Kickoff Workshop: Day 5

by - 2012/03/09 54 Comments Production

BAM! Here we are, the finished kickoff film, only 5 days after starting.

Is it perfect? Nooooooo- we’d tweak this thing forever if we could- but we finished all the big stuff, and made a short film!

Today was a day of last minute tweaks and battling the render farm. At one point we had every computer in the place up and running rendering shots, along with the render farm. I suspect we would have been rendering on folk’s cellphones if we could.

Francesco is going to be cleaning up the SVN database this weekend, and we’ll be putting that all up for all of you to browse! The models and everything we made will be going up then as well.

We’re also going to be rendering a full HD version of this thing over the weekend. We ran into deadlines (as can happen! When render farms! Are! On fire!)- so some of this stuff is only 50% full res (nothing you’d miss on YouTube, probably :P). But yeah, the “Official Artist’s Version” is coming early next week.

And with that- it is time for dinner! And Mango proper! Because, just again, this isn’t Mango! It’s a short kickoff project to test the pipeline and get to know each other and figure out what needs to be worked on! And pester Sergey with requests! 

  1. andy says:

    congratulations, well done! looks like you had a lot of fun making it. :)
    .andy

  2. Gianmichele says:

    It’s really nice guys. When you have time do a report on what has worked well and what you might consider a roadblock with a bigger project like Mango.

  3. Anonymous says:

    Awesome! :D

  4. QuentinG says:

    Looks great guys! Awesome result for only five days of work ! Really loved the last shot, the window looks really cool !

  5. Aaron says:

    You had a fire in the render farm? Oh my! I hope it’s easily and quickly sorted for you guys.

    Great work on the video guys! I’m very impressed with what you’ve managed to do in such a small amount of time. Now go have your beers, safe in the knowledge you’ve done a good week’s work! ;)

    P.S.
    Hope they having been pestering you too much Sergey! :P

  6. AbidingDude says:

    You guys are seriously talented. And I’m so glad to be part of the Blender community and hope you reach your pre-sale goal soon. C’mon people, let’s keep those pre-sales coming!

  7. CT. da'Bomb says:

    the video doesn’t show up in my browser and the link doesn’t link either….
    BUT THE VIDEO IS AWESOME!!!!

  8. Its Amazing…
    I loved the last shot, Its was really flaw less output…
    The other shots especially the Wall explode was not satisfied. but still it was cool..
    Now waiting for the Official Artist’s Version of it…
    I am sure it will be very good..

    Ahhh now waiting for the wall explosion, Robot, Rigging, Texturing, window explosion(glass explode) tutorials etc etc…

  9. Christoph Pöhler aka Dracio says:

    Very Cool… I am very teased…. and you spoild nothig :D

    • Christoph Pöhler aka Dracio says:

      Thinking about it
      creating 3D matter to realdy….
      it will be an intersing googel summer off code…

  10. Wray Bowling says:

    This is the kind of energy I’ve been waiting for in the Blender community for a long long time. I’m inspired. :D

  11. Tycho says:

    This is just amassing. The compositing is just perfect! Great tracking ! Thank sergey.
    Just a question : are you using durian renderfarm. Or perhaps orange or peach ones since Cycle makes it burn :)
    So is it the new mango renderfarm ? what have you got in there ?

  12. hassan yola says:

    the video of day 5 kickoff is so awesome, awesome and awesome i like that so much thank guys your amezing !

  13. Cessen says:

    That’s awesome! Great work guys! :-D

  14. Roundabout says:

    Great work guys, congratulations!

  15. J. says:

    Waaaaaaaaaaay too silly! :D

  16. blendercomp says:

    Wow, that was fun to watch! :)
    Great work folks.

    A couple of questions:
    #1. which camcoder did you use to shoot this project? Red epic?
    #2. how did you cut it after compositing? In the VSE or in the node editor?

    keep up the good work!

  17. Jan Henk Speelman says:

    What you need now is a good editor. The rhythm of the shots could be so much more exciting. I hope you’ll have one for the Big Thing.

  18. Martin says:

    Great work. I’ve never noticed it before but Sebastian Koenig sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  19. Guido says:

    Great job, guys! Awesome!

  20. meltingman says:

    so fun.. thanks ..
    I like the robot :-) :LOVE: lol

  21. jhon says:

    i was about to say something but Ian sad its not complete……Why is the robot is not… interacting with the smoke in the last seconds?..When he jumps out of the dust in the last seconds..The robot is not interacting with the smoke..as if they where baked completely on deferent layers and later composed.They needed to be baked together and then be composed.. But anyway i am waiting for more sketches of the real thing

  22. jhon says:

    And as for the ones who sad: don’t follow this blog…I’ll say go fu@k your moms..

    And as for the ones who sad continue tr$%lling(sick comments):Cheers

    • sebastian says:

      dude, you reached a point where you will be banned from this blog.

