drawing little storyboards and post-it notes and slapping them on the wall which was really great because you can you know you can interchange ideas really really quickly and he was just like sitting in the other corner of the room and drawing these amazing things like after after 10 minutes you would see this thing on a piece of paper ends like wow damn it so so that was really cool and at the end of the at the end of the week we had some idea of how how the spring person is and the idea is that she looks kind of like a girl of 11 years old 11 13 years but she could be much older and then also there was the design of the dog which is I think based on a dog he and his girlfriend know it's like how do you call it um it escaped me just now anyway he was drawing these storyboards and creature really really quickly and that kind of also influenced the production process so here are some of the artworks that he made this one over there was like what's the first one that he had and it was like oh my god that's what the whole story is about is this weird it's this weird fantasy world but that also doesn't look like pure fantasy because like going back to my inspiration from from my youth I wanted to create a world that's that's really deep and rich and detailed because if it just looks cartoony there might be some disconnect between us and and what you see on the screen so I wanted the the viewer to be deeply immersed and in into this world these are the character sketches and yes it's just mixture between between stylized and and sort of some some level of realism these are some some sketches that were that work worked on later on but you really knows the pain they got discarded we even modeled some of these as the story of course after that week I went back to Amsterdam and we we continued refining the story I I went into several attempts of making an animal animatic of the film which took a bit more time and then we were already building sets so as as more and more artworks were coming together we would we would piece by piece get a better picture of this world that we were going to make and also the character in it yeah so how that we managed to translate his amazing art style into 3d which is really a challenge in itself because we're not making a flat 2d film so for that I would like to call a union or amazing character sculptor artist slash genius so hello my name is Julian Kozma you might know me talk a bit about the design of spring and like the characters in general so I've been mainly I've mainly come on board as the character designer early on so when I when I joined the project there were like all these concepts of the b12 wah and we had a good starting point but I at first like I specifically wanted to like really oh wait wait sorry lost my train of thought overall goal was that it was kind of the mix of more realistic and stylized but overall we had more of this plan to go really into the stylistic aspect also because the original concept arts were like much much more like an anime in like in their focus and we had a very theme we we didn't have a lot of time and we knew okay at some point we're going to do everything in 2.8 so all these factors had a shame oh oh maybe I'm mm-hmm all right back up so I started with the main character spring and I really tried to get to match the original concept art from the Vetrov wah and get that appeal and style really to translate into 3d as much as possible but that was kind of hard to do because once you translate these details like the this drawing into 3d there has to be some some changes because okay when you look at the at the original concept facials for example they look amazing right and they really do like they convey the character so well and make her look so charming and relatable but once we put that into 3d early on the more depth and more shading was added even if it's just black and white without textures some of that guts lost along the way so and that's really visible like in the first mock-up so there it became really obvious okay that need to be more changes some mistakes and like in the differences were more obvious so slowly and steadily we started to go back in and make improvements to her design to kind of remove that inherent creepiness that kind of comes in there once you put it in 3d and unfortunately over time some of the like most of the changes kind of cost the style to shift so it went a bit away from the original anime stylized to more like a semi realistic stylized look especially once we added like textures and this entire problem persisted like even way past the whole rigging and animating stage and well even once we had like the final shots we still making changes like crazy and it was it's a long struggle getting the appeal just right and for quite some time we've been testing with different facials trying out okay how look late how would it look later from the animation and we tried to kind of pinpoint the problematic areas and the most that the thing that stuck out to us the most are definitely her eyes so we kind of made changes incremental e step by step the shape the shape overall we tried something more natural the eyes became generally smaller the pupil more round less anime and so on and so on it was the entire what is its problem all over again but it's not just the style that changed over time the project became more and more ambitious so the thought of mesh hair was completely expunged even yeah we were thinking of that at some point but so we had to do actually hair grooming and at least at least at this point the style that we had in mind was kind of set in stone so we were able to just go more in detail just push the facials more find the limits of the rig and what we can do with what we have so more issues emerged and had to be tackled like over here like this is an interesting world just the wrinkles not looking natural once you really push the bones into their extremes and adding more shape keys to fix those and at this point like we were far into blender 2.8 and that didn't make things a lot easier so as much as I love working with bleonard 2.8 with all the new features that they that it gives you to play around with the production of course has been plagued with a lot of bugs and crashes and broken features but in the end we pulled through like and