The open source appleseed renderer is coming of age. To showcase their quality, François Gilliot and François Beaune teamed up to create this beautiful short movie.
Fetch is a very short film directed by François Gilliot and produced by François Beaune to test the appleseed renderer in a small production environment.I made everything in 3dsmax 2011 because I know this software very well. The facial expressions were sculpted in zbrush because its really easy to do so. The characters were animated with the CAT skeleton, even if its buggy, its way better than the old character studio biped. The robe was simulated with the old cloth modifier / simulator.
Appleseed comes bundles with a Blender exporter, blenderseed, so go give it a try and let us know what you think!
20 Comments
I might add, the appleseed team are super nice guys! We met at this year's FMX in Stuttgart, and they are a really open and friendly bunch of guys, and very interested in exchanging ideas and tricks with blender/cycles devs! :)
Also: Congrats to the team for the online premiere! It looks awesome!
And fun to see you suffering from the exact same kind of DoF noise as us cycles users! :)
Thanks Bart for the plug, highly appreciated!
It was great to meet you guys at FMX, we had a blast. Will definitely come back next year :) Anyone coming to Annecy's Animation Festival by chance?
DoF noise is indeed quite problematic. It turns out Max (from the appleseed team) had a nice idea to more efficiently reduce the noise in shots with shallow DoF; we still have to try it but we'll let you know if it works out :)
About this short, first of all thanks for the post ! We worked on it over a period of 19 month, during our spare time. It was a great project with a lot of problems to solve at every level of the production, from the story itself to the final edit in premiere. The biggest challenge was not to give up !
If you have any questions feel free to ask !
Thanks again,
F
@Sebastian : Cool to see you around here, It was really cool to meet you guys during FMX ! ;)
And they like pizza ;)
Heheh true ! =)
That's looking great. I downloaded the OSX version, installed the blenderseed plugin and exported something... ...now how do I open Appleseed? (Sorry if there is something obvious I missed, but I didn't find any instructions on the website or in the downloaded files)
Stay tuned, The other François will answer very soon !
Hey Clemens,
Apologies for the lack of documentation, we recently rebuilt the appleseed website and we still have to add back the documentation.
Regarding blenderseed: appleseed 1.1.0 alpha-21 ships with a version of blenderseed (1.3.4) that has since the release been superseded by an entirely new blenderseed which can be found here: https://github.com/appleseedhq/blenderseed. Make sure to install and use this one as it is much more advanced and has become the official Blender exporter. The old blenderseed is gone.
About appleseed on OS X: appleseed comes in two versions: a command line tool for batch or farm renders (and which the new blenderseed uses to render inside the Blender viewport) and a GUI tool called appleseed.studio. To start appleseed.studio, you currently need to open a Terminal, go to the bin/ directory of your appleseed installation and type ./run-appleseed.sh.
If you need further assistance, may I suggest you to post in the new appleseed forums (https://forum.appleseedhq.net/) to make it easier for other users to find questions and answers?
Hey François & François
thanks for answering! Last night I had it working on Windows, but I'll try the Mac version later too (at work right now). I posted your reply to the blenderartists forum too, in case someone else is having trouble with OSX.
See you at Appleseed forums.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?281978-New-Appleseed-release&p=2661157#post2661157
Great, thanks!
Great! :)
Very nice looking short!
Cute story as well.
Good job guys!
Will be looking at your company closer for sure!
Great short, liked it, good job François²
That was delightful! I really enjoyed the film.
Recently I tried to use it, I did download, but do not understand how
and today too
I can't use in Linux OS (ubuntu 14.04 - 64), the software don't start, and
Window OS worked, but I don't understand
like to use
Where I find tutorials? (especial tutorial for appleseed on Blender)
if anyone knows a good documentation on how to use it in the blender, please post here
"With mitsuba render I encounter a similar problem with this (the documentation does not show how to use it in the blender, so I do not understand all)"
Do I understand correctly that you have successfully started appleseed (appleseed.studio I presume) on Windows, but not on Linux?
To start appleseed.studio on Linux (ans OS X), you need to open a terminal, go to the bin/ directory of your appleseed installation and type ./run-appleseed.sh.
Regarding the lack of documentation: we recently rebuilt the appleseed website but haven't migrated the documentation to the new site; sorry for that. We will add it back a Quick Start guide shortly to the wiki: https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/wiki.
Thanks for help François
Now appleseed run ok in my linux.
I will wait anxiously for documentation
Congratulations for the amazing work that you do
Thanks for the kind words!
Glad that you've got it running on Linux. We identified and fixed the problem on OS X. We will be releasing a new package shortly, stay tuned.
Thanks Bart for the plug, highly appreciated!
It was great to meet you guys at FMX, we had a blast. Will definitely come back next year :) Anyone coming to Annecy's Animation Festival by chance?
DoF noise is indeed quite problematic. It turns out Max (from the appleseed team) had a nice idea to more efficiently reduce the noise in shots with shallow DoF; we still have to try it but we'll let you know if it works out :)
Nice "very short" animation. Great display of the Appleseed renderer. And boy, it's nice to see a cheery small animated film for once. :)