By Storm Studios.
Ragnar writes:
We at Storm Studios in Norway used Blender to create an animated commercial for Boots pharmacy. We are mainly a Maya, Houdini, RenderMan and Nuke shop, but a couple of us have been dabbling with Blender, and have been quite impressed with the tools it has to offer. In addition to Blender, we used TVPaint and FrameToon for the 2D animation, Gimp and Photoshop for textures and concepts, and Nuke for compositing, before handing the film over to our sister company, Shortcut Norway, for sound, grading and online.
To get motion blur in Cycles, we used the latest development build of Blender, and to avoid noise, we wound up using almost 2000 samples resulting in render times just short of an hour per frame on 12 core machines. Unfortunately our render farm doesn't have proper graphics cards, so we couldn't take advantage of CUDA, but luckily I had written a Blender render dispatcher for Pixar's Tractor in my free time just a week before, so we could run Blender renders on our entire farm at the click of a button. I'll be making the render dispatcher available shortly.
You can see some of our other commercial and VFX work at stormstudios.no.
5 Comments
Thanks for the article and image. Anxious to see your Blender Render Dispatcher when it's available.
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Drew: Pop me a mail at ragnar (a) stormstudios.no and I can send you the source code. It's still a little bit in beta, and has only been tested on Linux, but I don't know of any bugs in it. The only thing keeping me from publishing it yet is this bug in Blender ( http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=498&aid=33108&group_id=9 ), which has been fixed in source, and will thus be fixed in 2.65. It causes Cycles texture paths to break in the .blend file you have open when you submit a job to the farm.
Of course, to use the dispatcher, you need to have access to a farm running Pixar's Tractor distributed processing solution. :)
It's good to see, that some big studios are interested in trying this software. And why shouldn't you? :)
In this case it seems to me, that old Blender Internal renderer would be good enough, because it's mostly planes and it's not photo realistic. Many things have to be tweeked in compositing after all.. But of course, if you wanted to try the new Cycles thing, that's good too.
Oh.. I saw your Trolls movie in Norway days in Latvia.. NICE! :)
Now that 2.65 is out, I've updated and posted my Tractor Dispatcher here http://ragnarb.com/tractor-dispatcher-for-blender/ for those of you lucky enough to have access to a render farm running Pixar's Tractor. I'll post it on the Blender addon wiki over the weekend.