we're still pulling through like like how Andy said earlier we suffer to make Venna 2.8 better for you guys and as we kept pushing the limits of the software we kept improving spring step by step by step and this is the current result that we have so let's rewind a little bit because I also want to talk about another aspect the outfit of spring of course like the overall design changed a bit as well so we got the original kind of sketches meat paintings of DeVito Lavoie and it was actually kind of funny like I was sending him a mess as I was sending a message it's like hey dude like this looks awesome but can you send me like some of your reference pictures like what were you going for and like he was like okay what what reference pictures like the whole magic of painting from your imagination so I was I was looking up some references just to get the translation right find something that's a bit more grounded and overall I was also I thought okay the the concept is a great starting point but let's take it a bit further because specifically I wanted some more detail and an interesting version of for example the jacket with more intricate patterns and edges that look a bit more old and worn like something that she would actually wear in that environment and I wanted to experiment with some more colors and also yeah just try some stuff out not really a rainbow coat kind of way but something more spring-like because making a jacket just autumn colored is kind of weird like it makes her stick out but she's called spring so how do we get some spring-like patterns in this felt jacket and I wanted to get something try something out that resembles a bit more something like growth something that you would relate to spring so I added these the these original like yellow stripes I kind of painted them into like vines or branches that kind of grow upwards and added these blue spots like kind of like like flowers growing from from these from these vines and also I experimented with the staff work with scarf just to get something a bit more natural-looking something that's more comfortable around her neck not something that would strangle her and once we were happy with the changes we went back into modeling back into sculpting so here's a little side by side comparison once I started to make some more changes there was also the interesting experiment okay how does the thickness actually look if we get some layers into there because she has actually a pullover under her jacket and also at some point the pullover was much more visible but with some scratch scenes and some story changes that and it didn't end up in the film so went into the materials and texturing and tried out okay how does this pattern now actually look on the model and really interesting very important for this whole experiment wants to get really the look of the materials right because it's supposed to be this thick felt material so we had to use particles and get it to look as like details as possible for the close-ups and make everything kind of look worn but also soft and comfortable so the jacket jacket is really supposed look thick and the boots overall like they're still relatively simple but still with like enough little detail and like it like a design in there that if you look at it closely like you can discover something new and this is overall the design that we ended up with for the film so everything combined everything pretty much done and yet I mean the design aspect and the overall appeal is not just restricted to the modeling texturing and materials of course it's all it also has to do with the animation so [Applause] how's my voice is it good is it there late last night it's great it's great yeah so you would think with with an animated project that of course it's a little bit like a conveyor belt where it's like okay we got the character design we got you to model it and then at some point you have to rig it and then you take that rig and then you just animate right I mean of course that's just one by one by one but of course as the next person takes it over they realize oh well maybe this doesn't work quite like we wanted to war like things get fleshed out and you just see this weirdness in it and it's okay okay this needs to go back to this guy so there's this communication that needs to be happening there because you can't just take this and then go off and run with it so you start giving feedback and you know of course just as I mean I've rigged myself so I know and I've rigged for myself for future custody so this is different you know you wear different hats so you rigged and you're thinking okay what is future he'll stay neat and then later future doctor takes it and he's like that idiot I mean how could he not know and it's weird internal struggle so you know you start giving feedback and so it was rigged by Juan Pablo great stuff but you know you need to also start refining what as the character look like it's kind of funny how that started bleeding really into like the character design and the appeal and this bigger conversation about it is she does she look okay when you take this kind of flat manga hask thing and then you start fleshing it out all these details get at it so a smile looks great in 2d because like you're not using your imagination kind of to fill in the blanks but then you flesh it out and you see where the curvature is so now the curvature of that smile isn't where you thought it would be and but yeah usually we started doing these experiments about with like because some of the facials weren't quite there but I started just making these run cycles this was never totally finished by the way so it looks kind of wonky but it was just this experiment because the idea originally was to have it be faster speedier mungus so I started doing these very exaggerated moves and by the way if you actually calculate how fast she's running it's like faster than who's saying bolt and I you know it's a it's insane but it like it kind of looked okay though like it's fine and then then it's back to animating or it's back to the it's actually back to more feedback and we had to give more feedback because there's certain aspects that maybe looked a bit wonky maybe the the some of the bones were you know slightly off or whatnot and then it was time to give more feedback