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BlenderNation Peach Interviews: Ton Roosendaal
Duration:
19 minutes and 20 seconds
Country:
Netherlands
Language:
English
Genre:
Documentary
Producer:
BlenderNation
Director:
Bart Veldhuizen
Views:
2,340
(1,688
embedded)
Posted by:
bmud on Feb 4, 2008
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Video Transcription
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- Special thanks to Creative Commons (music) and Bart Veldhuizen (BlenderNation)
- I'm here today with Ton Roosendaal at The Blender Institute
- and we're talking about his new project, the Peach open movie.
- and Ton, how are you doing with only six weeks to go before the grand premiere?
- Yeah... We're running around like chickens without heads!
- It's a good preposition. In the last six weeks, everybody gets nervous!
- Blending, problems, weeks behind... That kind of stuff.
- But I think the animation is doing really good!
- But of course it's going to be SO so incredibly good. You saw parts!
- I just saw the first animatic [that] I've seen so far. It's really impressive.
- I really want to know how you manage to manage such complex projects?
- Do you know how much time it's going to take... how to assign things to people?
- I have no idea. -- It just happens? -- It just HAPPENS. It's experience I think.
- I've done it in the 90's so many times with smaller projects
- and you know complete this, how to complete that, the amount of shots,
- the complexity of the shots, the amount of jobs to do for a shot,
- and then you've got a breakdown of the whole movie in shots.
- Each shot gets an amount of animation seconds and rendering seconds
- and then you can try to estimate the amount of work.
- But it's not going down to every shot and trying to think of "how do you make it?"
- "How may people do you need for it?" and then "how do you schedule?"
- But it's pretty much like... [checking the wind by your finger]
- How good is the Blending so far? Are you going to make it in six weeks?
- Of course! We have to make it! We don't have any choice.
- Do people still have a life outside the Institute?
- No. We might go to the movies next Saturday.
- So we have time to go away for two hours to see a movie.
- And then they have to go back to work again? -- Naaaaaaa......
- At this moment, are you still continuing to develop new Blender functions? --Yah! -- Is there anything new at this point?
- It helps a lot to have Campbell and Brecht here. They're developing full-time.
- I can only do it part-time at the moment, because I'm doing too many other things in the mean time.
- But they finished a project [that] I wanted to finish years ago already
- for sampling colors and compositing in a way that it gives totally crisp, beautiful images.
- The image is on the quality level that Andy said "Yes! This is the BEST thing that I have ever seen coming out of Blender!"
- That's what they're doing at the moment. It works, but it doesn't work yet on the render farm - we don't know why but...
- Okay. So you can work with your local stations here? -- Yah. -- Did you complete any real final render kits??? -- No.
- But that's the problem! -- How long is the rendering going to take?
- We've got SUN Microsystems offering with a network.com server farm of 600 computers which we can do 2 or 300 at the same time.
- and we calculated that we can render the whole movie in one day on their system.
- In ONE day? -- Yah; If the computers keep rendering of course.
- The processor... eehh... And we don't have to ba???rate??? to download everything.
- First Question is from Creon????: "You realized another 3D movie? What will you do next?"
- After Peach? Ahh.. We have a secret project going on called Durian.
- A durian is an indonesian fruit or asian fruit. It's smelly and ugly and spikey but tastes very well.
- That project is about NO STORY - only explosions, fighting, everything... that's not 'adult' but ????
- So, lots of fun, mostish????, and whatever you boys like to make.
- Not furry and funny anymore -- We want to have it in 4K. This big sponsor wants to have 4K-Cinema tested.
- So we have to render everything EXTREMELY detailed.
- I'm going to use it to test the sculpting better. It works in Blender, but it's not yet there. We'll have to work on it.
- Sculpting deformation. Sculpting animation. That kind of stuff. And of course 4K compositing. (whistle)
- Compositing right now is difficult in 4K.
- We want to be able to do ????? work? Big fun..
- Yeah! -- But we don't have it completely final yet. The finalizing has to be done in advance just like Peach.
- I want to know that we really can complete it before I officially announce it.
- I think I talked about it briefly at The Blender Conference, but I wasn't planning to do it here yet.
- I would also like to do something with a special effect film. But that project has nothing worked out. -- Just an idea.
- Wayne says: "Are there any more training DVD's like Mancandy lined up?
- More specifically, are you planning to teach all of which you learned from the Peach project?"
- Absolutely; yeah. So we hope to get a bit of time after the movie is finished to do more tutorial recordings in the studio
- to include in the Peach disc. But the concept of the Mancandy DVD was also to allow the artists to run the studio here,
- and to spend a little more time with making a longer tutorial about what they've learned.
- And it doesn't really have to be related directly to Peach, but it does relate to what they're doing here.
- You can expect tutorial DVDs from Andy about rendering of course, Nathan about rigging, William [for] animating.
- We would love to see them do DVDs.
- Verp: "What's the area of Blender that you think needs the most amount of work?"
- At this moment? -- At this moment. -- The interface...
- But the interface has been a topic since 1995. It's always a topic.
- and the interesting thing is that when you get to crunch time in the studio here,
- with project like Elephants Dream or now with the Peach project,
- the interface is not that important anymore, because people want to have rendering fixed,
- and bugs fixed, to have deformation, animation tools,
- but the fact that the buttons are aligned a bit weird or that it takes a little more clicking... It's not that important.
- Have you developed any features that we haven't seen yet? Any in-house stuff?
- Naaaaa......
- So it's all in the trunk? - No. It's in the trunk of course.
- The trunk is the official released blender, and I think there's already 20 branches who experiment.
