Just a quick note to tell you that Blender played a small part in the creation of TED. I always push for Blender to be included in some part in our pipeline and this time we used blender to unwrap the UV’s for the bear.
Go blender! 
Glenn
VFX Supervisor.
Iloura.
wohaa, great ! and i realy looking forward to watch TED this summer
grsaaynoel, that are really great news.
Can you give a little bit of insight how the workflow went? How did Blender integrate into you pipeline, have there been drawbacks, etc.
Not necessarily just related to Ted.
I always find it highly interesting to hear from such things. And maybe it could be even helpful for the devs 
nice! please provide screenshot or something would be well worthy a post on blendernation imo
Ha. There really wouldn’t be any screenshot. We basically just used Blender to unwrap UV’s as I mentioned. On previous films we have used Blender a little. On Don’t be afraid of the dark we combed the hair of the homunculus in Blender and unwrapped their UV’s in blender as well. We are also looking into using the hair combing for some characters in a current film project.
Blender does not figure largely in our pipeline which is predominantly Maya/Max/Houdini and Nuke for composting, but as a Blender zealot, I try to find ways to include it in our day to day work.
here is an article with 2 shots we worked on broken down…
We created Ted and animated half of the shots of Ted for the film, sharing the work with the amazing Tippett studio.
Cheers,
Glenn
We have uploaded some making of clips on our site… check it out. There may or may not be a spoiler alert here
http://www.iloura.com.au/film/opening-sequence-of-ted-vfx-breakdown/
Cheers,
Glenn
I haven’t seen the movie yet but I think what happened at the end of the first video breakdown is a spoiler
Thanks a lot grsaaynoel
I worked on TED from the Tippett Studio side (the Tippett shots were created with the fur system I wrote there, and I spent a week finessing a ray trace shader for use on the bong…what a weird experience). We didn’t use Blender on TED; but every so often Blender gets kicked around for evaluation, particularly they’ve considered using it as a previz tool.
It’s really nice to see Iloura made use of it. I’d imagine there is more of that happening at the mid- to large-sized VFX and animation studios than most people realize.
Saw that movie, it was pretty silly. Cool!
Really nice work from Iloura, Glenn. I hadn’t realised that you guys had worked on it, and look forward to seeing it . Good to hear that Blender is getting some loving there!
Mike, after revealing that, you are going to get lots of requests asking for that bong shader inside Cycles
Hah, it was a renderman shader, and it wasn’t anything special except a big bag of tricks to make ray tracing work okay (because it’s hard in renderman to make ray tracing efficient). It did things like ray splitting up until a certain ray depth, then switch to importance-sampled path tracing. It would sample the environment on high ray depths rather than keep tracing. I think it also separated out the reflection and refraction results into different AOVs (render layers) for the first ray hit for the compers, but otherwise kept them combined after that. It would also add in diffuse crud because of the water stains using overs and/or mixes, etc.
No one thing in it was hard or particularly special, but I just had to pull out all the stops at the same time to make it work well enough to get the shots done with reasonable render times, due to the bear behind it with pretty high curve counts. I’m a pretty conservative guy, so working on a “bong shader” was not exactly an uplifting thing for me. But I have to say, from a technical perspective, it looked quite good in the end. I’ll blame the artists, they did a great job on the asset itself. They had a water-stained one for reference that came directly from the set which floated around the artists’ desks for a while (I have no idea if it had ever actually been used or not, but it sure looked like it had). I think that’s the only time in my life I’ve been that close to one. :eyebrowlift:
I was submitting patches to Cycles up until the end of March, but I can’t anymore due to a conflict of interest (I’m working on Arnold now), so I can only toss commentary about Cycles from the peanut gallery, not code. 
Mike, is there any plan to create an script or something to use Arnold in Blender?
That’s a good question. Let’s just say that there are experiments in this regard that exist, but there are no official plans at Solid Angle for Blender integration right now. We’re pretty busy as-is. Some sort of integration is definitely a project that interests me, though. I’m also trying to keep an eye on any Arnold users out there that have their own Blender/Arnold projects in case they need any assistance. Hopefully that’s not too nebulous of an answer. 
Anyway, sorry for derailing this thread a little bit. Once again, props to Iloura for making use of Blender, and for a job well done on TED in any case. Both studios really did a great job with the VFX.
Great news, thanks for sharing those infos grsaaynoel!
I watched the film in cinema 2 weeks ago and it’s really a very funny film!
Also great to see you here again Mike, hope all is well for you.
Best Regards,
Thomas