because there was a lot of stuff that you really needed to tweak and figure out and then one is that you know just the point I'm trying to make is that a lot of back and forth that happened did some facial experiments you know I noticed I noticed something definitely while doing the facial it's the you know there were certain certain expressions that maybe could didn't yield themselves that well and you could see kind of the rough edges of the appealed being lost and so I did like another version where I was just grabbing any bone I could and I if you see the corners of the eyes for example there they go really far an extent kind of far and it that may be okay like in a 2d drawing or whatnot but like once you flashed it out it looked a little bit weird so I tried another version if it just it looks very similar but look at the corner of the eyes yeah okay a little bit rounder shoved in a little bit and the eye overall feels just slightly smaller but they were it's that whole idea what is it you know it's like it's an intangible thing but it's a magical blah blah blah but it's like slightly better lately better has great so it was like a side-by-side comparison at the at the end of this little thing it'll actually swap between the two just so you see it very obviously and you know one looks slightly more appealing why I don't know it's just you know your experiment and you try to figure it out there was also this a very interesting thing that happened and it's it really stems from the fact that it was like this flat character that was originally designed it's it's the fact that the face in you know if you have to flesh it out the face will be favoring in 2d drawing it would be favoring the front part heavily and it'll accidentally make this flatness that you don't see in 2d so when in 3d it actually started looking kind of flat and weird and I just hasn't as an experiment I was just kind of showing the rest of the team what if we like scaled it up slightly in that one I mean it looks a little bit funky but like the point was made that and especially now afterwards when we see some of the older versions it's like wow like see it looks like somebody hit her and you know that but this is like the whole process was like figuring out what works what does it so so trying to figure out like the animation style of this thing the as I said before the character had this very interesting evolution and ask that evolution was happening it wasn't just the character design and the art style that was like shifting slowly and steadily it's it was also like the story the story was I mean it was definitely changing and it had like different versions were trying things out but there there was the sense in one version it was like really a kind of happy-go-lucky girl that kind of like I don't go skiing down the valley in to do and and that gives you that sensation of like oh wow like okay I get what that I'll lean into that idea of like really springy and all and then the story evolved to become more of an internal struggle and more of this you know it's it's and it's totally valid and it's very interesting but the more you make it an internal struggle and it's it's less about like that external thing it you have to change the animation style because you can't quite justify just doing this if it's not about that so the animation stuff started like shifting more and more and more towards kind of real and yeah it's it's just a very interesting conversation that kept happening so we did some references this is way up on a Dutch mountain it's it's actually like 10 meters beautiful up there like the air is really thin but it's it's crazy so there was this interesting thing about like her having a staff so she has this staff and if you just want to animate that you know you hook it up to the hand and now the hand is kind of has to snap and then you start walking with the staff but there's that problem that she's gonna be walking with that staff like I don't know 80% of the movie so do you fake every frame when she's hitting the floor and it seems like a lot of trouble so I just kind of came up with this extra bones that were there in the rig just try to figure out like can I add an extra bone there and then whenever she hits it it's less of a hassle to animate and then you know you're just kind of fake it coming back up and I did some experiments with it kind actually worked and then whenever you don't want her to be holding the staff and to be hooked up to all that you can just disconnect it and it's fine so this is one of the earlier walk cycles and I'm very I like I take very detailed notes on the speed and all that stuff because if you're just doing like a one time thing it's fine you don't have to maybe worry that much about speed but the product and I knew this would happen the problem is you start then way later like a month you do something another walk cycle runs agra fort a totally different character and then at some point when you finally see them together in the scene one is just you know and the other is super slow and man and it doesn't match up and also it's just it's it's it's that idea of like buying into the universe if everything works on the relative speed so but she's going down the valley a lot and you can't just take the walk cycle of course and just tilt it down I mean it's the body really behaves in a different way this was yeah like 17 degrees yeah I was actually taking some of the like earlier concept art 3d stuff and like I was trying to figure out the chords the rough middle ground of an angle and 17 yeah so I did some reference for some of the shots we were trying to figure out also kind of who is she and that became like another what is it's kind of a thing we're trying to figure out who she is and what does she behave like and that's on top of the whole animation stuff so this little experiment we just carry picked a couple of shots that felt okay I'll stop this that that felt like it was very character defining so this was like one of the first one that felt like okay we're trying to figure out like she has a relationship with the dark because he's kind of happy very interestingly this is one of those shots where it looked fine in the viewport the whole appeal idea and her smile and then at some point and he was like you gotta you gotta see it render