I’m in Amsterdam right now, working on the Durian project titled ‘Sintel’. You can of course follow our progress on the short movie here: http://durian.blender.org The movie is progressing well in the last few weeks. Some big news are going to be annonced on the blog over there this week. So make sure you give it a look everyday!

On other news, Olympic Games started in my home country Canada. I hope everyone is having a good time following their country progress there What does olympic have to do with this blog you ask? Well, Olympic games are associated with alot of people watching it, so obviously company take the opportunity to create ads for them! At the studio where I work in Montreal ( www.deshed.com ), we created a serie of ads for the company Rona who sponsored the Olympic in Vancouver by providing construction materials and worker to build the different venues.

You can view the ads at this website: www.2010vancouver.rona.ca

The studio did the first one that plays when the website open (codenamed ‘Rona Tape’) and as for myself, I mostly worked on the two ads in the ‘Venues’ section of the website.  I hope you’ll enjoy them

Have a nice Olympic games time!

Js.

Last week we finished our third project at school. By ‘us’, I mean myself (Jean-Sébastien Guillemette) and two other student at the NAD Centre in Montréal (www.centrenad.com) that aren’t part of Montage Studio. I was in charge of some modelling (building, alienship, artillery canon

It was an intense 6 week of production.  Some stuff still need to be done on it, but we had  to move on to another project. I’ll come back to it in a few week just to tweak a few things here and there including the lighting, motionblur and a few color correct. Oh and of course add sounds to it! But well, I wanted to show you guys

(make sure to follow the link to see it in hd on vimeo!)

Demo 03 – Centre NAD from Js Guillemette on Vimeo.

Hope you like it!

Js Guillemette

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Hand Turkey Studios is going to allow live public access to our production as we compete this coming weekend (17-19 July) in this year’s 48 Hour Film Project in Richmond, Virginia. We assembled a team and competed last year with the ambitious goal of completing an animation in Blender as our submitted work.

Due to some technical difficulties last year (discussed in more detail in a presentation at the 2008 Blender Conference), we missed the deadline. However, the entire international team of talent from last year (plus some new additions!) has returned to do it again! And we’re amped to make this thing awesome.

As part of that goal, we are allowing public access to our work environment during the weekend of our production. Since our team is located throughout the world, we collaborate on our project through the Internet. We’ve  opened some windows to that process so anyone can follow along as we make our animated short… four of them, to be exact:

* The Hand Turkey 48 Hour Film Project Wiki – This is our central collaborative tool. Brainstorms, sketches, designs, task lists and workflow descriptions all live here. Check out the Recent changes page to see the latest updates.

* #ht48hfp on freenode – We use IRC as our main means of real-time communication. If you have a preferred IRC client (Chatzilla, mIRC, Xchat, etc.), point it to the #ht48hfp channel on freenode.net. If you don’t have a client, you can use freenode’s web interface.

* Follow us on Twitter – The entire team has access to update that account, so any of us can let you know what’s going on. (http://www.twitter.com/handturkey48)

* Streaming webcam footage – We are actually going to stream footage from webcams at the locations of some of our international team members so you can watch the craziness that ensues. We’re still hammering out the kinks on this, but we’ll have a direct link set up by Friday.

That’s it! Come watch us slave away this weekend and wish us luck!

Related/Relevant links:
- Project wiki
- Blender Conference presentation
- Richmond 48 Hour Film Project

I’m finishing my studies at the “National Animation and Design Centre” in Montréal and I just wanted to share with you guys two short films I’ve been working on while I was at the school. I’m actually working on a third short short film (30sec) and then another special project I’ll present later in August

These projects were rendered using Softimage|XSI 7.01 but quite a few things were made in Blender.  For ‘ClockWise’, I had to produce my models quite fast..and Blender seemed the way to go for me so most of the desk stuff was made in Blender.  As for the 2nd video, titled ‘Pardon’, we had to find a way to make the paint appear on the ground and on the different object.  The production time was quite short, 6 weeks, so I brought back Blender and I used its Fluid Simulator to generate liquid-like white matte that I would use on the UVs of my model in XSI to indicate where the paint would show up.  We obviously used alot of compositing for the whole thing, and all of it was done in Fusion 5.3

So here we go:
Clock Wise
My Role on the production: Everything

ClockWise from Js Guillemette on Vimeo.

And in 2nd,
Pardon
My Role: Modelling, Lighting, Matte Artist, Compositing, all around generalist
Team: Xavier Drapeau Mayer (Texture Artist, Modelling, Compositing), Julie Le Roy (Rigging, Animation, Painting, Character modelling)

Pardon from Js Guillemette on Vimeo.

I hope you liked the videos! (Don’t forget to watch the 2nd one with your speaker on to hear the beautiful music of Derek McTavish)

Js Guillemette.

