One of my tasks here is to make sure the Big Buck Bunny gets rendered, even though Im not crazy about networks, ssh connections and figuring out why the Nth frame didn’t render, some of you have shown interest in the renderfarm so heres a rundown of how it works ;)

Images are rendered on Sun’s Grid at http://network.com, they have a service where you can buy time on their systems for $1 per CPU-Hour, Many tasks can be uploaded to run parallel on their systems, I think they have 600 CPU’s but we’ve only ever managed to hog around 240, with an average of 150 CPU’s at a time.

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I’ve put together a little video that describes the various stages of animation I go through. These aren’t hard-and-set rules, but more like guidelines that help me animate more efficiently. Depending on the shot I’ll be more or less rigid about keeping the stages separate.

I also left out an important stage in the video, which is sketching out ideas for the shot. I left it out because the drawings — if you can call them that — are really embarrassing. But for me it’s a really important stage because it’s easier for me to explore ideas through rough sketches than through painstakingly posing a model in 3D. (If anyone is curious, I often use Pencil for some of that drawing/exploration stage. Pencil is nice because it’s a 2D animation software, so I can actually do rough 2D animation to test out ideas.)

.ogg video file

Today is the day we will officially say goodbye to the work title ‘a Rabbit’s Revenge’.

The title of the Peach Open Movie is:

(click for 1920×960 version)

So no ‘Rabbitouilli’ (legal issues), ‘Rabbitribution’ (unpronouncable) or ‘The Butterfly Effect III’ (yes, there already is a sequel).

A little explanation about the title Big Buck Bunny:

‘Big’ because the main character isn’t small.

‘Buck’ is the term for a male rabbit. It’s also the name of a movie character played by an actor we used as a reference.

‘Bunny’ because…. ah, I’m not gonna explain that.

Sacha

it’s starting to get a little rough around here…

there are about 6 weeks of production time left. our fearless team of animators - sacha, william, nathan and our external keyframe shifters - are working hard to get the last couple of scenes of our movie animated. enrico and i am both working on “finals” - a little underated sounding description ton likes to give to the task of texturingmodelinglightingcompositinganddoeverythingelsetogetthemovierendered.

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Enrico, Andy and the technical team have been busy for a long time now to create the environment for Peach.

Here you can get an impression how it is going to look like.

It is getting somewhere, and of course it is not even finished yet!

.ogg file

Besides animating there are more things to do, like composting, lighting, the environment. Ton and Sacha made a schedule from the breakdown to have an overview of all the actions. What you see here is only 1 page. There are 7 pages like this which in the end all need to be checked off. No finals yet, but come back soon for more detailed information!

In this blog post also a short reproduction of the animating. William is animating 1 shot of 2.375 seconds. He has been busy with that for at least one day. One day within the Peachteam exists at least out of 10 working hours or even more. The script is divided in several scenes. Each scene is a certain amount of seconds. In the overview you can see how many animation seconds a shot has (not even counting prop animation!)

They are working on it!

Download the .ogg file here.

As the schedule starts to get close, we recently realized that we are not going to be able to finish on time. We now have finished animation for less than a third of the film, and we only have about six weeks to go before all animation has to be locked, so that we can get all the final renders out on time. Weeks are going by with a few shots coming out here and there, which is not going to cut it.

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Continuing in the current series of posts about “Outsider” perspectives of the Peach project, here is eight year old Australian gal India, giving her special views and comments.

India and her mum Cathy have spent the last month in and around Amsterdam annoying Campbell and the Peach crew as much as humanly possible.

At the end of the video is a special “Hi” to India’s Connect-4 Guru Martin (aka Theeth) who spent some time down under with Campbell and family.

Download the ogg movie here

Just writing to let you know the gents at LugRadio interviewed Sacha in the last episode; “Time Gentlemen Please” (Season 5, Episode 9)

LugRadio is a Linux and free software focused podcasts, where 4 guys from the UK discuss open-source, communities and various projects

For those who follow the blog closely the interview dosnt go into details but its still worth a listen.

Download the OGG or MP3 from www.lugradio.org

Hello all. A friend of mine, Aaron, from the USA came to visit the Peach project last week. He put together a video and a blog post for all of you:

The condensed version of a week in the life of the Peach project:

.ogg video file high quality (39.6MB)

It’s a couple of months before the premier and there are lots of things to do. Not only the most obvious (finishing final animation) but also finishing scene construction and render preparation so that the first of the finished shots can be shipped off to the render farm. A simple calculation revealed that at the current animation pace the project won’t be finished in time, so four external animators have been found and hopefully with their help the timeline will become reasonable again.

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