and she had this uncanny valley creepy smiles no because like as soon as you add all the details and everything something this weird going on there and you know and that took that was like a whole conversation just trying to figure out what is missing in this mode like what makes it not a genuine smile all of a sudden but anyway this this was like one of those first shots we were trying to figure out that character another one was just like that look over the valley with an internal struggle this is also why like a happy-go-lucky animation style will not necessarily work and that one works it's one of those that I want to remake and just add a little something to it but we'll see if there's time for that it you know and you saw our earlier versions of this so we're it kind of looks good the the art and everything well lit but then there was one other shot there was also kind of this medium close-up and I keep keep showing you my reference and it's it's a shot where she has her staff and she needs to make kind of this decision and she's preparing for it and then she goes and smacks into a thing and no spoilers and it seems like a very big shot but also because it's kind of longer and it has a lot of thought process in it so this was kind of the first early version of the reference and I kind of took it from there and I this is more body mechanics and just overall acting beats so I made this version just kind of relatively happy with and it totally works but I could also tell that I could I need it like another pass where I maybe went over some of the facials a little bit more and kind of maybe exaggerated a couple of things so I made a second reference there was a little bit more focus just like on the face and the acting and whatnot great actor it's just fantastic he really like captures an 11 year old girl he's got a shave and then this is this is what came out of that if you're wondering by the way why there are like these colored markings on the staff it's just for my own sanity because if you're constantly holding something both for reference in animating there will be slippage some sometimes it'll slip a little bit but you won't notice because it's a long thing and the hand is constantly moving so it's just like that visual indication it's very helpful but yeah so now you'll see that this is a little bit more kind of expression going on there's more internal struggle I think yes we have a rendered version of it and this is this shot is definitely out of like those experiments figuring out who is she what does the animations that I wanna I think this was the most successful one out of all of them this was the one that get like where everybody on the team had like the most positive feedback and and and got a little bit more than thewe see a thing about yeah this is this is the right direction to take it in but it's not all about the girl of course there's also the dog and here to talk about that is Pablo wait no we changed design for yeah it's very the talk is great it's going great so it's good okay let's continue with the design so oh there's a black side okay so of course there were other characters in the film this one for example the little sidekick dark of spring called autumn and of course his design process was also not very much straightforward because because he's basically this little this tiny dark fur ball and so the biggest problem that we had to fight with his design the biggest problems were like okay you can't see his eyes with all the fur in his face you can't really see the dog because of all this dark fur and how are we going to simulate this whole furry mess so first we tried to like first make some sculpting's try to figure out the overall proportions and volumes and make them kind of compliment his facial features and the character design and not really hide them and he's supposed to be a bit of an old guy with like a beard big mustache sorry and bushy eyebrows and we needed that to be visible so but why does he look like that so originally he was supposed to be like you he's autumn he's supposed to be older than spring and he's the he was kind of the old wise master that shows her the way but there were some story changes along the way the character didn't quite fit anymore so we changed him but the design still stayed so so even when we even had like a little idea of a puppy version of him in an opening but like we expect like experimented more with the fur and made this eyes overall more visible because we really needed that for that extra level of expression later on but there was another problem when let's just quickly go back so his body proportions were originally like a bit more realistic and since we switched the idea back to like okay let's do her hair grooming and you saw the hair of spring like it looks fairly realistic so it was important to still kind of get that stylization from this dog character which was hard to do so so we kind of tried to exaggerate his proportions just make his head pretty big related to his body like push it as much as we can because he needed to match spring and stylization but he almost couldn't walk anymore and that's kind of visible like if you see the underlying body the balance is kind of tricky to do but it's it's way more forgiving once you see it once you have that big layer of fur on top but yeah so once we figured the body out where Andy started to get into the hair grooming get like and it's not done yet this is like everything is working progress of course so also you notice like the hair had to become a bit more gray like it makes him it makes him look a bit more older like he's supposed to but it also makes him actually look visible again the later renders especially like in the dark forest and we can't see him unless he's like if he's like completely black then where's the dog so everything looks good right well well once we have like a little animation once we see him emotion in motion it's the simulated the the MU the simulated hair like without moving it movement it kind of looks odd so this is still currently like a problem and progress so he could it could stay this way that he like the hair stays like mostly stagnant but Andy managed to make like a smart Rick for for simulation like semi simulation animation for her hair so hopefully we can spend some extra more