Great news everyone!

This coming Tuesday we welcome Pablo Vazquez, who’s visiting us for 5 weeks to work on kicking off our lighting/look dev pipeline, giving me time to focus on finishing our animation tasks up.

Currently we are almost out of character animation shots- the remainder of our animation is all technical in nature. We’ve started lighting- gradually switching our pipeline over to Cycles (but not 100%)- but at this point we have no lit shots that I can call ‘final’ in lighting and/or compositing.

Pablo is our secret weapon to change that. Much as we needed Chris Bishop’s skills as an anim supervisor to get through the bulk of our character anim (and to a much higher standard than I had even hoped for), we will benefit from Pablo’s sheer artistic and technical awesomeness to get things in shape.

For those of you who don’t know, Pablo is known in the Blender community as venomgfx, and has worked on multiple Blender Open Movie (and game!) projects, authored an amazing set of tutorial DVDs (Venom’s Lab) and worked on many commercial projects. We worked together in Buenos Aires on Plumiferos, the first feature made in free software, and I have had the pleasure of pulling all-nighters with him just before the Blender Conference to make interstitials for the Suzanne animation festival. This month is going to be a great one for me, and I hope for Pablo and the rest of the lighting team too. We’ll try to post more about our awesome team and their pipeline during the month.

Lets hope the local Mate meets his standards!