Firefox Flicks: Blender Animations
The Firefox Flicks competition is over and two entries have been made (partially) using Blender. Both of them have posted detailed descriptions of their work and made the .blend files available.
Charles C. Wardlaw spent three months producing his entry ‘Foxfire‘ entirely in Blender. Reading his production blog, you’ll see that his project involved discovering how many of Blender’s features worked, such as the sequence editor, character animation, video compositing, curve deformation and more. He writes:
Firstly, I’m happy to announce that my flick received three out of a five possible stars from the limited number of people who watched it. I was a little scared to check out my rating, but the three stars makes me feel good that I spent three months on this thing. ^_^
Next up is the promised package of files used to make the animation. Please note that this is not everything — I’ve left out image sequences, the mixdown of the audio, the .fla files for the 2D sequences, and the sequencer composite files (that’s about 500 meg of data, with all the separate png images). There’s nearly no way you could remake the animation only with what’s provided, but the point is simply to give interested parties a better behind-the-scenes look at what I did.
Charles offers the project files for download. Very nice work.
Some Things Just Make Sense
We reported earlier about the Tag-on of the entry by Hand Turkey Studios “Some Things Just Make Sense” (which is very funny, by the way) that was made in Blender. Now that the contest is over, they have also released the .blend file for their project under a Creative Commons License:
Here’s the blend file for the tag on that spot. From it you can see the goofy rig I set up to control the fox’s movement as well as the vertex-painted textures and a couple alternate lighting setups that were ultimately rejected by my fellow Turkeys. Also, you see how I had to use a camera with a maxed-out lens size to approximate the look of the orthographic camera.
We’re releasing this file under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. All that means is that we would like you to indicate that we created the models and animation in that file. Using our studio name (Hand Turkey Studios) and main web address (www.handturkeystudios.com) would cover that just fine. We’d love to see what you do with this file, so drop us a line via email or posting here if you do.
Please note that you’ll need a CVS build fully use this file as it need features such as vector blurring. You may be able to grab a testbuild from GraphicAll.org.
This 2 Firefox Projects looks Really Amazing!Great Done!
Blender Rocks Again and Again!!
Thanks for Sharing The Production Blend files…etc.!
And Infos and Tutorials about How made this!
The Orange Fox Looks Really nice!!
Thanks!
I really love that animation, it is good if you learned a lot of valuble things from your experience. I feel as though the actual composition was a strong point – so I would advise you to use what you have learned in order to tweak it and make it better.
just wondering why they didn’t use the orthographic camera option rather than “approximating” it with a maxxed out lens?
These are very good animations and must of taken quite a lot of work to do.
Off-topic:
When you go to the main Firefox flicks homepage, you know the girl who has a putple shirt and has her head over the cubical wall? Man, she’s pretty!
da: The reason we had to approximate the ortho camera is pretty simple. Basically, you cannot keyframe the scale of the ortho camera. Moving the camera (in orthographic mode) toward or away from an object has no effect. The only way to do change the size of your subject is by adjusting the camera’s scale. Unfortunately, since that is not currently keyframable, the only other option is to max out the lens size on the regular camera and pull it really far away from the subject. It’s not perfect, but it comes pretty close. And since it was our only real option (didn’t have time to code the ability to keyframe the ortho cam… maybe I’ll try and do it now, though), it had to be so.
Thanks for the question!
Groo: I know that you can’t keyframe the camera’s scale, but there is an easy work-around in Python.
Here is a quick example blend-file: http://www.boomspeed.com/crouch/changeortho.blend
If you don’t understand something in it, just tell me, because I put this together in 5 minutes.
Bart.
PS: I’ll probably remove the blend-file in a week or two, because I only have 1MB of space at that account.
Crouch: You know… it’s the obvious work-arounds that always evade me. :) That’s an excellent solution and I’m almost embarassed that I didn’t think about it. Thanks for the tip (and the blend). It (and likely many derivatives) be in my bag of tricks for future projects.
I downloaded the files of this production, and I realizad that, when you entrer edit mode in the fox blender file, the is just ahalf of the tail and there also is no right leg, but when I exit edit mode and there are those parts and also they are rigged. Hod do you can do that??
Thanks for reading and any comment is apreciated.
Signs Salvador