tools Archives - La Cuisine

Grease Pencil Color Mapper

By Amélie grease pencil, scripting, tools June 3, 2024

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.

This article exists in French / Cet article existe en français.

Billie : A 2D animated open sequence

By Amélie grease pencil, tools November 24, 2023

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

Ever been stuck in your development of tools for 2D animation because you didn’t have an animation file to work on ? We may have what you need.

This article exists in French / Cet article existe en français.

Which add-ons to start with Grease Pencil?

By Flavio Perez grease pencil, tools December 29, 2022

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

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!

This article exists in French / Cet article existe en français

3D Triangulation of a Grease Pencil drawing

By Amélie grease pencil, scripting, tools December 1, 2022

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

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.

Grease Pencil tools for animation productions

By Amélie grease pencil, project, tinykin, tools November 22, 2022

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

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!

The Siren: making of an international feature film

By Flavio Perez making of, project, the siren, tools November 16, 2022

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

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.

Grease Pencil Color Picker – a Blender addon

By Amélie scripting, tools July 6, 2022

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

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.

Checking a sundial’s accuracy in Blender

By Damien Picard scripting, tools, Uncategorized February 27, 2020

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

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.

Our stack

By Flavio Perez IT, tools March 19, 2019

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

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!

Play: the Journey of a Simple Command Line

By Flavio Perez tools July 25, 2018

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

When dealing with shots, it’s important to get a continuity check. It means the ability to see those shots together to preview them as a sequence.
It can happen at any time during the whole process, from the layout (to check if a shot’s framing and timing are working well within the sequence) or during the animation (to check if the motion continuity and rhythm work), to the compositing (to check if the colours or effects match between shots).

We could use our favourite video editing software (from Blender VSE to Premiere, Avid, etc.), or dedicated software like DaVinci Resolve or the expensive Nuke Studio. But you might not have a license or you might want something lighter than opening such a big app, looking for the project and loading it. For that, big studios often have their own sequence player or rely on an extensive use of Tweak’s RV, an expensive but powerful video player. Let’s see what we can do with free software.

This article is not technical, it’s about the process to find a solution.

2D Camera Rig

By Damien Picard tools July 19, 2018

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

As you may have heard, we at Les Fées Spéciales have been using cutout animation techniques extensively on our previous projects. Some aspects are explored in other articles, but the film layout is one of particular interest to us. A problem commonly encountered during layout of a 2D film is that of getting nice and smooth camera movements when your camera is zooming and panning, that is, rotating about its center.
This article demonstrates a camera setup we created to solve this problem.

Image background transform

By Damien Picard tools April 26, 2018

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

If you’ve ever found yourself in a situation where you had to correctly place a background reference image in Blender, as we have, you may have felt frustrated by the limited controls offered by the Background Images panel. We couldn’t find an add-on to facilitate the process of correctly placing images, so we wrote one. It uses controls close to Blender’s own transformation tools (Grab, Rotate, Scale, etc.). You can move multiple images at once, rotate and scale around the 3D Cursor, or around each background image’s center.

You can download and test it right now on our GitHub repo.

Mesh To Bone Shape

By Duy Kevin Nguyen tools November 21, 2017

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

When rigging, you usually want to add custom shapes to your bone controllers. It helps to simplify the selection of these bones and moreover it gives information to help the animator to understand quickly what a bone can do. In Blender, the default procedure can be really tedious so we have created a script to help handle adding and editing custom shapes to bones.

lucidity: a naming convention template tool

By Flavio Perez tools November 4, 2017

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

In a previous article we shared our way of organizing the files. In this one, we’ll introduce you to the use of a simple python library called Lucidity, very useful to start handling your project naming conventions. The aim is to quickly check if your file paths are correct, or build paths from a set of variables, without coding your own parser.

Cameraplane: a tool for 2D sets

By Flavio Perez tools October 21, 2017

ShareTwitter FacebookPinterest

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.