time on his forget also some movement in there and make it look even more awesome we'll see but this is the dog that we ended up with in the film currently and since I already showed this walk cycle that's just straight go back into animation so Pablo take it away hello I'm an animator the other part of the animation team of two yes mainly on my part I did a lot of things in the doing this orphan but I was in charge of defining autumns animation style so yeah that's autumn Howard Julian said already and he's he's the dog that is going with the spring along his journey and yeah he sees a sidekick and they're really cute and handsome and whatever so I would like to talk a little bit about Julian topic of the pollution of the character but I would like to talk about the animation point of view or of that evolution and while we decide to go for the ice basically so here we have a sketch of the B that is already and you saw that it's a trillion slice and yet we tried to work with this in the earliest stages so we tried to go around they not having eyes and we try to have like like the decisions like animation decisions they were more based on body language so basically he was trying to do everything through moving the body with the ears movie the mouth size but we encounter tons of problems when the shots that were that kind of close because we couldn't move the body because I was the head was moving too much so we use like a small shield and ear position but the mouth also is not like simple mouth that you can have a smile you can have sad face so we decided to put eyes and there is something that's happened that when you have eyes in the character you instantly connect with the character so that make us open a wide of range of emotions that we could add to him and also we could make him more cute and more appealing so we look a lot of dog reference and there is something that dogs has that is they have they have a lot of control on the eyebrows and on the eyes so they feel really expressive not like cuts that they are I mean no no no so after studying a lot of expressions a lot of anatomy we decided to check the ears also like we wanted to have every detail under control we wanted to know how ears work because they are also really expressive and they are also part of the personality of the dogs so taking all this information we decide to make a facial library this little facial library is really important because it's going to help us to define how is autumn and more important it's going to help us to be constant during all the process so like this he alta can take the dog and it's all it's going to be always autumn it's not going to be autumn by healty and it's not going to be autumn by Paulo when I animate it so it's going to be autumn by everybody because it's autumn so that's really important to have a consistency and all the sorts that will look the same and it's not going to be a bunch of different representation of the animator order of the difference animators so later we did the full version of like render with fur and everything and yeah this is a in like improving like constant improving process because every time that we find a new expression that is good and we like it and we agree we put in the live right so it's like a ongoing and bigger library every time during the day not the process basically well as Gina said before autumn also made a evolution in the role that he had in the in the story beginning he was a master of spring but we encountered since the early storyboards and layouts some problems with a being a bit annoying because we don't have any dialogue so we don't have fingers we don't have hands we didn't have eyes so he had to kind of guide the spring during the first part of the movie and it was really difficult to do that so we decided to make change in this personality we decided to take away the extra intelligence we gave him we make him dumber and we make him a dog that he is going to do dog things he's going to fetch a mistake pee in a tree or stuff that dogs do so I would like to show a sample example of how autumn was before and you can see how he's all the time barking or making noises and it's something that it was really distracting and something that we were not looking for so as you can see it's awesome animated playing slide in there is no Sun a well supposed to be barking all the time saying like wow come here I laid that is oh look at this stuff and later his oh wow let's go Wow let's go so yeah they stood out what something that we didn't wanted that because we win then we end up having a lot of barking and it was really distracting so [Music] we have to do an all the process that we knew already how awesome it was going to be a dog we decide to tackle all the body mechanics and how he is going to move and define an animation style so then it was something that it was kind of clear since the beginning he was going to be a dog he was going to act like a dog he is no he wasn't going to stand up he was not going to be doing pointing he was not going to talk so he's a dog so and in the range of and we decide to be in the range of like healthy say they are they in the reality we try to bleed it out in more stylish possible way because also may be in so realistic it was a bit boring so we decided to again more Anatomy check how master works how joints work we made it we took a lot of information and big library to define how a real dog do the things later be able to Estill Isis as we as we wanted so we study also a lot of dog movements like there are the different the different ones that you have that they are like we decide to get three main ones for him they are the throat they run and the work they are the basic ones as we were going to flesh out and from there get and all the speed that we wanted how much he should walk and the distance and all this stuff so let's start with the throat cycle I got there is a first video that you saw the trot trot cycle so that's a trot and that is like some letters below it so I will try to explain that as clear as possible because it's a really technical process even if it doesn't look like that so the letters the thing that the represent is like the time that each feed is encountered with the floor okay I made this frame by frame so that's maybe it's going to help basically is