Blender Conference 2019 in Amsterdam

A talk with Tangent Animation Studio,  Jeff Bell, COO, Vice President and Producer

Jeff came to Amsterdam to attend the Blender Conference 2019 and also present his company latest project Lo to the Blender community, and I have an opportunity to sit down with hm and talk about how his company get into using Blender for the production of the Nextgen movie and what is his view on the future of Blender for the animation industry.

CGGE: Why you want to switch from major commercial 3D software to Blender? Since money is not an issue I presume.

Jeff: No, budget is always an issue for small production.  Usually a 10% of a production budget go to buy software.  An in a particular production and we ran into some trouble and ask the commercial software supplier for help but want us to buy more software.  So, I think there must be a better way to do that.  And I had been watching Blender over the years. as far back at the 90’s and I had tried it every year and see how far they have come.  I never felt that they are ready for production.  In around 2012 and 2013 we are doing a production and Blender 2.5 was released and it is a big change.  So, we actually ran a 3 minutes test with it, 3 one minute shots.  And we took it through all aspects of production, all the way from modelling, rigging, surfacing, texture painting, all the way through lighting and animation and proved that it works.  We found it in 2 areas needed some help, we took the money we that we used to spent in commercial software to hire developers and fixed the problems and then we go on.  And because of that incident, we took the money that we are going to pay to third party vendors to hire developers, we are gaining knowledge and if we come into a problem, we can fix it our self.  Then we think that we should get heavily involve with Blender Institute and sponsor their program to help develop better software.

We also work with other companies like Epic, Ubisoft, Google, Nvidia, I just came from a meeting with other big corporate sponsors and started sharing information on what we are working on.  So we can work on a particular part and they can works on their others. That will be reallycool.  By working with other studios together we can build the platform faster.

CGGE: Are you doing any project in China?

Jeff: Yes, I am going to China in November because my partner is setting up a studio there.  They had sent their artist to our facility for training for 4 months to get our animation technique. So I am going there to help them to have the studio setup.

CGGE: The LoPue software that you present at the Blender Conference are you planning to sell it and compete with Shotgun?

Jeff: Yes, we will have it ready in January, 2020 and compete with Shotgun.  But we bundle it with asset management, rendering and other programs as well.

CGGE: Last questions, why Blender is so important to Tangent Animation?Jeff: With Blender we build knowledge and experience. With other commercial software we ran into a bug if we don’t get support, we literally stuck. With Blender we ran into a bug, we don’t have to wait for support we can fix it, and it is very free.

Source:Raymond Neoh