Blender's Open Movie Project

MrAndrews writes "I just read on the Blender home page that Ton Roosendaal is going to be creating an open movie project called "Orange", which should kick off development sometime in the fall: "The Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, have agreed on producing a 3D Animated Movie Short, to be created with the Open Source 3D suite Blender and other OS tools such as Yafray, Python, Verse, Gimp, and Cinepaint." Moreover: "... the resulting movie - including all the production files and software - will be published under an open public license." Open source entertainment is another step closer to reality!"

Comments

Trying to understand the point

[Dancin_Santa]

I'm not sold on Open Source entertainment. I have my tastes, you have yours. I doubt that you'd appreciate my imposing my creative vision on your work, and I know that I would resist your attempts to impose upon mine. Collaboration in creativity leads to such wonderful dreck as sitcoms and "dramedys". Just say no.

What I suppose is interesting about this is that the final product will be open and available for others to use. Free from copyright, so to speak. It seems like a nice idea, much like Creative Commons, but it doesn't seem like some really huge step forward in any respect.

The complete open-sourcing of the toolset would be cool (Blender and a few others are already open).

How about Weta or Pixar?

[pjbass]

As far as I recall, doesn't Weta and Pixar use Linux for their OS in the render pools? I concede that LOTR certainly didn't open-source the artwork, nor did Nemo et. al, but how much closer to open-source entertainment are we with this? Do I get to see the movie for free (small donation optional)? I'd go see it if I got my Sour Patch Kids for free I suppose...

Re:How about Weta or Pixar?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is interesting as a proof of concept. I'd love to see if they make their musicians use only open-source tools. Unless they plan doing it the old fashioned way (write a score, get a bunch of people to play it live) there's not a lot of options. Rosegarden isn't up to scratch, and even if it was there's a massive shortage of decent virtual instruments.

Trying to do a score in Ardour/Rosegarden vs. say Nuendo or Sonar would be extremely painful.

Re:How about Weta or Pixar?

[ciroknight]

As a student, I looked into many different fields before I chose computer science. One of which was digital film making. I spent a summer shadowing a documentary film crew, and I can tell honestly tell you that the amount of work that goes into even the simplest of films is insane.

When we start talking digital animation, the amount of work leaps exponentially. Long hours of modeling, shading, color checks, lighting checks, triangle counts, waiting for renders, etc. It's a tough business.

The "suicidal" part comes in when someone suggests making a feature length film, animated, basically with no money to pay people to come and work for you. You're looking at a group of 10 to 20 dedicated people, spending a great deal of their lives for the next year or two, churning away at scenes, storyboards, models, textures, etc, until finally they come up with something, instead of Pixar's or Dreamwork's thousands of support personel. You're looking at 10 to 20, midrange servers whereas Pixar or Dreamworks has hundreds, possibly thousands of highrange servers in their rendering farms.

Now, will the final product be worth it? Hell yes if it's a good story, looks good, and feels good. Put it in theaters, get a couple million in ticket sales and you've instantly paid for your venture. But the problem is getting even that far. And for that, I would call you suicidal, but I would commmend your work.

More details on the people involved in the project

[LetterRip]

Those of you not involved with Glender won't recognize the names of three of the individuals involved in the project thus far,

Bassam Kurdali aka slikdigit - created the animation 'chicken chair' among others.

Andy Goralczyk aka @ndy - has done both gorgeous stills and lively and fun animations.

These are two of the best artists/animators using blender, both have excellent imagination and the talent to accomplish any bit of artistry they put their minds to.

and lastly Ton Roosendaal - he is the creator of Blender and the primary driving force behind its open source development.

With this combination of talent being the driving force behind project Orange, we can be sure to expect something truly entertaining and masterfully executed.

LetterRip

Blender

[abell]

Blender is a truly impressive piece of software. I went a few times through the following steps:

• Install it out of curiosity
• Open the interface and try and "figure it out" for ten minutes, being unable to do anything but move and rotate the default cube
• Close and uninstall and forget about it for months.

Then I bought an apartment and to test out various furnishing options I finally decided to seriously learn how to use Blender. It took way longer than 10 minutes to come to terms with the interface, but once you learn the various shortcuts interaction with the 3D space becomes really efficient. Now I completely love it and use it even for creating simple images. Who needs a pre-made icon of an arrow when I can generate a 3D model and a 2D rendering of it in a few minutes.