example a quadruped it has four legs so is in this process we can in this throat we can in mind that it is like one vibrating in the front and all the bypass I know the pipette in the back so two person one here another one here and the throat basically is like if they are jogging okay but the one in the back is having the opposite leg at the opposite leg in front that the one enough in the front so basically see if the front one start with the left to the front the battle in the back start with the right so like this is how they balance and how they get this kind of jogging state I will explain it but it's bit complicated then I guess you can see it so I guess it's time to move on to the next one the run cycle so the concept is the same you have the letters pumping up and this is a faster cycle we have like the throat it was like something in between and later we'll see the work is the slowest one and this is well of course this one is the faster than the one the one that is take is covering more distance so we want we want to yeah make him run so we use these kind of cycles the same like you can see like is having some some legs in the in contact and other ones but there is a that is the second frame is really important is the one that it doesn't have any any feet in contact with the floor it's like a flying position so basically this is like what is make difference make the difference with the other world cycles so yeah I know that it's really complex and everything but it animation is complex so it looks that is we are just moving stuff but it's actually really technical and there is a lot of information that we have to gather before we move on to animate anything and some final is the walk as you can see this slow it down it's Lois cycle and to say that these cycles are we define them like this because we were feeling that it was what it was going with autumn in the style but you can also like for example the walk you can speed it up and you can slow it down but there's moment when you speed it up that is it's going to look out of context and then you will need to make a transition to the trot because dogs they do it like this so they just not like run faster so fast I mean work faster fast fast the thing that they walk and there is a moment that they trot and there is a moment that they run so also you have to yeah there is there is a sort that we have to make that transition and after knowing how they are going to move we decide to go to a more complex animations so here's a combine of it's a broken of some of the body mechanics combined and also adding some attitude so we decide also to have a different bit of different animation style than spring this is more realistic and we try to make him more snappy in cartoony like this we could he can be more like a comical relief from all the internal struggle of spring so we wanted like when you see autumn you can have a smile on your face at least yeah so yeah after we decide we made all the tests we have already like some desire like final sorts in production we find we found already our the animation style we are happy with that and yeah that's how it's animated now so yeah we like we defined like ear floppiness like how tails moving and that's the other last shot I did and we are really happy with this animation style and yeah now that is define almost all the hard work is done so yeah work but part of the work is done and now just we have to animate what is left yep so I think Julian is about to take over oh yeah so yeah at this point I'm just ricocheting back on the stage so so let's go back to the original concept art one more time because there's actually one part still missing that I want to talk about and also use it as a bit of a like a springboard to get into more two-point-eight so we haven't really talked about prop design yet and what better prop to talk about a then the one that spring has in our hands all the time the most important thing for kind of magical shepherd staff so let's talk about this one a bit so this one's pretty significant for the character and of course it went over some changes over time as well this is the first sculpt test I did and one problem we figured out early is it doesn't really resemble anything familiar like if you look at the original concept alright it looks amazing but what is it actually like so it looks rather unnatural and we want like I wanted to experiment a bit further and find something a bit more grounded so we also had also like there were a lot of changes on on top of that so we had to change a bit of the thickness because spring has tiny girl hands so how didhow supposed to hold that thing but also the big top part like we were making early animation tests and she was just walking and she was constantly in danger of hitting her head with that thing so also there was an animation part in hee Altice part where she was kind of resting it on her shoulder and like that had to be faked as as hell so so we kind of tried out to improve these these problems that we had like get the kinks worked out so this is kind of what we ended up with in terms of the model so another change is like there were these dangling bolts on the side and we just removed them like there were they had a purpose originally and but they would just be constantly distracting and a huge hassle for the animation department so they had to be removed and the design I really ended up latching on to that I found was bonsai trees because you can grow them in all kinds of shapes and sizes like they look really interesting and I really liked the design aesthetic and they generally have something very smooth and youthful to them there and you can grow them in all kinds of shapes in it and they still look pretty much alive and this all sounded pretty pretty good for like something that's kind kind of supposed to be an extension of the main character spring so we like I went back into like the like materials and we made some more design changes also we decided at some point okay there supposed to be more leaves on them we're still tying with the idea of having like one or two leaves on there the entire time but at some point you can tell it's supposed to grow into something so experiment well experimented more with the materials and the interesting part is at this point we were already in two