We hope you are all having a great holiday time, aswell as a joyful new year’s eve!

There is a few thing I want to talk about today.  I’ve been working with one of our client recently. It’s a society in Montréal that strives to give space, money and equipment to artists who creates art related to technology. They call themselves the society for technological art (Société des arts technologiques).  We worked with them previously on the ‘Tomb Raider fashion show’ back in october/november.

Now two of their employees are starting to work on a project to devellop a tool they’ve been using for a few years but never to this extent.  They want to create a CGI short movie that is completly immersive. Immersive how you’ll ask? Simple, they want to create a completly CGI short movie that will be projected in a dome. Yep, a full 360 degrees horizontal (maybe even more..) and 180degrees vertical dome.  I’m sure most of you are aware of the difficulty (and quantity of work) such a short movie can bring.  But it’s an amazing challenge.  For now, I’ve only been working as a consultant on the 3d side of thing, and how Blender could be the solution to their logistic/money problems.

We’ve been doing a few rendering test, and we now have a pretty solid way of rendering a scene into a ‘half-sphere’ that can be projected into their dome.  We used a pretty similar technic to what the Planetarium of Weber state university are using (see Blendernation post here).  Meaning, having a camera looking directly at the top of a fully reflective sphere (which, obviously reflect the whole envrionnement).  I’ve done some modification to their setup since it caused some problems. As a matter of fact, their setup use an uv sphere which has a single vertex at the top (which create quite a few triangles).  Since we we will be rendering is very high-def (something along the lines of 2000×2000), I wanted the reflective sphere to be as ‘perfect’ as possible. Using subdivision surface, the triangle obviously didn’t deform well and were distorting the reflection, so I had to change the sphere to a full quad surface. Anyway, long story short, we now have a system that works.

But our client have bigger ambition. Bringing their immersive dome to the real-time realm is one of them.  They’d love to be able to setup a scene in the Blender Game Engine, insert an ‘hemispheric’ camera, press ‘p’ and play their game/archiviz/etc.  in their dome.  We’re currently working with Dalai Felinto to devellop a simple way to generate real-time environment map and use a script to render it out in the format we need for the dome.

This is a short term solution tho. For the long run, we would LOVE (note the emphasis here..) to have a true ‘camera’ object that ‘film’ the scene in an hemispheric kind of way.  I’ve prepared a .blend to show what I mean.  I definitly know nothing about coding work, and I’m sure this involve some pretty deep coding in Blender, but if anyone have any idea how this can be done. Make sure to drop me an email to jsguillemette [at] montagestudio.org

Here”s the .blend:  http://www.montagestudio.org/Ecks/SAT/360CameraDome_idea.blend

My client is of course willing to pay for the work that would be done.  So if you read this, and you’re a coder, and know how it can be done. Email me first, and we will listen to the budget you need to devellop such a tool.

Js.

First of all, let’s all wish a huge happy birthday to our coworker & friend Ben Dansie! Well to be honest, his birthday is ‘tomorrow’…but he’s so far away on the other side of the planet that, as of his time, he is now 23 years old! Not quite a quarter of century, but already such an amazing artist. We wish you an happy birthday Ben!!

On a more serious (but still fun!) note, I’ve started giving Blender workshop/classes at the ‘Société des arts technologiques’ (Society for technological arts) in Montréal. I gave my first class on last Saturday and everyone seems to have enjoyed the class quite alot! It was a very basic class about blender. I lead them through the interface, explaining why stuff works like this or that in the Blender world. The classes are obviously given in French, but if enough english speaking people register, there is a possibility that I could give the class at another time in english! So if you live near Montréal and would like to attend the classes, make sure to go on this website and check out the schedules for the next one!

http://sat.qc.ca/post.php?id=8&post_id=1375〈=fr

Here’s the schedule as of now:
Blender 1 – Blender basic- December 6th 2008 (already given)
Blender 2a – Modelling tools preview (3h class) – December 18th 2008
Blender 2b – advance Modelling (6h class) – December 21st 2008
Blender 3 – Animation & Shading – January 2009

I’ve also been working on a short movie for school. Well the pre-production is done (I’m finishing the animatic as of now), and I’ll be starting the real production by next week. The title of the short movie is ‘Escape Velocity’ and it’s the story of an Office Worker who try to secape his desesperate and sad situation. Here are two renders of WIP elements of the short movie. I started the character this morning and the car/moto is mostly a doodle of what the end product will be!

Stay tuned for updates!

Js.

On to business.

The latest large job we worked on was to create a digital catwalk model, dress them in 10 pre-designed outfits, rig and then animate them. Easily the largest job I’ve worked on so far. I have to say it was a lot of fun, particularly when answering the question ‘What did you get up to on the weekend?” with “Modelling for a fashion parade.” I helped with modelling the outfits a bit, but my main tasks in the three person pipeline of sorts was the rigging and animation.

