Members of the Ubisoft Film and Television branch have shared some information about using Blender in this kind of big production for the first time.
The Blender Foundation has released an interview with Julien Blervaque and Yannick Castaing from Ubisoft Animation Studio. In this interview, Julien and Yannick shared some information about using Blender in the production of Rabbids Invasion: Mission to Mars, a 70min long special episode of the TV series Rabbids Invasion that will be released at the end of the summer on France Television and on Netflix worldwide in 2022.
"This production on Blender was a great experience for us. We were able to integrate the application into our in-house pipeline and connect it to the other applications quite easily, thanks to the strength of the Python API. In spite of some features that would need some maturity, we had the confirmation that Blender is production-ready and comes with tools that can really push up our way of working in terms of creativity," comments the team.
What's more, the team also talked about an add-on they developed named Shot Manager that introduces a true shot entity in Blender scenes and a wide and powerful set of tools to build and edit sequences in real-time directly in the 3D context.
Here are some of their tool's features:
- Creation of shots from scene cameras and of sequences from those shots, plus sequence variations
- Non-linear real-time play of the sequences
- Scene action and sequence edit global retime
- Global control on camera video and sound backgrounds
- Sequence batch rendering, with Eevee, Cycle, and custom playblast
- EDL import and export based on OpenTimelineIO
- Grease pencil sketching per shot (still in development)
- Edit back and forth with VSE
The full interview can be accessed here. Don't forget to join our new Telegram channel, our Discord, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.