point eight territory so something that I really wanted to try out experimenting with is the new look deaf view so this is kind of like a replacement for the old material view so it completely runs with Eevee it's kind of a simplified version and it's really easy to do materials in there it's kind of a like a fast real-time version of cycles so I've tried our texturing and I it worked really well the performance was much better it looked much better and so how far can i push this so I tried experimenting for more like what if I enable all the modifiers stacks and it just started painting on top and it basically did nothing to the performance so holy okay what is going on here how far can I go with this so I tried out okay how does it look in comparison to cycles and overall with like the more changes were made to the e V engine to support more notes the more faithful the representation representation of e V is comparable comparable two cycles and so I just started making all of the prop materials first an e V and this was really useful it was also very fun to play around with it's very handy to just do all the proper environment assets kind of the early also looked development in evey and it's like a real-time viewport at your fingertips so why would you not use it but it's not it wasn't just used for the for the prompts it was also used for the third character that we kind of left out so far and that's this guy so he's called the Alpha I can't go much into specifics we're already going over time so he she it is also more involved in the second half of the film so we don't have a lot of material yet so I'm just going to put all that on this screen so a lot of his later sculpting process whole material workflow look development that was all in 2.8 and using Eevee extensively and so take this as a little teaser for more to come but if you're like once the movie is done and we're back here next year I can unpack this whole rabbit hole but if you're really interested like there's a whole lot of breakdowns work-in-progress material and everything on the cloud so support the blender cloud it's worth every cent support open movies we're really really all the time someone gonna be blazing through this so as you saw we had a big evolution in the characters and that was all driven by the story development and as you can see here this was one of the middle sections of the pre-production where we we were trying to do really fast iterations of the of the story development we we experimented earlier on with all kinds of tools graph drawing and treati based on what they David did and then drawing in grease pencil but at some point the technology was just getting into the way so we decided as a communication tool between us and the team we we we have to talk about this so I just slap it on a wall and and just draw it really really bad and that changed the face of the whole story so originally it became really really really calm congruent and long so eight and a half minutes and we managed to cut that down to what you see on the top here the sex the the six minutes and of course as you add more animation and more detail into it it gets longer so currently we're at 7 minutes and 10 seconds here is just a little sneak peek of how that whole thing kind of lines up so at the bottom you can see what we currently have it's not perfect it's not done yet full of errors and everything and on the top you can see a later layout and here you can see the really crappy posted version and as we're going through this we're slowly adding more definition to each shot and hopefully we really will be able to make this world come alive and that's another issue that we can't talk about it's media we don't have any more time about it so we had to make lots of things most of these things are done by that guy Julian so he might tree is made everything we a my trees I see kills plants rocks and all that kind of stuff to bring the world to life and we kind of start from the layout and then we keep on adding detail and shading definition and we add more more more things more environment elements to really bring the world to life and some point some kind of particle plant pass kicks into life and we add more grass and weed and leaves and it's supposed to be this really frozen forest and also a huge part of that is also lighting so this is kind of the final ish part of this shot well there's no more time okay I'm we're doing this in 2.8 where as we said we can't just emphasize it big enough so we benefit from a lot of the stuff that happened in 2.8 so collections are just a lifesaver because all the things we have to rake before into the set whereas we're using linked groups and that kind of stuff we can now do with just visibilities visibilities and nested collections which is like mind-blowing because you get all these kind of possibilities and that really when the the code Quest started we we had all these sets of new tools that really that really just helped rethinking of how we make movies in blender at the current stage we're kind of almost halfway through production we're gonna have four more months of work to go so wish us luck that we make it this amazing team couldn't work of course without the amazing team at the blender studio ton francesco and of course thanks to all the developers in the blender code Quest who just were making this version of blender that we use so fast and so workable and they're so open to criticism and our whining at all kinds of hours so just to sum it up all of this all of what you just saw you can find another blender cloud pays our bills and if you are curious about how we make things we're gonna we're uploading every week every part of the process that we're making so you can watch this thing happen live as we make it and you can discover our mistakes and learn with us along the way that's just a little sneak peek the times over thank you very much for your attention thank you guys you you you

Channel: Blender

Views: 181,172

Rating: 4.9638824 out of 5

Keywords: amsterdam, grease pencil, blender 3d, b3d, lightning talk, render, addon, Blender Conference, presentation, bcon18, blender, 2d, cycles, de balie, animation, eevee, conference, suzanne awards

Id: U8PU9fuoKPY

Length: 69min 32sec (4172 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 04 2018