- And also with 2.35 ... er 2.50 branch is where we do interface tests. There are many other branches who fool around with tests.
- But personally I'm only working on 2.5 and rendering things for Peach. But everything goes directly in to the trunk.
- Oh.-- No secrets. Not that I know of. -- Too bad. -- Maybe Brecht has secrets!
- and by the way, if there was a secret, I wouldn't tell you. That's what a secret is about!
- Well you just talked about your secret project Durian...
- Naaaaa... It's not a secret.
- Last one! "What kind of coffee do you need to make a project like this?"
- What kind of what? -- Coffee.
- Coffee?
- What kind of coffee? Normal coffee. -- Normal? -- Just coffee! Two or three cups of coffee in the morning...
- one espresso... Italian espresso of course ... That's it.
- How many hours a day do you work?
- Ten... Eleven?
- I'm quite modest. I mean usually, it used to be in my previous company that I would come in first and I would leave last.
- But now, usually I'm not the first to arrive, and I'm never the last to go. Everybody's making more long hours than I am.
- It's very sad that I'm getting old, so I have to sleep my 8 hours... and I can't do this.
- The other guys are like 20. They can work 24 hours, and go back; go back; go back...
- Of course they have the more fun job of animating the movie.
- I also have to do book-keeping stuff, meetings, and managing people. Those kinds of things are more difficult to do. More testing????
- So now you're a manager, instead of a producer
- This is the first project you're doing in the Blender Institute? -- Yeah! -- Is it what you expected it to be?
- Absolutely. It's really fun. It's a very good atmosphere. There's freedom. It's relaxed too.
- Even when people work really hard, there's hardly the feeling we had in previous companies
- like from oahhtoaiwniwnmfoiw neogeo. There's always guidance. There's always some rediculous buisness ??? that had to be met.
- And the only rediculous target we have now is of course the movie premiere, but that's our own target. WE've defined it!
- We've defined what we are going to make, and that we are going to finish it. It's our job.
- Of course it's frustrating, it's difficult... It's our film. So we can say "It's finished. We did it." Nobody else.
- But how is it different from Elephants Dream?
- Elephants Dream was a co-production the Dutch Media Arts Institute, and we had to work with them a bit
- and they also had their interests and input on planning. But they gave us our freedom.
- But it was a temporary place. It's not our own institute, our own offices. We only had one room where the artists were working
- and i was working at home. And now I go to work every morning which is The Blender Institute where I'm...
- working on blender stuff! -- Ah. -- That's insane. And next week we have five more ????? projects.
- ??? blender artists and developers???
- brecht?? two employees of the Blender Institute, the producer ???? , and me, and two people from Egypt.
- It's growing! -- Who would have though that.
- Of course, in April, half of the people will go away, because that's the end of the Peach project.
- And you're going to prepare the next one -- That's not very good, but we wont have to BURGER?MACHT?FRE?ZO?LEGH
- WE ??? more of the local community. The buisness is ??? projects./
- We try to get projects finalized and when we can do it... we execute it
- and then we can finish it and go to the next.
- What are your hopes for the Apricot project?
- The main goal is of course is to get a great game that looks like a good game and doesn't look like a crappy open source thing
- but that's always the thing we have to do first, because Elephants Dream was a milestone for open source movie creation
- Even when people think it's a crappy movie.. But lots of aspects of Elephants Dream were milestones.
- They were really big steps for development and quality. For games we have to do the same thing.
- People expect high quality games now-a-days. And that's not only technology, it's also art.
- So we need to put some artists together to work on something that looks like high quality.
- And of course the second thing is we need to develop Blender better to fit better in the game creation pipeline.
- Game tools like baking, and maybe a little bit of painting if they do painting. Modeling of polygons, making prototypes.
- How do you make an efficient level editor? How do you get Blender better configurable to fix the pieline to go to other game engines?
- Because you're going to use the Crystal Space game engine? -- Da.
- The Crystal Space game engine also has development targets for a couple of things
- we're going to have a python pipeline inside of Blender to talk to the Crystal Space engine.
- but of course, it's not only Crystal Space. Other game engines will be able to do the same thing over again later on.
- For Blender, it's not like we decided to do Crystal Space and only Crystal Space. No.. Crystal Space is great. It's a good engine,
- but the result will be that other commercial game engines will also be able to work much better.
- And does that mean that Blender's own game engine is not going to be developed any more?
- It's a bit spotty, still; so we're thinking of removing it as a plug-in.
- So it will still be there as optional, but we'll allow other engines to plug in directly too.
- We might test that even within the Apricot Project, but it is not a target. -- No.
- The Blender Game Engine is great for prototyping, and for making [games quickly],
- but the Blender Game Engine is extremely complicated to manage, and maintain, and improve,
- and even when you decide to do that, you need developers! I want to have all sorts of development.
- The top purpose of Blender is to have developers. I want to have creative people here, and try to organize all kinds of development online.
- People should help us with developing. If no developer accepts the Blender Game Engine
- as an interesting project then it will always be a bit problematic. -- It has been problematic for the last few years. Right?
- Blender itself has 40 or 50 people, almost DAILY, active on contributing, and that's why we can do this.
- If the game engine had 5 or 50 50 developers... (mumbles) Crystal Space has 20 - 30 people fairly active.
- So that makes much more sense to use that game engine. -- Yeah!
- How do you think that will look in the end? You can just press "P" and it will play in the Crystal Space engine?
- or do you need to do C, calc---The file will be programmed like a normal game so when you insiert the game disc,
- it starts playing. Title animation... Music... -- But what will that look like?


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