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[OSLiving]

Apricot is a project driven by the Blender Institute, a Dutch production company that rose to fame with the world's first open source film - an animation movie called Elephant's Dream.

Apricot is an open source, cross platform game (currently Linux, Windows, OS X) that "using Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together." (Source)

The game will be developed from February 2008 onwards by a small team of 3D artists and developers in connection with the online community. The game will take its characters from another of Blender Institute's film, this time their short film 'Peach'

Check out these animation tests:



The Peach movie is supposed to be complete after 6 months having started in October this year that means March 08...

[NotSure]

I hate to put a downer on this, but Elephants Dream proved that Blender was technically capable of producing animated films, but also that not all Blender users should try their hands at animation.

The Apricot movie may be good, but their animation tests look like work I would expect from a "good" first or second year animation student.

The game I hold no hope for. They have no animator at all, and have not asked for animators. This means they have no respect for the movements in game at all. The game will have pretty screenshots, and may be well programmed, but when the movement is mannequin like, and/or has random annoying movements, gameplay will suffer.

Yes, I know many people get in front of software with animation capabilities, but that does not make them good animators. I am sure someone from the Apricot game will claim that he/she is an animator. Six months working with blender, is not the same as being professionally trained in animation techniques that Disney and other studios took fifty years (and thousands of the worlds best artists) to perfect.

And yes, I do know what I am talking about. Four years of Deluxe Paint animation armed with every book and program Disney produced on animation, and THEN I got training, and really became an animator. You can get by without training, but you would need decades of practice, and 3D animation software at consumer prices has only been available for 15-20 years.

Apricot did not even advertise for an animator to help out.

[OSLiving]

Notsure, I wouldn't call that a 'downer' at all, I'd call it a very interesting provocative response. It would be even more interesting to hear what a member of the Blender team actually working on this project would have to say to the points you raise here.

Let us not forget that the game code will eventually be available and usable by all and therefore I assume it is being created in the interests of all, but also that the Blender team state on their blog: "the best 3D artist and developers will develop [the] game jointly with the on-line community", so I'm sure they'd be interested in taking your criticism on board. Let's see if I can get them to comment...

[NotSure]

http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/apricot-open-game/

Core Team: 6 people

one hardcore game engine developer
two 'integrators'
two artists
one artist / lead game designer
plenty of online support from CS/Blender developer and artist communities
external support for music, voices, audio edit

Artists are not animators. Most people would not ask their GP to practice plastic surgery on them, that requires a specialist who has much more training. Animators do go though a lot more training, in many fields of expertise.

I have not seen one adequate animator come from the Blender community, who is not already on the Apricot Movie team. Unless the movie team are poached (to the detriment of the Apricot Movie, which is already savagely understaffed for an animation), then there is no talent to draw from. They have not gone otside the Blender comunity, which is a mistake, because Pixar, Disney, Warner Bros, and others could not hire enough traditional 2D animators for their 3D movie production when the boom first started. A 2D animator brings more to the table than a team of people who can model 3D objects. I know this sounds arrogant, but you can create great, entertaining animation that the viewer feels emotionally for with simple objects animated well (look at the Pixar lamp). You can not get the same emotional attachment with your audience with beautiful images animated badly (Anime is an exception, but it is still a niche art form that the general population does not speak highly of).

And I am not even getting into the lack of serious score writer, or screen writer. As a head of department and a head animator, I still realize that the most important part of any animated feature or short is the story itself. The second most important part is the score and voice acting. If you have a great story, a great score and great voice actors, I could put my feet up and animate with stick figures and the audience would still love it. They claim there will be outside help for this, but it is an afterthought. There are musicians, classical score writers and writers available and willing to work on projects like this. It is not a good sign that they have not shored up who will be doing these critical jobs.

The team just seems too "3D graphics" heavy, with no thought put to story, movements, voices and music.

[OSLiving]

NotSure, just thought I'd let you know that  I forwarded this thread onto Blender and just received a response saying "I've forwarded it to the team, wait for them to respond!" - so who knows, if the folks over at Apricot are kind enough to take the time out to respond we may see this develop into something quite remarkable.

[darek]

Hi!
Andrew sent email for us about this thread.
You can't compare animated movies vs games also you can't compare 2 years developed $15mln budget game with 150 people vs Apricot. I belive we will surprise many commercial companies with our tricks but still we are only 6 people working in 6 months.

Animation in games depends not only on artists but also on engine. In the movie you know next action and you can make smooth transition to it - in the game you need advanced code to guess it. We working on new-cool-advanced-etc animation system at this moment - we will see, it's high priority but not highest.

Greetings,
Dariusz
Apricot Team/Game Designer

[OSLiving]

Hi Dariusz and thank you very much for taking the time to comment on this thread. However, I can't help but feel that you 'edged' round NotSure's main points, particular on the his 'artists are not animators' point. You mention a new animation system and the fact that it's not of the highest priority in your project, so one wonders to what extent NotSure's reservations about beautiful imagery but poor animation will be true. I suppose that in the end it's going to be a case of the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. I for one will definitely be giving Apricot a try, and good animation or not, I'm looking forward to it.

[darek]

I strongly believe that out team is good Note that Blender Foundation choosed multi-talented people so our artists will animate characters and it will be fine. Note#2 - we will reuse a lot of stuff from Peach project with animations as well done by animators. If you look into Peach team http://peach.blender.org/index.php/the-team/ you will find also only "artist" "artist" "artist" "artist", but in this animation http://peach.blender.org/wp-content/uploads/furtest.ogg you will see that they made amazing job without label "animator".

