For one of our projects we had to handle 1300 shots, using 600+ different 2D backgrounds. Those sets were composed from one to more than 100 layers (underlays —e.g. buildings—, overlays—trees in front of the characters—, skies,…), annoying to handle and set properly in Blender. So we created a small add-on called cameraplane.
Two years ago, when I started working with Blender coming from Maya, I was very frustrated by Blender’s GUI limitations for TDs. The options for creating tools looked too limiting, and still are as far as I’m concerned.
Don’t get me wrong, there are great designed features for TDs. Creating an operator is easy and then you can use it everywhere you need, the API is strong and I like it. My complaint is more about windows and widgets. And I had to find solutions.
La Cuisine is the blog of the technical department of the French studio Les Fées Spéciales. Established in 2015, based in Montpellier (in the south of France), the studio creates animated images, CG and digital 2D animation for feature films, shorts, museums or other companies. The studio relies on two main aspects: social innovation, through the use of a cooperative structure, and technical innovation, using and participating on free software solutions as much as we can. You can find more on the french website and blog of the company : www.les-fees-speciales.coop.
Willing not only to be free-software enjoyers, we have decided to talk about it, share our tools (as imperfect but as useful as they may be), and explain experiences and methods. This is why we have created this blog, La Cuisine. It stands for “The Kitchen” in French, a place where the process of creation is mixed with a lot of technical skills, looking for new recipes.
This blog reflects some of the works of the company but also our opinions and struggles. We share a certain way of doing things: our way. It might not be perfect, it might even be wrong sometimes. But we share it because we haven’t found a better solution, so it might be helpful for others, and because we learn by sharing.
Of course articles are open to discussion: react to our posts, be free to say what you feel or think. Is there a better way to do something? Tell us, we’d love to hear from you and learn best practices.
Today the technical department is composed of:
We will introduce ourselves later, but we do not consider ourselves developers or computer engineers. We are graphic designers who love coding and we are curious about almost everything. We love experimenting stuff; playing with whatever material we have. And it is not limited to the company projects or field of expertise, either. We’ll try to share that too.
Expect to find in this blog technical making-ofs and postmortems of some projects, code and tool explanations, thoughts and research about how we work, conferences notes, and hopefully many more things. If you have any questions, feedbacks or comments you can also contact us by email : la-cuisine [at] les-fees-speciales [dot] coop
