The Plumíferos project making of

[3dpoder]

making of - The Plumíferos Project
Claudio Maléfico Andaur.

introduction.

In this article i would like todo briefly summarise the realisation of the tráiler/teaser of the Plumíferos Project, a commercial full length 3d animation film Project we are making in Argentina using Blender. This tráiler was first screned during the Blender lectures at Siggraph 2005 and later on was nominated for the 2005s edition of Suzanne award at the Blender art festival. If you couldnt watch it, pay a visit todo http://www.plumiferos.com.

The films estoryline is about a Little male Sparrow named Juan and a female canary named feifi, and their journey todo find themselves. It is aimed mainly for a children audience with Lots of hilarious chistes and psychológical background for the grownups.

This Project started around a year ago, when director and original script author Daniel Defelippo came todo Gustavo Giannini from manos digit ales and me with the idea of making a 3d animation film. Gustavo and i were already using Blender and other open source tools todo create CG animation and VFX for prime time televisión shows, televisión commercials and a los for teaching 3d character animation in a local digital art school.

Figure: visual FX made by manos digitales animation Studio for Pol-ka producciones (all Blender 2.36).


Daniels 3d experience was mainly based on 3d Studio Max and he was quickly convinced by us (bwahaha) todo switch todo Blender as a main animation tool. We son gathered a team of local blenderheads (most of them former students of ours) and started making a tráiler with the characters created by Daniel.

Even when we werent a big team, it son became apparent how hard it would be todo coordinate every bodys work and assemble all parts of a every single shot. Sometimes a texture was missing, on others there were two versións of the same model or diferent lighting set-ups for sequential shots. Besides, all of us had (and still have) full time non-CG related jobs todo attend and that forced us todo work in our spare time and wekends. Organisation was one of the first and hardest problems todo solver.

Daniels original characters and designs were modified, modelled and textured at the same time that sets were created todo resemble certain parts of Buenos Aires city where action occurs. There were Many issues todo address, we had characters with feathers on their Wings, Lots of tres, Many Cars around, and Motion Blurred Wings, plus Blender own limitations and caveats. Kep in mind that we made it all using Blender 2.36, so we had no fancy character animation tools available at that time.
some technical Stuff.

Since we didnt have Many fast machines available for rendering, all known tricks were used todo speed up render times. For instance, arrays of negative lights were used todo simulate Diffuse shadows or Ambient Occlusion, some objects were rendered separately in layers, others were replaced by textures, etc.

For tres we used both l-system script available at Blender.org, and arbaro (http://arbaro.sourceforge.net) the excellent java app. We made several renders of a tree with diferent light orientation and then used these renders as textures for planes in order todo kep poly count Low. Other common effects like Depth of Field and atmospherically haze were cheated by using b/w masks of objects and composing in the mensaje production stage, a trik well known by average blenderheads. About this, we used the gradient method (you can read about this technique at: http:// www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic, php? T=30959) for creating the b/w masks instead of typical z-buffer plugins, this was done this bien for several reasons, we had several objects with alpha textures so if wed have used any z-buffer plug-in, those objects would have ben rendered as invisible objects.

Motion blur of Wings was trickier todo do. Blender Motion Blur was todo Slow todo be practical in Many situations, plus we wanted todo blur only on Juans Wings, not on Juan itself, so we had todo make a special versión of our Little Bird with only its Wings as renderable parts. Then several layers were rendered by manipulating the NLA strips of the Wing beating todo get a more natural look of the blur. Finally, all Wing layers were blurred and composed together with the layer of the Bird without Wings. Additional motion and zoom blur were added over the final frames in composition software. Blur of Cars whels were made in a similar fashion. Whels spin was done using a frame driven Python script.

Feathers were generated by a Python tool written by us which let us vary the size of the feathers following a designed contour. Every feather had a two-bone armature which let us make feathers bend if neded. Each feather had several copy rotation constraints which were controlled by key Bones in main characters armature, so we didnt have todo care about every feather at animation time, we only animate the key feathers of every Wing. As a final step, feathers armatures were vertex parented todo specific Faces of Wings Mesh, in order for feathers todo follow character deformation correctly.