Not to mention the facts that the package is smaller than your average text-editor, its start-up is almost instantaneous, that it runs identically on Windows and Linux and that you can extend it with Python routines?

Oh, and did I mention that I love it? :-)

Distributed rendering similar to seti@home

[tomrud]

Shouldn't it be possible to use distributed rendering for theese kind of projects? Rendering could be done with a software similar to seti@home.

Re:More details on the people involved in the proj

[nunchux]

That's all well and good, and I'm sure it will be beautiful, but who's writing the actual story? I work in animation and I have seen many beautiful shorts, demos and portfolio pieces by many extremely talented technical animators... And most of them are boring and meaningless exercises, if that. Or they're based on a joke that's not funny in the first place.

Myself, I'd rather watch the pathetically animated but extremely funny Home Movies on Adult Swim than the beautifully and painstakingly rendered but pointless Final Fantasy movie. Good characters and storytelling should come first, I hope this project realizes that before embarking on this effort...

Render@home?

[photonic]

From the linked website:

Render farm: Especially during the last 3-4 months, november-march, we need online access to a render cluster allowing Blender to render movie resolution frames. Our estimate is that it will require at least 10 systems to render 3 months continuously.

I am not really familiar with the technicallities of rendering, but wouldn't it be possible to use some distributed client model instead of a rendering farm? You could make a program similar to SETI@home that downloads the wire-frame of the scene and sends back the rendered frame once completed. Might be really nice for a screensaver since you actually have a picture to show instead of some alien noise. They estimate 10 systems full-time for 3 months. I guess the same work could be done in the background by 1000 systems in a few weeks.

Some issues that I could imagine:
-reproducibility: subsequent frames that were rendered by different clients should look exactly the same. This means that only a project provided rendering core can be used, no tinkering allowed by the user.
-copyright (not an issue in this case): suppose Toy Story 7 would use this concept. I guess Disney/Pixar wouldn't be to happy if all the frames were posted online well before the final release. Posting only low-res previews might actually create a big buzz.

Blender is "deceptively good"

[Vektuz]

I recently switched over to blender from the more 'expensive' tools due to its extreme flexibility, open source nature, but also because it actually makes a lot of the big tasks pretty simple. It takes a little longer to learn the interface, but as people are starting to learn, different is not necissarily bad. Blender3D and the amazing "Wings 3D" winged-edge modeller make a powerful team.

The next killer app

[master_p]

One of the next killer apps is the "movie director", i.e. an application that allows the direction of a movie using 3d graphics. There have been attempts in the past, but the technology at the time did not allow it. With all the 3d graphics power available now, it is quite feasible.

The success of the Halo movies, the game 'the Sims' and Pokemon success are prime examples that people like the 'director' concept.

Finally, Lots of people have been asking in various forums how to direct their own anime. A 'movie director' application would make it possible.

Re:Great news

[MaestroSartori]

Funny you should say that...

I recently took a trip from Glasgow to Amsterdam, for a job interview. In Glasgow airport, I saw a Tux Racer arcade cabinet!

I was actually pretty shocked, didn't know the thing existed, but the little kiddies playing Tux Racer seemed to be having fun.

Bandwidth

[anno1602]

The problem here is the amount of data that needs to be transferred: You need all the textures, models, objects, everything from a scene before you can even start rendering. That can be quite a significant amount of bytes. And the resulting rendered frames are, while not large, still huge in comparison to SETI@Home. To sum it up, the CPU-time/data-size ratio is not as favourable. Consider that even in "professional" render farms of a few hundred nodes on a LAN, the delivery of scene data and return of rendered frames is a major bottleneck and needs to be planned carefully if your hundreds of nodes should not be sitting there waiting for the file server.

Re:Verse

[MrAndrews]

I'm glad the mention of Verse survived into the blurb!

I left that bit in when I submitted it specifically because I wanted to see if I could drag someone like you into the discussion :) I am curious: what exactly does Verse do for this project, and is it used in Blender dev generally already? It seems like a brilliant technology, but I'm a bit confused about how it works in practice.