Blender Institute Podcast #034 - HDRI

Sorry, that's a far too much text. The summary is: I learned a lot thanks to the weeklies and dailies and think it would be fantastic if one or the other could be revived if it is somehow practical for you.

Long version: I loved the Gooseberry weeklies and I loved the Glass Half daily meetings. Of course it is not the sexy way to present information these days and as such It would certainly be wrong to use it as the only way to show what happened during the week. As programmer who works on a daily basis with 3d artists and technical artists, it was extremely interesting to see how another team handles issues that occur during an actual production. There is a lot of literature about project management and a lot of resources about how to work together as a team, but basically no resource where you get direct insight. There are some amazing postmortems, but they are so heavily summarized that there is usually not much you can learn from them. It may be mentioned what turned out to be good and worse decisions, but there is usually not much in depth information about why that decision was made and why things had to be changed during the production. For me, it was tremendously useful to see how you solved problems and what your approaches were to tackle certain issues. It was interesting to see how different people approached comparable topics in different ways. Or noticing how certain people seemed to be very unproductive and then finding out that in reality the topic was a lot more complicated then I actually though it was. Or seeing how and why you introduced the dailies during a production was very interesting, especially when noticing how much it helped to make every artist more confident about what they are doing and where everything should be going. As an ignorant programmer, I could closely follow artists working for weeks on the same aspects that were already pretty good after one week and they barely made progress afterwards. But even I had to agree that at the end, those iterations made a real difference and were absolutely worth it. Even when I could see that regularly when working with 3d artists, I usually didn't notice those differences because I didn't have enough distance. Also observing how the team works together or seeing how the team evolves and constantly gets better over time, can give an actual understanding that there is a real value in having a stable core team and not always starting from scratch with a team. Thanks to the weeklies and dailies I was able to actually get an understanding of many things I already know, but didn't see or understand what it actually means in practice. I would have eventually learned that one day, but thanks to this resource, I believe that I understood it much faster.

I understand that weeklies and dailies take more time if you record them. For me, they had a huge value, more than you most likely believe. If there is a practical way for you guys to bring them back, it would be fantastic. But I also know that there are very few people who have the same kind of interest when watching those.

Thanks for the shout out on the chicken short! We had lots of fun doing it.. And Hjalti, chickens are a blast to animate! You should still do it! :)

The project was rendered in cycles, and done on our platform .. Mostly with a Chromebook! We will be releasing videos and tutorials over the next month on how we did it. :)

Keep up the great work on the podcast and all the cloud related things!

-jason

...well, as you asked for comments/opinions!.... I personally really like the more professional tone things are gaining (with re the videos) and think this is a good approach for the cloud. Hdri's are absolutely fantastic and a huge benefit to the subscription...! (I'm not mad about shader sharing, don't get rid of creativity completely!!)

Also, imho I don't personally want to see an agent overload. I think especially with renders, its a nice approach to show/have a segment/mentality. i.e. don't show the whole room, maybe just a chair; show us a specific angle or part of the hairdryer, not it all. I don't want to see and know everything:) That said, for example, with the bottles that Beau modelled, how cool would it be to have a unique brand/design/label (and backhistory naturally) for each one!! Now, THEY could be released as sort of small posters/ graphics to build the buzz and #hype!! and tease for the project, without having to show us everything from the final viewing, and literally, camera position?

That said, you do have the biggest story team at your fingertips and the more feedback at this level the better, for the success - or SUCCESS!!! - of the project. I read the other day, the reason why Disney images look SO gorgeous, is because of the many hands and revisions each go through before the end (and with help from their in house secret softwares too of course)

Just some thoughts:) As ever, thanks for all the awesome work:D

Regarding HDRIs to shoot - it would be great to choose a location and shoot one HDRI every hour for 24 hours (probably not in one 24 hour period, for sanities sake). Would be interesting to have that extra dimension to play with.

Ideas on the blog and stuff to show, The caminandes way was great, but if you guys can just post whatever you do, a screen cap of your desktop or whatever you're doing no matter if it isnt final, or if it's just a test, that's nice to see

I didn't really love all that much the length of gooseberry uncut videos, but the write ups that the journalist you had did were fantastic!, fun, engaging I really enjoyed reading them (i believe i folowed every single post you did on the gooseberry blog) and watching the bits of edits or little clips that were uploaded with them, so I'd definitely bring that back.

here is an idea maybe you could have journalism or media something something intern or that would interview one of you every day for like 20 mins, and make a post about that, that way you just give him a few pics or videos of what you're doing and he writes down a small article about what is happening with that artist's responsabilities at that point in time and populates it with nice stuff that that artist is doing, and after he's interviewed everyone he does a longer post on where the production is at that point. Afterwards he can start over... the idea is to take a bit of writing and sharing responsibilities off of your shoulders so you concentrate in producing the film and the material you're there to produce and have a part time making of person dedicated to document everything, that would be suuuuuper nice, but maybe it's unrealistic...

Ha! I also have like 80GB of rigging Victor!! It would be such a pita to edit! I'm totally with you Andy! :D