Dear Visitor, the Technical Department wish you a happy new year!
And this incoming year is a very exciting for a lot of reasons!
Let’s start in terms of projects for us. Next October will be released the feature film Dilili in Paris for which we worked hard for the past two years. Hopefully you will see it in festivals before then. And you’ll have more articles about that production soon.
This summer will be seen the opening of a very nice archeology and geology museum. The museum is located in Lodève, next to Montpellier in France. We are currently creating more than 45 minutes of animation, interactive programs, and multiple 3D reconstructions for the museum. It’s improving a lot our tools, methods and pipeline and we will share more on that too, later this year.
And we have other nice projects. So we are very busy, but we have a lot of things to share along those works, so stay tuned.
But it’s not only about us, it’s about huge releases in free software too!
A big leap is going to be made with the 2.8 release of Blender. Apart from the awesome new real-time viewport (EEVEE), we are super interested in the Grease Pencil and what the Pepe-School is doing with it. Will Blender be the solutions for 2D animators in a 3D world? We hope so. But it’s also the new way to organise the scenes which is a feature we’ll use a lot in the tech department. It’s a great year for Blender and it’s celebrating its 20th anniversary!
We keep an eye on real-time solutions too as some of our projects use such technologies. Godot, the most advanced free real-time game engine is going to have a great new release with Godot 3. Great 3D rendering engine, blueprints, C# and more. This is pretty interesting to follow.
Krita is also going to version 4. Lots of improvements at every release for a piece of software we have been using daily for two years. The incoming ability to create python scripts within krita is obviously a feature we look forward to, to improve our workflow.
But we also work with solutions less known by the public.
For instance, Zou/Kitsu, a production tracking solution (like Blender’s Attract). It’s in production in our studio for 2 months and Les Fées Speciales is actively participating in its development. We have planned articles and tutorials in the incoming months.
Kabaret is an asset manager developed at Supamonks studio that we are testing in pre-release and going to push in production soon. We will also talk about it later. But there is more!
OpenToonz, the 2D animation software, is improving a lot; Storyboarder might also be a nice solution (we need layers and soundtrack please). So it’s exciting to work with open software nowadays.
According to the standard VFX platform, Python 3 should soon be (and FINALLY) a reality for everyone in the industry, mostly stuck with 2.7 for 10 years. It’s good news to push forward more compatibility and the ability for us to use the more advanced features of python 3.
Very cool projects are in production with Blender and other free software. Like I lost my Body, by Xilam, or TV series like Non-Non by Autour de Minuit and Ella, Oscar & Hoo at Normaal, and an incoming project at TuNousZaPasVu. Of course the open movies of the Blender Institute, Hero and Spring, will provide many improvements for the community.
And many more things we can’t talk about… or we haven’t heard about, yet, of course!
In any case we wish you a happy new year, full of projects and freedom!
Work well and take care.
Flavio, Damien and Kevin
