3D World

Agent 327

Steve Jarratt investigat­es how the latest Blender short, Agent 327: Operation Barbershop, works as a test bed for the open-source software

Blender’s new short shows off the best of the open-source software

Back in 2014, the Blender Institute developed Blender Cloud – a subscripti­on service that provides users with collaborat­ive tools and acts as a repository for training and open-source assets, which subscriber­s have direct access to. As a paid-for service, Blender Cloud is instrument­al in generating the funding for the Institute’s short films, replacing the sale of DVDS, which are now almost obsolete.

The latest Blender short, Agent 327: Operation Barbershop, is a significan­t milestone for both the app and for Blender Animation Studio, the production arm of the Blender Institute. The three-minute film is proof of concept, and is being used to seek funding for a full-length feature film starring the aforementi­oned spy – a character who is based on the cult comic books by Dutch artist, Martin Lodewijk.

“With this movie, we wanted to make a statement about the quality that the studio wants to work on,” says producer Francesco Siddi, “and give a glimpse of the characters that populate this long-establishe­d universe.”

Operation Barbershop is also a test bed, both for the existing technology in Blender and as way of determinin­g what new technology needs to be added. “Blender has been the rock solid foundation of our pipeline for years,” says Francesco, “and in this project it was no different. The fact that Blender enables us to work from storyboard­ing all the way to final render is a real productivi­ty boost,” he explains.

One of the key developmen­ts during production was to implement high-quality hair rendering with motion blur – work which was started during the making of the previous Blender short, Cosmos Laundromat. “While this feature was already available in the Cycles render engine, it was optimised to give render times acceptable for a short film production,” Francesco comments. In fact, Cycles now renders scenes with hair and motion blur ten times faster.

In addition to the improvemen­ts to Cycles, a large amount of developmen­t time also went into the Depsgraph dependency graph project. “The character rigs reached a high level of complexity, making it challengin­g for new animators to quickly become productive,” says Francesco. “Depsgraph is the new core of the animation system, which provides dramatical­ly improved performanc­e of animations with complex rigs. Finally, cloth simulation tools also got an important upgrade. This allowed us to introduce believable cloth behaviour on top of several animations.” Both the new dependency graph and cloth tools will be rolled into the anticipate­d Blender 2.8.

with this movie, we wanted to make A statement ABOUT the quality that the studio wants to work On Francesco Siddi, producer, Agent 327: Operation Barbershop

However, after a decade of such production­s (Agent 327 is the studio’s ninth short) Francesco states that it’s no longer a matter of new features, but of maturity. “In a production scenario, we look into collaborat­ion, flexible workflows, and so on. even if it looks like some developmen­t happens for a production corner case, that’s not necessaril­y true. So much effort is being placed in designing solutions that benefit the largest use cases possible, and it could be argued that with the open channels that Blender has with its huge community, this has never been an issue.”

For future projects, Francesco explains that the Blender team will need more advanced asset management tools to handle the ever growing complexity of characters and environmen­ts. These tools will also need to integrate with production management and render tools. This means that developmen­t work has also focused on the Blender Institute’s pipeline tools: render manager Flamenco and Attract: a production tracking system.

“Like all the tools we make at the studio, Flamenco is free and open-source software, with an open and extensible architectu­re, allowing any software to be used with it. Flamenco can be used to manage computing clusters of hundreds of machines and it’s available as standalone software, as well as on the Blender Cloud,” says Francesco.

Attract, the production tracking software was developed by Francesco during the 2012 production of Tears of Steel. Attract enables the team to know the status of the production process at all times. “It manages sequences, shots, tasks and their deadlines and assignees. Attract is integrated with Blender, and it keeps the edit at the centre of the process. This way, when there are changes to the film – shots added, removed, cut, reviewed – they get reflected automatica­lly in Attract. Attract will become available as a service on Blender Cloud very soon,” explains Francesco.

It is clear that the aim of the Agent 327: Operation Barbershop short was to focus on asset management and pipeline integratio­n, with the aim of scaling up the animation process for feature-length production. “Managing the growing complexity of the project in terms of assets, as well as keeping the render times under control, was very important for this project,” explains Francesco. “This allowed us to reach the style we were after, and that’s something we are really proud of.”