Apr 4, 2019

Step by Step: Disassembling Blender's New Short "Spring

Blender has a long-standing tradition of creating and releasing short films to demonstrate the capabilities of its open source CG software. The latest film to premiere online this morning is "Spring," directed by Andy Goralczyk, about a shepherd girl and her dog who come face to face with an ancient spirit. [Spring was produced through the Blender Institute and Blender Animation Studio. It was funded and distributed through Blender Cloud, an online platform that allows artists to connect directly with their supporters as the project is produced Fourteen artists collaborated on the short film, which was produced by the Blender Institute and Blender Animation Studio.

Cartoon Brew spoke with members of Spring's production team step-by-step about how the character of the ancient spirit Alpha and specific scenes from the short were realized in Blender. [Julien Kaspar, modeling and shading artist, told Cartoon Brew: "I worked with Blender for a while. "Then we discussed it with director Andy Goralczyk and began to develop and explore the key shapes. We were able to do this because there were very few technical constraints and we were able to focus all our efforts on getting the overall feel of the creature right."

Once the concept was approved, Kasper then created a base mesh with excellent topology on which the team could add the desired level of detail. An essential step in this process was UV unwrapping, as artists use UV maps for both texture painting and baking. At this point, the character had to be sent to the rigging department for the first rigging pass. This created some constraints on the process, which we addressed."

The base mesh was subdivided using Blender's Multiresolution modifier, then further sculpted to add detail and partially baked into the texture. We always tried to achieve the best possible balance between character detail and playback/rendering performance," Kaspar said. In addition to baking the sculpt, Kaspar worked on texture painting and shading, using many of the textures available in the Blender Cloud Texture Library.

In one scene, Alpha gives Spring (the girl) a chime for a cane, but it immediately falls off and flies away, causing a stressful moment. The team had to produce their own reference video and choreograph the moment. Animator Nacho Conesa said, "The main goal of the reference pass was to find the key poses that convey the stress of the spring." After several discussions with animation director Hjarti Hjalmarsson, we decided to create a new reference pass with a different angle because the one we had was not strong enough."

To handle the complexity of the character's rig, the team used several tools within Blender. Conesa explains, "It's a group of predefined controls that allow you to select certain parts of the character and pose them with a certain level of detail. It was not used for alpha shots, but is useful for other characters. It consists of a number of pre-made poses for specific parts of the character (usually the face and hands) and greatly speeds up the animation process because it provides a good base for the animator to achieve poses and keep the character on the model.