      • PhysicsGuy says:

        Good call! The guy was driving everyone crazy. It’s a shame that this annoying troll forces you guys to police the blog. You have better things to do with your time and your talent! And thanks for all that work btw! I’m really impressed with how fast you guys get down to business!

        • Tycho says:

          Does wordpress implement a IP/email ban system cause this guy really starts getting on my nerv ?!
          It’s normal one can criticices even if the critices arent constructive but it’s not fair one can flame, nerving all this blog readers and probably the team also. If he could do better that this, i would well see it …

  23. Jordan says:

    Excellent work! The final film will be an impressive marvel. I’d love to get that version of Blender that instantly brings my creations to life!

  24. ndundupan says:

    cool guy’s, Awesome! but i think, it’s need better actor :lol

  25. Pierre says:

    I’m *really* impressed by what you achieved in five little days!

    This sure is another great proof of what can be quickly achieved in Blender, and it was a great experience for you all to get a chance to work together and have a better idea of the whole process that you’re going to apply for Mango.

    Thank you, and bravo all!

  26. Thiago Kolb says:

    Great work!
    files to download?

    :D

  27. atomant says:

    …dary!

  28. Teun S. says:

    Nice work guys! My favorite shot is also the last one where the robot jumps through the window. Looks very cool!

  29. Stuart says:

    Awesome job everyone! Time for a beer I’d imagine :) One question though: are you planning on developing animated collision objects for smoke simulations while making mango?

    • kjartan says:

      Yup. We`re going to have a meeting with Ton next week. I’ll try to push on making this feature a priority.

  30. PhysicsGuy says:

    Are you guys going to make some kind of analysis about the workflow. I think it would be very interesting to see what kind of technical problems you encountered last week.

    One thing I am struggling with, is that fact that I cannot use an image sequence as a texture in Cycles. I’m making this animation, where a movie runs on a rendered cell-phone. I had to first render out the footage to a panel the size of the cell-phone screen in blender internal, then render the phone in cycles and then composite them together. But with this approach, the movie playing on the screen doesn’t cast light into the surrounding. I have not been able to come up with a work around for this problem. Well, except changing the texture by hand between frames and rendering the frames out by hand. But I simply refuse to do that *grin*.

  31. jhon says:

    When will they re-lease the hobbits

  32. jhon says:

    oh yeah this year

  33. revolt_randy says:

    I love it!! For only 5 days of work it’s great!! I also think it’s a good example of what could happen if a quit confirmation (idiot) prompt is added to blender!! Hopefully, if it’s added, (as mentioned earlier in the week in this blog), users will be able to disable it to avoid wrecking havoc on the world!!! hahaha….

  34. jhon says:

    hahahah

  35. Iris says:

    Mi è piaciuto, molto simpatico , se avete fatto tutto solo in una settimana bravi.

  36. Justin Barrett says:

    Great job, and good idea…seems everyone worked together quite well…and the pipeline seems to have all the major kinks ironed out…again good job!

  37. Snir David says:

    This is quite amazing! I can’t wait to see what else will come out from that great team.

  38. Dusty says:

    Actually considering how bad (but funny) the first edit of this thing was, it’s really impressive to see how far you guys can take this! And you only had 5 days!
    I can’t wait to see what you guys do now you have a few weeks of filming\development\editing.

    My eyes are glued to the screen in anticipation.

    Well done!

  39. Josh Duncan says:

    Watching Mission Impossible 2 and am absolutely admiring the VisFX stuff they do, must take em years! You guys are seriously on the ball to pull something together like you have in 5days! I’d love to be shot an email when the final images are up (Ton has my email), so I can put together some sample material (encoding-wise).

    Again nice job

    -Josh

  40. Daniel Wray says:

    Overall very nice, some scenes could of course use a little work, but for the time giving I think it all works really well, and the effects look very nice – specifically the last shot where the robot breaks through the glass.

    It’d be great to get some feedback from the artists on what they think needs work, I believe someone mentioned the compositor, as it stands it’s actually very powerful but things like previewing (ram caches), and integration with an external canvas (using the image editor for painting on frames, holding frames, and even masks) would make most tasks a lot easier.

    The scene where the robot breaks through the wall is the weakest shot in my opinion, specifically the moment where the wall cracks uniformly, I think with a tiny bit of work this could have been improved by painting a series of mask images that could have revealed the cracked areas bit-by-bit to give the impression of the impact hitting the center and then spreading out to the edges.

    Overall really enjoyable, and for five days of work I think it looks great!

    Well done team Mango!

  41. Gallaecio says:

    Just awesome! I had a great laugh, and the effects are not bad either (I was expecting something quite worse ;)

  42. Tralfamadorian Orator says:

    You have a penguin at the beginning of the film that is so lonely and helpless. May I send a gnu in the post to keep your penguin company?

    I love the short film, by the way! And I enjoyed watching each day’s work-in-progress.

  43. Kjersten says:

    Wow! Most Awesome! love it!

  44. Fauzi MG says:

    Wow, awesome….nice project…hahaha animator be going grazy..hahahaha just click quit..blender will be exit process

    hahaaa