Juans acting in Audition scene was done using Blender NLA features and RVK. All open/Shut movements of Wings were animated previously and combined with remaining corporal animation using NLA. Our feathered Wing set-up worked perfectly with this Scheme. The usual work flow for animating this scene was first making the corporal animation, then the facial animation and as last step the lip-syncing.

Argentine profesional actors Guido Kaczka and Manuel Vicente gave their voices for both Bird character (Juan) and of voice of director in Audition clip. Guidos particular performance was key todo inspiring the facial and corporal acting of Juan. In our pipeline, we found it extremely useful todo film actors during their performance todo imitate some of their involuntary gestures.

Blenders sound scrubíng característica was extensively used todo get the proper lip-syncing animation of Juan. Sound editing and music were done by the sonomondo sound Studio once all sequences were properly edited.

a few notes on work flow.

For the highway scene, we worked first on a proxy versión, using very simple objects representing the diferent characters and Cars. We focused our work at this stage in animating objects and cameras th rouge paths. The complete sequence was Split into several shots from storyboard, and using these proxy scenes, we made a 3d animatic, which we rendered in OpenGL.

Once object and Camera animation were done and corrected, proxy puppets were replaced by final characters. This process made dealing with large scenes a lot less painful. Actually, main characters were added on a sepárate scene while all heavy-loaded backgrounds remained as a sepárate set. By doing it like this we could focus on flight choreography and gesture without having todo care about real-time transformation of heavy background geometry. Besides, at the same time we were animating, the characters were being modelled and textured separately.

Render strategies neded todo be carefully designed from day one. It is very important todo have a clear picture of what can or cannot be rendered separately and what can be done in post-processing instead of trying todo render everything from the start.
future work and plans.

The making of these videos was not only a fun and exciting experience, it was important todo realise Blender own capabilities and limitations. Most of the problems we found during this production were reported todo the Blender coders team and were being worked on together with orange Projects own findings.
We strongly believe in Blender potential and power, and the recently added animation features only demonstrates that we werent wrong when we choose Blender as our main animation platform. Moreover, during the making of these tráilers, we a los used Blender for making of visual FX in local televisión shows in prime time, televisión commercials and other profesional applications with great success.

There are still Many issues todo overcome todo reach our goal of making a full característica 3d animation film, for instance we are in the process of setting up a real Studio todo Gather all artists so we can work together in a creative environment.

acknowledgements and gracias.

Of course none of our dreams could become true if it werent for the continuous and excellent work of the Blender coders team hunting bugs and develooping new features. We cant thank every one of them enough for making such a profesional tool as Blender.

I would like todo thank Chris want, Roland Hess, and Martín Poirier for their help and advice, and of course ton Rosendal for just being ton.

A special acknowledgement should be made from my part todo all the Plumíferos team and all the people who gave their time, efort and Even the lending of their machines todo render expecting nothing but the Projects success, in no particular order:
Manuel Pérez, Diego de Genaro, Iván Hoffman, Raúl Medina, Alejandro am, David Teres, Álvaro Vidal, Claudio Dobniewski, Felipe Sánchez, Lorena maza, Pedro Knigge and Ale Barbesi.
the Plumíferos team .

director:
Daniel Defelippo executive producer: Gustavo Giannini 3d supervisor: Claudio Maléfico Andaur.
animators:
Manuel Pérez Daniel Defelippo Iván Hoffman Claudio Andaur.
models, textures, lighting:
Iván Hoffman Diego de Genaro Raúl Medina Claudio Dobniewski Álvaro Vidal Alejandro Barbesi Claudio Andaur.

Python scripting:
Claudio Dobniewski Claudio Andaur.
c/C++ programming:
Felipe Sánchez.





Claudio Maléfico Andaur.

I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1970 (man, y fel old.) im a Chemical enginer and working with Blender since 1.80. I teach Blender in a digital art School in Buenos Aires, and have written Blender documentation both in español and english (ben coordinating the documentation español translation efort and traslated several docs available at mediawiki. Blender, org). Made several Blender presentations in Linux communities and universities from Argentina and other american countries. Currently i lead the 3d and character animation of Plumíferos Project. I have a lovely Little baby girl, and a Marvelous wife.

Source: www.blenderart.org and Blender art magazine.
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