The Camindandes Llamigos renders have finally been finished and now the moment we’ve all been waiting for is here! The third Caminandes open movie made by The Blender Institute (and the second one rendered with RenderStreet) has been released.
Koro’s 2:30 minutes new adventure was made possible by the Blender Cloud supporters and this awesome team of #b3d masters:
Director – Pablo Vazquez
Animation director, layout – Hjalti Hjalmarsson
Modeling, design, lighting, effects – Andy Goralczyk
Animation, character modelling – Sarah Feldlaufer
Pipeline and production – Francesco Siddi
Story artist – Matias Mendiola
Rigging – Juan Pablo Bouza
Software support – Sergey Sharybin
Music – Torin Borrowdale
Sound design – Sander Houtman
Entirely produced by the Blender Institute, producer – Ton Roosendaal
There are plenty of novelties in this third episode. Koro gets a new llamigo in the form of a baby penguin character. Their love for berries will take them into some dangerous new places inspired by the rocky landscape of Patagonia. If you’re curious to know about some local references or have ever been in Santa Cruz in Southern Patagonia, Pablo shares some insight on his Facebook page.
Also, the snowy environment (created mostly by Andy) represents a new kind of asset in the Blender Cloud. You can check the episode’s free resources at cloud.blender.org/caminandes —some of them are already there, others will be released over the following days.
We have been asked about the render stats, so here are a few figures. The 2 min 30 seconds short animation has a total of 3600 frames which were rendered by 90 servers working in parallel. Motion blur took a toll on render times, causing the longest frame to count over 10 server-days in render time (which were finished in approximately 13 hours). The whole project totaled over 23 months of server time—16,593 hours to be precise—including the in between test renders and the re-doings (the Christmasy train from the trailer has now been replaced with an authentic one). Average render time per frame for the final shots (not considering the long motion blur frames) was 102 minutes—one hour and 42 minutes. One more number coming straight from Andy —the renders were over 130GB in size. This was the most complex episode in the Caminandes series so far.
Pablo Vazquez has done a great job in running the entire project and kept everybody in the loop with the project’s weeklies. Have a look at the 10 video series if you want to understand the complexity of the entire process: how you should always aim for perfection (Koro’s eyes have been tweaked over several weeks), how each member in the team has its own role(s) (for instance, Hjalti is also doing the voice-over for this episode, and we feel he has a say in those eyes too), the atmosphere at the Blender Institute, and how the film is coming together with everyone’s contribution.
Besides our love for Koro, there is another reason for which we were glad to help render the Gran Dillama and Llamigos episodes. Through our RenderStreet for Artists program for open movies we started in 2014 we’re supporting the free software movement and saying thanks to the Blender community!
