Interview with Blender Bob (Robert Rioux)

Robert Rioux, better known in the Blender community as Blender Bob, is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund, among other things, the voice over artists for his ambitious 3D animated feature, Tiki. Most of the production is handled by volunteers from the Blender community, and once the movie gets sold to distributers, all proceeds will go to the Blender Foundation. So this kickstarter is a unique way that you can contribute to Blender.

I talked to Robert about working in VFX, advice for starting artists (Quads or NGons?) and of course his feature film project.

Hi Robert! Could you tell us a bit about yourself, and what you do for a living?

I have been working in the VFX industry for 28 years. I started even before Maya existed, on PowerAnimator. I beta tested Maya actually. I have worked on over 60 features films and many documentaries, TV shows and commercials.

I got fed up working for big international studios as the work environment became more like a sausage factory. So I decided to go to Real by FAKE, a medium size VFX shop based in Montreal, where I'm from. Much better quality of life, projects just as interesting and same salary. But normal working hours. Very cool team. Easy choice.

After a few years I was promoted to director of innovation and technology. My job is to find the latest greatest technologies and bring them to the company so that we can always be on the cutting edge of VFX.

Your Blender tutorials are very interesting, because they usually cover topics that are not so common, and clearly come from industry experience. What made you decide to start making Blender tutorials?

I once saw a Blender tutorial that was, to my opinion, completely wrong. They guy had 70k views. And the comments were very positive. And I thought...70k just got the wrong idea on how to do that, and they are all happy about it because they don't know any better.

So I made a clip explaining my view on the problem, but I never published it because I thought I was rude. So I decided instead to concentrate on other things, especially VFX, because very few people talk about that on Blender channels.

You've been working in the VFX industry since 1995, on movies like Ghost in the Shell, Star Trek Insurrection, Independence Day Resurgence and many more. What advice would you give to someone who wants to work in VFX as a 3D modeler today?

All quads, no nGons! Avoid booleans. There are many discussions about that on the internet but if you want to work for the big companies, you have to follow the rules. Clean topology. Everything should be water tight for simulations. Evenly distributed polys. Model according to what the asset will be used for. How close are we going to get. Is it a hero model?

And then there's the naming conventions, grouping/parenting, UVs and all that stuff that differs from one studio to another. And don't complaint if the director or supervisor keeps changing their mind. It's their prerogative. You are getting paid to do it anyways.

A character model from the Tiki movie (all quads, no booleans!)

Do you sometimes use Blender in your VFX pipeline for these big Hollywood movies?

At Real by FAKE, we only use Blender and Houdini. And the Blender Bob YouTube channel was also created to show the world that Blender is a viable tool to work on feature films. Blender is used 95% of the time for our 3D work.

You're currently producing, writing and directing an animated feature film. Could you tell us a bit about it? For example, who's the team working on it, and what's the goal of the film?

Tiki is a Blender community project. When I started it, I had 30k subscribers. I thought if 1% of them want to join the project, that would give me 300 artists! The deal was the following: We all work for free. None of us are getting paid. But when we sell the movie to Netflix, Amazon, Apple or broadcasters, 100% of the profits will to go to the Blender Foundation.

It's a passion project and that's our way to contribute to Blender's development. More than 80 people have worked on the project so far. Thirty-five are still active. People come and go depending on their time. We have people from all levels. From junior to super stars, all over the world.

We use Discord to communicate. I only met 3 of them in person! The movie was developed so that it can be handled with a small team. It's about two guys stuck on a tropical island. So we don't need hundreds of characters and sets.

Some beautiful concept art from the Tiki movie

What inspired you to try and create a feature film? I would imagine that after coming home from a long day making VFX for movies, even more 3D work would be the last thing you'd want to do!

Tiki was written as a live action movie in the first place. I wrote it at a time were I was fed up with VFX and I wanted to try something else. It never happened.

But after going to BCON last year, I got this energy from the community and I decided to make it a CG movie instead. And that allowed me to push the story even more as now I didn't have any limits on what I could do. Only my imagination. And the only way to make it happened is with the community.

It's not easy to manage a feature film while having a full time job but the team is efficient and we have leads for lookdev, rigging and characters that are taking a lot off my shoulders. I could not make the movie without them.

Is there anything else you'd like to mention?

We have received an amazing support from sponsors. Moss Biome, Terrascape, Botaniq, Geo Scatter, Character Creator/iClone8 from Reallusion and JangaFX for Embergen and Liquigen on the software side. Garagefarm.net offered us enough rendering credit to render the entire film! Movella is sending me two kits and 6 months of software for mocap for their incredible xSens system. Wonder Dynamics is in too, and it will be so useful for Tiki.

Real by FAKE is providing a file server and IT support. AMD sent me a 32 core CPU, their latest one and it's a beast! Nvidia provided a 6000ada graphics card with 48GB of VRAM. It's mind-blowing fast.

Even Air Tahiti Nui sponsored us with plane tickets so I could fly to Tahiti to record the voice for Manatea, one of the main characters. He is Polynesian and it was important for me to get a real Polynesian for the voice.

I'm actually in Tahiti right now as I'm writing this. Recording will start next week. Youtube superstar Markom3D will voice the other main character. But even with all these sponsors, we need money to pay the people who are not related to Blender like the voice actors, recording, mix, sound FX, conforming etc.

And for that we are presently in a Kickstarter campaign that will finish in 18 days (today is August 17th) and we need the community's support in order to continue the project, the biggest ever collective Blender project.

Check out Robert’s Kickstarter campaign here. And remember, even 1 dollar can help! In fact, due to how the algorithm on these platforms like Kickstarter works, 10 people each giving 1 dollar is better than 1 person giving 10 dollars... (because it helps push the project to the home page). So don’t feel emberassed to give a small amount. Or, simply share the project on your social media if you want. It all helps.