Transformice Cartoon Series

Artwork Animations
1

I’m currently working at Cross River Productions in Paris on a 52x1mn30s webseries based on the Transformice online videogame.

Basically it’s all about mice fighting for cheese.

Here are a few episodes (you can watch more on the youtube channel) :

We are using Blender intensively for this project : for 3D of course but also for editing, color grading and compositing. Rendering is done with internal renderer and Freestyle.
GCRU/Afanasy is used for the renderfarm, Photoshop, After effect and Natron for some tiny 2D work.

We have set up a custom pipeline that allows us to automate a lot of tasks like linking assets in scenes and scenes in a edit .blend next to renders.
Using this process we are much more efficient, because we don’t need to jump between softwares to see the result of what we are doing.

If you’re curious here is a screenshot of an edit file :

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A typical shot/layout file :

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You can also find some rigging breakdowns that help us to explain the rig to animators that work outside the studio. And also test video on my vimeo channel .
https://vimeo.com/user5987709/videos

The beginning of the project was a bit tricky for various reasons, and for the core team it was a first experience with blender. With the help of a few blenderheads we managed to get the project back on track and everyone here is now very pleased to use blender, and it perfectly fits our needs for that project.

If you’re interested in seeing more of how we’ve done things we’ll try to make a more in-depth making of when we get time.
And also don’t hesitate to ask here if you’ve got questions.

Finally we’d like to thank everyone involved in blender development for that wonderful piece of software and also all the people who have worked on the Transformice project !

Some links :
TFM TV youtube channel :

Cross River website :

Transformice videogame :
http://www.transformice.com/

Attachments

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5 Likes
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Great work was put into this series :smiley: Also great thing to see Blender there in action as tool to bring smiles on everybody’s faces.
Also I saw some other works of yours on Vimeo. You are inspiration. Keep up the good work et bon courage!

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had a coupel of genuine LOL moments in the office so will have to watch the rest at home :smiley:

fabulous work on all levels.

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Wow! These are really well done. Nice work.

Steve S

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haha, that’s an interesting series, I am currently searching on Youtube for the full episodes. Thanks for the great work.

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Thank you all for your positive feedback !

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nice NPR render. I am curious about a freestyle render.

btw, a making-of or completed tutorial could be better :slight_smile:

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Sacré boulot! Felicitation!
Great work! Congratulation!

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Thanks all !
@Oyster , we wish to make more indepth making of but for now we are too busy with the production. But If you have questions I’ll be glad to answer them and share our experience.

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I just played the videogame, I hadn´t had much fun in years. Loved the mechanics.

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many years later

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damn i thought its all done in this year. and even sent msg to your studio too.

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Hey ! Feel free to PM me too , it’s always good to get in touch with people or companies who know blender ! As I’m involved in many 3D projects there I can recommend people if I think it’s worth !

A lot of cool things append in the studio that we haven’t shown yet, but soon it will be time to show fresh new stuff !

Cheers !

1 Like
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I´d like a recommend to studios from you. What do I need to show? Or what is the current profile you look when recommending?
Cheers.
These animations are so good I´d like to do a conference around it.

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Hum, I’m not sure to understand all, what I was talking about is , if you send an email to the company it gets transferred to the human resources that are in charge of recruitment . But as they are not 3D artists they may discard a profile that I may find interesting. Or you may send a mail when we aren’t looking for people and we may not remember you at the right time. If I find someone interesting, I can speak about it when it’s time to look for someone.

About the profile we are looking for :

For individuals we try to work mainly with people that are available in Paris / France. And we look mostly for generalists that can do many things in blender at least at a basic level, like modeling, rigging , layout, shading, lighting, compositing . You don’t need to know everything but you may have to touch all of those because we don’t split team by tasks (like a modeling team, layout team) but one people generally take all the tasks of an episode except animation. (That of course may change depending on the project).

We also look for people specialized in character animation and art direction.

Sometime we look for other studio to out-source a part of the work : like it was the case on Transformice , the animation was out-sourced to two other companies, one based in France ( Tchack ) and the other in Ukraine ( Animagrad) .
It always complicated to split a project between companies , a company that already work with blender is a big plus .

For recent work we try to make projects without out-sourcing but it’s always possible that we can’t handle all the projects if there are too much of them.

1 Like