On February 2, Adobe announced the end of development for Animate (formerly known as Flash), and—shortly afterward—that the software would no longer be installable within a year (three years for certain enterprise licenses).
This decision carries serious consequences for the artists and studios who still rely on this venerable tool for their animated creations. And there are many of them.
This article exists in French / Cet article existe en français.
Two years ago, we launched the color picker to help 2D artists in their colorization task in Blender. This tool addressed the issue of dealing with a model containing a large palette of colors (represented as grease pencil materials). Subsequently, we worked on the topic of exploring color palettes. Whether it is to find just the right palette for a character, offer alternatives, or have different sets of colors depending on the light environment, exploring palette colors in 2D can be tedious if the palette is large and contains many nuances.
Example of color script that changes the light environment on our character Billie. Credit : Gaelle Diot.
Read moreThis article exists in French / Cet article existe en français.
This year, we had the pleasure of being able to present some of our latest research at the Blender Conference 2023. Amélie Fondevilla and Flavio Perez showcased two scenes that serve all aspects of Research and Development around Grease Pencil, Blender software’s 2D animation tool. These two scenes are freely available as open scenes (Creative Commons CC BY sharing license) for study by other research labs or for anyone curious to see the production steps.
Grease Pencil is this great module for 2D animation within the open source 3D application Blender. When you download Blender, Grease Pencil is included. It’s already a wonderful tool, but it can be greatly improved with some add-ons. In this article we will list the ones we use, what they are good for and where to grab them. We will also explain why they are not included in blender, and offer you an option to install and update them all easily. Let’s go!
Read moreThis article exists in French / Cet article existe en français
We, at Les Fées Spéciales, love the Blender Grease Pencil. Not only it allows you to draw and animate in 2D, but it also allows you to do it in 3D directly in the Blender scene.
Why not use it to sketch 3D surfaces, then ? With a few strokes, we would be able to populate a 3D animation with FX elements, for example. In this scope, we implemented an algorithm to triangulate grease pencil strokes.
This article exists in French / Cet article existe en français.
Amelie presents our last tools and research made for Grease Pencil 2D/3D productions. From speeding up cleaning, managing colors, using Grease Pencil to generate 3D meshes to early research for adding rich details patterns and striokes to 2D animations, discover our latest work in this talk made during the Blender Conference 2022!
During 2020 and 2021 (during covid lockdowns), we created a maintained the whole pipeline for the feature film The Siren (by Sepideh Farsi). 8 studios where involved, and Blender was a the core of the pipeline. In this talk, made during the last Blender Conference 2022, you can discover the pipeline and workflow, the huge pile of free and open source technologies used to make this 1800+ shots movie.
This year, Grease Pencil, the blender module to make 2D animations, was part of many talks at the 2022 Blender Conference. From shorts to feature films, the Grease Pencil is trending. In this article we’ll share some notes on this topic and on the promising future of Grease Pencil.
Before going through the conference, here is the Grease Pencil demo reel 2022, as edited by Daniel Martinez Lara and now part of the Blender official youtube Channel
In order to help artists to clean and color their animations, we created a color picker which is both intuitive and easy to access. One click is all you need to display all useful colors of your animation, choose and select one of them.
Lately I’ve been involved in updating and maintaining some official add-ons in Blender. One of them is Sun Position, by Michael Martin. This add-on is extremely useful for architects, and more generally anyone interested in getting fairly accurate Sun lighting for a specific time and place on Earth. In this article I’ll show how I could use it to simulate a sundial in Blender and check that it gave the correct time.
This year we produced a 2-minute pilot episode using Blender 2.8 and the Grease Pencil. It’s our company Les Fées Spéciales’ first production in its own name, and we presented it last september in the biggest European pitching platform, the Cartoon Forum. In this article we cover where this project comes from and why we are doing it; how we switched to the Grease Pencil to handle the production process and what the future of the project is. We are thrilled to be able to talk about it.
Note that for a change, it’s not really a technical article, but more of a production making-of of that pilot.
Welcome to the blog of the technical department of Les Fées Spéciales, a French animation studio.
We decided to create this blog to share technical thoughts and tools. Feel free to ask us if you want to know something specific about how we work, or if you are interested in writing and sharing how you work within your company contact us at la-cuisine [at] les-fees-speciales [dot] coop. Guest articles are welcome here!
We also invite you to visit the RESOURCES page, list of meaningful content covering our area of topics.
The stack of solutions used within a studio is an important part of the technological ecosystem of a company. That stack is a living thing, changing quite a lot. Some solutions were only used within a project and are now discarded. Others are still used despite being old versions. And it might be hard to make an accurate and full description.
Yet, we can describe broadly what’s currently used at Les Fées Spéciales. As you will see, it’s mostly free and open source software, but not exclusively. And nothing too fancy! Operating systems, communication, DCCs, web stuff and programming solutions: here goes the list as of 2019!
In our article on the making of Antarctica, we used Open Street Map (OSM) to obtain the coordinates of points with which we can create a closed line, representing the coast boundaries of the Antarctic continent. In this article, we will explain how we send a request to the Overpass turbo server to get filtered data, then we show how we have manipulated the data in Blender to get a Antarctic Polar Stereographic projection (in the WGS84 coordinate system).
