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Grease Pencil scenes for testing tools and algorithms

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.

Checking a sundial’s accuracy in Blender

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.

Welcome

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.

How to Choose a Software License for my Blender Scripts

One of the stated missions of Les Fées Spéciales is to publish as much of the code we use in production as possible. Publishing these scripts and programs falls under the copyrights laws—or author’s rights laws in our case, since we operate in France, a country under a civil law system.
In order for the community to use these scripts, the scripts need to carry a software license. Writing an overview of the history and inner workings of software license, and free software in particular, is way beyond the scope of this article, however it seems useful to remind scripters what they may do with their scripts, should they choose to publish them, particularly in the context of Blender scripts.

2018, An Exciting Year for Free Software

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!

Cut It out: our talk at the #bcon17

We attended the 15th Blender Conference and it was a blast! Every year we gather so much energy and ideas during those 4 days. Kudos to the organizers for this hard work. And this year we were invited to present part of our work on the feature film Dilili in Paris.

Damien took 20 minutes to present the solutions we had to develop to handle this 90 minutes feature film. And more particularly, the creation of the 500 characters needed to populate the early 19th century Paris. Those characters were built using an old cut-out technique, like flat paper puppets but in a digital process. For more explanations, we’ll let you watch the talk, for which we were kindly authorized to show the very first shots of the movie, which is yet to be released in October 2018.

We will go back more in detail on the processes and other solutions we deployed in upcoming posts. Stay tuned!