Digicel Sammy’s Journey Commercial
This is one of those projects which shows that Blender can be a productive member inside a modern CG pipeline combining different applications all together. They used Blender for modeling, Maya for rigging and animation, and VRay to render everything.
As a side note, Andrey’s VRay integration into Blender 2.5 is very usable now and he is getting close to fully support all elements of VRay. This is particular important for those smaller studios which want to make use of VRay but do not want to invest into the costly AutoDesk Maya platform, as Blender’s modeling and in particular animation tools extremely matured in the recent versions. Link to Andrew’s website: http://bdancer.github.com/
Stefan Wernik writes:So imagine you live in Papua New Guinea and you love ‘The Simpsons’ but you have never seen your countryman animated and rarely even illustrated. Then Sammy our cheerful, happy-go-luck character appears on national TV in a light-hearted commercial for the telco Digicel. Latest news from Papua New Guinea is that Digicel have made a life sized Sammy to parade down the main street of Port Moresby .
The commercial was made at Hackett films in Sydney and was Directed by Stefan Wernik and James Hackett.
All the modelling and UV’s were done in Blender, then exported to Maya for animation. It was rendered with Vray. As a freelance Director I’ve used Blender in the pipelne on several commercials now and it’s great to use it’s strengths depending on the needs of the project.
First !! X-D
Very nice commercial!!
Nice to see blender use for commercial more and more often,
and around the world. Go Blender !!
Nice to also ear about Vray integration into Blender :-)
Than again, Cycles looks sooooooooo Promising ;-)
@Adariel
Based on what is written above, the meshes were exported to Maya, so I expect Vray was integrated to Maya and not Blender.
Still I agree with what you wrote, seeing blender used more and more is definitely a good sign of all of us.
Prodeous, of course is VRay used through Maya, why would you model in Blender, animate in Maya, and get it back into Blender to render into VRay, when on a second note in italic I state that the VRay integration in Blender to cut out Maya as a middleware ???
Very often the lack of render options was the bottleneck for selecting Blender when what you needed it could not provide at all. VRay’s integration and Cycles finally remove that bottleneck and open Blender to be fully used and not just as a tool for one particular step.
Great times are coming.
@cekuhnen – Can’t wait for the ‘great times’ to come…
Honestly I dont see a reason why they didnt used Blender all the way on this project. Well if they already have Maya and Vray thats ok they used it, but this could be accomplished with Blender itself I believe (after watching Sintel…).
Anyways, good to see Blender used again. Damn.. I am becoming fanboy :(
Nice work, especially modeling, but have to agree with twitcher, V-Ray does not seem to have achieved something that Blender could not. Ok, I understand that it is all about a pipeline and being productive/efficient with tools one is sure about. In that case the use of V-Ray seems to have been an overkill. It is more suited for hyper-real rendering than stylized looks like here.
Tikomiko,
true the render result could be done with Blender, but with raytrace it is getting slow, very slow, and I am not sure if they employed also some GI.
Anyway would you just switch to a different workflow only because one project could be done/rendered with Blender?
Blender can be considered being integrated when it is equal and with the lack of render tools it is not yet there
thus it will remain a “maybe might fit the bill” tool.
I think people are missing the point, the pipeline will always be a place to mix and match. What is important to note that people are integrating blender into their professional workflow as the preferred modeller.