I know that specialization and focusing on one thing is important in many companies but "artist" "animator" it's really too formal in this case. I will be game designer but also: programmer, 2d/3d artist, secretary making coffee for me, and chauffeur picking me every morning to work on a bike

Also it's hard to say that animation will be good or bad. You saw the furtest movie, we will reuse Peach animations so if you like it then it will be good but remember to not compare games and movies, two worlds, do you know any game with really good animation like in animated movie ?

Greetings

[NotSure]

I was willing to let the subject lie at "...we will see...", but the thread has continued.

Saying that having animators to make and animated movie, or a game where animated movements are key to gameplay, is "too specific" is akin to me saying that "having a mechanic rebuild my Volvo's engine is just too specific, five geeks that build their own computers will be able to figure it out.". Maybe darek wants to fly in an airline who believes "aviation engineer" is just too specific? People specialise for a reason. I am not saying the artists on board are not going to give it their best go, but no studio in the world would put inexperienced people with inexperienced people. This is what a head of department and/or head animator (head animators do not animate heads, they are in charge of junior animators and giving each person work that is not too advanced for him/her) is for.

The test loop supplied is adequate. No better than adequate. There are four reasons I would not pass it in a studio setting, and one where the animator would get a warning. The other thing to note is that this is the shortest test of animation skill I have personally seen. It is really only two keyframes and an incorrect blink loop.

Independent studios have footage like this sent back to be completely reanimated on a regular basis. So even studios get rapped across the knuckles often.

The final problem here is that there is no emotion. This is a short demo, but a good head animator/keyframe artist will either be trained in acting, or have an innate ability to act (and probably has done armature theatrics to boot). Did I mention that trained animators had to specialise? Dance, acting, life drawing, and then all the technical art, motion, timing, and mass training.

Especially with the Apricot movie I am worried that Apricot will become "Hoodwinked II". Without enough talent in the writing, and the score, we will see a disjointed series of visual gags mixed with "In" hop hop and extreme sport references. Or maybe another arthouse effort... which probably will not work with cute characters.

There is talent out there. I am probably not the person to ask, given the distance, but ask around at http://www.awn.com/ . From what I have seen, Blender is rather popular there. For a score, you may find someone willing to help at http://forums.indiegamer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=13

Writing may be more troublesome, but I can't help to wonder if the current screenwriter strike in USA will help. Many writers with nothing much to do, and they all seem to be very angry at the studios, and some are looking for a new web based outlet.

[darek]

I don't know which animation is good which bad for you. We should find any entry point to compare. Our goal is to make industry-quality game, so which game do you suggest ?

[NotSure]

Sorry, I don't think we are on the same page here, yet.

A cute 3D platform game is a good industry standard. There are just many parts to any production. You just seem to be limiting your skills base.

Sometimes, I have changed the look of a scene and the timing, because the person writing the score knows how to give it more impact. He knows things I do not. Sometimes I will suggest a change while I am drawing up the storyboard of a project, because I know that animating it a different way will have more effect than what the writer originally had in mind. Often the head animator has to change the angle of the shot and the positioning of the characters because the characters will not interact well the way the storyboard artist drew up the scene.

Bringing these people in early can save a lot of grief later. I have been asked to fix other peoples work once it is close to completion, and I can not do anything. I would have to take over, start from scratch and do it all myself. That is too much work to do late in production.

As far as bringing in an experienced animator, it will help your characters movement. Even if the programmers have to program the movement, the animator will be able to advise, and identify problems. If I were giving advice on this, my first alarm bells would be in the shape of your character. Personally I think he is cute, and there are not enough chubby characters. Other than that, have you imagined how identifiable he will be from every angle and his movements will be from every angle with such short limbs? The tool we use here is called "Silhouette". Does the characters pose look clear enough to identify what he is doing if you just blacked him out so he looks like a silhouette? If he bent down to grab an object and the camera was behind him, would he just look like a grey lump with ears moving down, then up? How about jumping from behind and above (isometric view)?

Remember, I am just an animator. The voice talent will have other advice. A writer will have other advice. The foley artist will have other advice. Put together, you can have a great game.

Have you also thought of asking animators to come in to suggest workflows? You seem to be doing this as a project to refine Blenders toolset. I am all for creating new tools, but some of the old tools are tried and tested over 100 years of animation. Timing for slow in/slow out, fast in/slow out and slow int fast out. This is just one tool I have yet to see well implemented in 3D, when it is so essential.

[darek]

I can say - we will try our best.

[Square Bottle]

Aww. I kind of feel bad for Darek and Apircot's treatment here. I think I'll jump in.

First off, as for the whole "animators are not artists" thing, that's silly. I'm a graphic designer, and I would absolutely consider all my friends who were in the animation department at my design academy to be artists, and fabulous ones at that. They fit somewhere between "Sculptor" and "Graphic Designer" in a way, and both of those roles are considered artists, so why not animators? I'm very happy to consider them sufficiently artistic to call them artists.

Next, there's no reason to think that Apricot is doomed as far as I know. They've assembled a very powerful and talented team of creators, they are very motivated, and they work directly with the people who develop the software they are using, too. So actually, I think that they have significantly better odds of making a quality release than most video game efforts have.

Elephant's Dream was referred to in this thread basically as an example of a failure, which kind of made me scratch my head. I've heard nothing but great things about Elephant's Dream until now. I feel like I could show that movie to almost anybody and they'd go, "Wow, that was a professional, high-quality film!" I mean, just look at some of the screen shots and you'll have to admit that it looks pretty darn good! And if these people apply themselves toward Apricot, I'm sure that Apricot will also be held in very high regards.

Anyway, Darek, I think that Blender and the associated projects are great. I'm rooting for you guys with Apricot, and I really do believe it'll be awesome when it's released! Keep up the hard work. We love ya.