Short Movie: Important Things

Spanish animation studio is working on a short movie called 'Important Things',  an open movie project - all the source files will be released. I talked to director Rodrigo Medinilla about this project.

Please introduce yourself

Plasma is a studio which has traditionally based its pipeline in Max-Vray-Fusion-Premiere. We are always demanding a greater deal in quality and complexity of the projects we carry out but we are trying not to increase the production costs. At this point Blender enters the scene.

We decided to use Blender for the creation of this first project to get, at the end, a useful pipeline, coordination standards and personnel.

Although initially more expensive than using the commercial software that we already have in use for production due to the required staff training and the reduced productivity of the personnel during the adaptation process, we decided to use Blender for the creation of this first project to get, at the end, a useful pipeline, coordination standards and personnel who can be employed in upcoming projects.

This premise has led us to teach Blender to the staff which has carried out the project and to document all phases of production in order to create a standard which allows us to collaborate with other studios in order to build a Blender based business network without legal constraints in forming larger teams of artists and reallocating the resources used for license fees to the creation of applications and staff salaries.

Was it hard for your studio to change to Blender?

Our studio uses 3ds max for production for the last 14 years but I´m adopting my personal tasks, for about 2 years now, in parallel for Blender with the intention to switch some areas to Blender. The idea to produce a short movie was also a motivation for me to create a project with the aim to form a team of Blender artists.

Our mayor problem was to find animators for Blender.

The planning of the project scheduled the creation of a teaser in the first month of production during which all team members could make tests with the planned workflow and which allowed them to detect possible problems while it gave us time to form the group members who were less experienced in Blender. We were satisfied with the results and we could start immediately with the final pre-production.

Our mayor problem was to find animators for Blender. Starting with Blender training we noticed that the conversion of professionals for Max/Maya resulted more complicated than teaching Blender, from the very beginning, to staff from other areas. All commercial 3D software packages (Max, Maya, Softimage) started to create similar standards in interfaces and production workflows which the professionals dominated and which they had so interiorized that any change resulted difficult.

Finally we decided to train 2D animators in Blender and the results where very good. We needed one month and a half for training purposes.

First Final Shot

Can you tell us a little bit more about the movie itself? Is it a commercial production, or will we be able to watch it as well? What about the storyline?

This first short film is a project with the intention to be shown at festivals. The story is about a man doing the housework and the prejudices concerning child growing. It is a simple story which treats the prejudices of men concerning housework.

The story is about a man doing the housework and the prejudices concerning child growing.

We hope our audience will like it. At the moment are closing negotiations for a second short film which will be a contract work for a client.

This project, despite being a short, is planned with the complexity that requires a larger project (corporate manuals, Gantt production diagrams, standarized folder trees and development of automatizms in Python). As discussed above, the idea is to finally create the necessary structure for larger projects.

In the evolution of the project we implemented Blender services in a renderfarm of 500 processors and we are preparing the whole documentation of the project to be published when we finish the film.

Did you implement your OWN renderfarm?

RenderFlow is our render department and offers online rendering service for several years now. We decided to adopt the service to make it compatible with the needs of mayor productions and with the guarantee of absolute confidentiality for our clients.

Have you considered existing renderfarms? What did you find lacking?

The existing renderfarms for Blender use to be public ones (so the production is not confidential), they lack to offer the possibility to refer to libraries or they simply lack render power per node or in total.

Can you share some technical details?

The typical scene from Important Things has an average of 80 referenced libraries, 300Mb and needs 40min per frame for rendering on a Dual Xeon Quad Core 2.5Ghz. In RenderFlow we can use the references which allows us to send only the changes in the scene for each render shot and not always the whole one. Furthermore we have 500 CPU available for processing and due to the fact that the rendering process does not need human intervention and that it proceeds in a closed CPD this guarantees the confidentiality of the project. I would like to announce that developments goes on and soon we will present the second version of this system.

The film has a duration of 8 minutes in format 1080p stereoscopic.

We use the blender internal render engine but we have also tested with vray (we are partners of chaos group at renderfarm level).

We have to finalize the project before 31/12/2011 so we're busy with the last settings for render/postprod while composing the soundtrack.

The blog of the short and the documentation has not been translated to English to avoid complicating the millions of tasks that are due to do in this first project, but for the next project and for the preparation of exhibition material at least parts will be translated.

Rig demo (Spanish)

How do you use Blender for this project?

The project is entirely made with Blender except video edition which is done with Premiere because this software allows us to use hardware acceleration for composition in stereo HD.

I understand that the project isn't done yet, but how does your team like working with Blender so far? Will your studio keep using Blender in the future?

We will finish the project before 31st of December this year. At the moment we are busy with rendering + composing of soundtrack + creating sound effects

The team felt very well with Blender after an initial adaptation process to the new method. Without any doubt we will go on using Blender in future though we have to admit that we detected some problems in the use of libraries which have to be solved. (in case you are interested, it concerns the fact that Blender "looses" links to libraries which are not encountered once you save the scene and generates the need to create the links again afterwards.)

I have to gather the final data and I will send you the final credits, the estimation of costs and any document which might help anybody else to create his own project.

Links

• Important Things Website (in Spanish)
• Plasma Studio Website