After the release of the Big Buck Bunny movie I decided to get my hands on the production files and make my own short animation as a ‘celebration’ of the open source project.
So after about 8 months of on-and-off work I’ve managed to get it finished. And it is (as far as i know) the first animated short using the Big Buck Bunny production files.
The animation itself was a fun little idea i came up with while thinking about what could happen after the original Big Buck Bunny movie takes place. Big Buck Bunny : Karma follows Frankie after he is released by Big Buck (I figured he’d release the poor little guy after teaching him a lesson) but can Frankie behave himself??
I’m pretty happy with how it came out in the end, you have to remember that my animation skills are no where near the Peach team’s skills. But and crits and comments are welcome, I look forward to hearing what everyone has to say about it!
I also got into contact with Jan Morgenstern, and he gave me full permission to use the BBB soundtrack in my animation.
So you can view this on Youtube (click the image or link below) and I hope you enjoy it!!
Running time is 4:16mins
Also remember to click ‘watch in high quality’ on the Youtube page, it makes it much better to view, and improves the sound a lot.
Big Buck Bunny : Karma
Some Stats:
Throughout the creation of the animation (including pre production renders and test renders) I made over 19,700 individual .png image renders. Most of these were test renders at low quality, but ~3630 were full render sequences of the animation.
The full renders were done as 50% png’s with a frame setting of 900x700 and OSA level of 5. Any higher settings or larger picture size would crash blender, as I would run out of Ram. (I have 4GB or Ram, which came in very handy, but still wasn’t enough)
At ~3mins per frame the whole animation took ~182 hours to render (Id usually leave my laptop rendering overnight and while I was at work)
The first thing I noticed was that the warm fuzzy lighting that characterized the origional BBB was gone, at least that’s what it seemed to me, and the pacing and actions seemed a bit slow, like the stones were in slow motion.
Poor Frankie, haha, the animation and story was decent, you just need to work on building the excitement level and matching the atmosphere of the origional.
Though it was a good try for someone who was making a BBB animation by himself.
And yeh I should have looked at how the original BBB lighting was done, I just used a sun lamp and sometimes a standard lamp to light dark spots. And yes the stones and some other bits were a bit slow, ill keep that in mind when I do future animations, because thats happened a few times in other animations Ive done.
I think at least some of that fuzzy warm lighting is achieved in the compositor. Any tips you learned from using the assets you could share? Might make it easier for this to become a trend. All in all good work.
Yeh, i did learn a thing or two which made the whole process a lot easier. Time for a mini tutorial
After getting the production files I, like everyone else, decided to attempt to render a frame from the movie to see how long it would take to render. I couldn’t even get a basic frame to render at 25%. So i kinda gave up for a while, thinking it would be impossible to make a BBB animation.
But then I worked out a nice way to get it to work better:
Mini Tutorial! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Open a new blank blender file
Go File> Append/link
Append the grassy ground from one of the scene files from the movie (I cant remember which scene it was from, but it was just a medium sized section of grassy ground)
You can append objects, trees, rocks, grassy plants etc etc from the ‘props’ or ‘envs’ folders in the production files directory
Build up some kind of environment with whatever files and props you want, i also found a nice sky image will hills at the bottom in the folder mattes>textures called skyreflect.png which was perfect for a background image
To get characters into the scene I found the best way is to append the entire scene from the characters blend file, instead of appending the mesh, then the armature, and then rigging it all yourself like I tryed initally (massive migrain!)
Once the character is in your .blend you can select the Scene, then select the whole character (including its armature) and use Object>Make Links>To Scene and link it to the other scene you need it in.
(See Williams post below for a better way of appending the characters)
Thats pretty much it. You should find that it wont take to much to render, depending on how many objects and characters you have in the file. Most modern day computers/laptops will be able to render a decent scene.
I certainly hope this will be the start of a trend, its interesting to see what other people can come up with!
You could’ve always used Pepeland’s old technique for lighting via compositor, I remember completely how he did it despite it being a while ago. If you need a refresher node setup I posted one in tests.
Yeh i checked it out, interesting how it can be done.
I also looked at the BBB node setup for one scene.
Looks like its broken into several pieces (character, branch, sky, leaves, etc) and then the effects are applied to each part depending on what they need, then the whole lot comes together to form the single image.
Probably should have looked at all this before making my short animation
I have to correct the tutorial though, as I’m sorry to say that you’ve used a rather unoptimal way of using the characters.
Here’s how I recommend you use the characters:
1: get the character files from DVD or Graphicall
2: Create a new Blender file and save it to disk
3: Go to Append > (character file) > Groups and load the character group
4: Make the character a proxy by pressing Ctrl + Alt + P, and select the armature from the list
5: Animate!
This is way better, and ensures your character is linked to the rig file. Same technique of appending groups also works for the other assets.
Thanks for the tips. Well be helpful for others planning on using the files. I had an animation in mind that I was going to block characters for but it could easily work with the characters from BBB.