We used a character that I have been working on for quite some time as the model and were quite fortunate that she more or less matched the description of the clients. This saved us a lot of time and effectively saved the clients money too. (I’m working on a default male character too, more on that in a bit.)

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=117247 – The main thread for the character, including the rigged .blend for download. Will post the file here directly when she is deemed ‘finished’ for a full public release.

With that in mind, we jumped straight to modelling the outfits around the character and the rig itself held up quite well using ‘bone heat weight’ with the exception of hips and shoulders which I went back and manually painted for the outfits. One thing that the other two don’t even know yet is that because I sent the default unclothed model to them in a pose different to the default rigged T-pose, I had to manually edit the clothes back into a T-pose before they would rig properly. Being my fault in the first place, I just chugged along with the work. I ended up cheating a bit for time reasons with the rigging by adding a bone or two to some outfits around the hips where I could just ‘pull’ parts of the outfit out at certain frames to avoid making shape keys and other time intensive rigging. Also, in many cases I deleted out the torso part of the character mesh under the clothes to avoid overlap. Although the character mesh itself has many shape keys, deleting faces wasn’t a problem in Blender. It is when you go to add them that it usually kicks up a fuss.

Animation. I have some animation experience, but it would be fair to say I am still learning. Fortunately, I have a copy of ‘The Mancandy FAQ’ which as it turned out proved crucial in finishing this project on time. (No real room for extension when the Fashion Show has a set date.) The system I had in the end was one large .blend file with 10 identical paths on layers, with one outfit per layer. The camera would follow a separate set of keyframes that were the same for each outfit/segment. The rigged clothed character would then go through one of 5 intro animations (swimming/crawling/etc as requested by the client) a transition animation into the walkcycle and then the walk cycle. The walk was constrained to the path for direction and timing of movement.

I was pretty proud of getting it all to work at the time.

This large file (180mb) compressed quite well (down to 20mb I think) which I sent to JS to render. It has given us a fair bit to think of in terms of an international 3 person pipeline for larger projects, but for now we are all glad it worked.

Where to next?

Well, there are a few various smaller things we are keeping busy with, but one I am quite excited about personally is the chance to test some webcam based motion capture software. This is where my male character comes in to play.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=141638 – WIP thread.

Having a ‘default’ female character who was rigged and textured came very much in handy, so I figured a male counterpart would also provide at least a good starting point for similar future projects. I’ve already been able to implement a few things that are a little late to work into my female character without starting from scratch. For starters, he will mainly be rigged using a mesh deform cage, which will simplify many things and also allow me to make changes to the modelling without affecting the rigging.

There is a reasonable amount to see in the thread already if you are interested, including rendered motion capture tests, a lighting setup for download and some still renders.

Cheers,
Ben.

well it’s been a while I wrote anything on our blog. We’ve been really busy lately with several things. First off, let me answer to the few people who emailed me about the Airship modelling timelapse serie. No it’s not finished, I still have alot of recorded session I need to edit together and upload. I blame the lack of free time for this little delay. The next video should be up by next week.

So why have we been so busy you ask? Let’s see!

First off, we had the joy of working on a few contracts. Yep, our first official ’studio’ contracts.  No we didn’t work on some blockbuster movie, but still, we had some fun. We had two contracts with IMS productions which produce films for tv. We worked on some steampunk frames for a documentary so they could fit their video in, and also did (Jonathan did) an very cool logo animation for one of the client of IMS prod. 

Then, we were approached by another company about doing the intro anim for a documentary about the missile defense system of the USA.  Unfortunatly, they decided to go with another studio, but we had some fun doing tests with missile entering atmosphere. Here’s a few ‘test’ shot that were in no way finals:

And a very crappy video test showing the fire trail test. This was done with a static background, and the warhead is moving too slow. But it was really just to test out the fire effect –>VIDEO Here<–

We had another quite (very) interesting project. Ben will do a more complete rundown on that special project in the next days, since he is the one who had the pleasure to make the biggest part of the project.

In fact, the production for that project happenned at the end of October…right when I was in Europe for the Blender Conference. So the two other guys were working like monkeys to get the stuff done, while I was enjoying Paris & Amsterdam. Ah life is hard!

Talking of the conference, I was really really proud to find out that my short movie, “Tape-à-l’oeil” was nominated in the category ‘Best designed short film’ of the Suzanne award festival over there. It didn’t win, but it really surprised me it got nominated! It was a great time! If you didn’t see it yet, you can look in our animation section on our website, or simply look under this paragraph. I embedded the video from aniboom, since I entered it in their animation contest!

Watch more cool animation and creative cartoons at aniBoom

On a side note, I’m currently busy studying VFX at the NAD centre in Montréal. I should have a few projects to share with you guys in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned!

Js.