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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!"
Free Open Porn for all!
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).
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...
Lets hope it does for movies what Tux Racer has done for video games.
Oh.
While this would be quite an accomplishment should it come to reality, and could set the establishment on its ear, I can't help but thinking from browsing through their site that it's still 'vaporware'. Just take a look at the Sponsors page. They're requesting 6 quality 3D Unix machines and a 10-system rendering cluster, among other things.
I wish them the best of luck in their endeavor.
Whoever Has the Most Toys Wins!
Anyone else thinking what I'm thinking?
Ever play that game as a kid where you go around in a circle and you make a sentence by each kid adding one word? It's just like that, only with animation.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Since they will be using Blender, you might be interested in the upcoming features that the next release will have along with some of the scripts available
have a look at the development digest
http://cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=233256
Blender now has manipulators and universal undo - two things that lots of slashdotters complained were missing the last time Blender was mentioned on slashdot.
LetterRip
Open source entertainment is nothing new. There are plenty of examples from Folk Music and Hymns to Pantomime (christmas plays, that have nothing to do with christmas). You hear a song, you play a song, you change the lyrics/tune to suite your own politics. You never claim to have written it yourself, you just say something like "Here is a song I heard over in Sheepy Magna, it goes a little something like this..."
Copyrighted entertainment is new, and a little bit counter intuitive. My understanding is that it was brought about to protect the incomes of the artists, whilst provide recording companies to profit from the sale of recordings. Now, as recording companies start to fear for their livelyhood, it seems to be coming full circle.
People have always been able to make a living from providing entertainment and they always will (if they're good), they have not always been treated like gods and they have not always been richer than our leaders. Never mind the dotcom bubble bursting, I think the entertainment copyright bubble might be leaking a bit too.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
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
- 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? :-)
I bet it has something to do with a penguin!
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
... to join the Free Film Project, instead of making another independent project?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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...
Of course. Everything has Paris Hilton in it. That woman's more-overexposed than a black negative feefalling into a sun thats about to go nova.
-Jar.
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Heh. As a full-time developer of the related technology, I'm glad the mention of Verse survived into the blurb!
Verse is a low-level data model, network protocol and programming API for dealing with distributed applications involving 3D graphics and audio. It is completely open and distributed under a BSD license so you can use it in any kind of application.
For details, see the top-level Uni-Verse site (toplevel page about the current research project). If you're a developer, perhaps heading directly to the Verse pages is more interesting. You could also check out the specification for the Verse core technology. Or why not just surf the CVS and read some code? :)
If you have questions, you could drop by #verse on FreeNode, or use the mailing list. More developers would certainly not hurt.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
I'm Blender, baby! Please insert liquor
"The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand", or so I have read.
...or maybe you end up with a group of people who just keep overwriting each other with aimless direction. Just imagine a stadium full of people trying to decide where to eat lunch. Wouldn't be pretty.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
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.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
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.
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.
In a writing class we took, the teacher basically told the whole class to write a story. One person would write a page and then hand it off to the next person. All I remember is that the first person started the story off in some lab at a university, with some professor looking for funding or something, but eventually it morphed into a ninja/kungfu thriller with an ending that involved the professor blowing up her former lover with a rocket launcher.
I agree entertainment is not something that is better of "free" per se. Though it can be. It's a matter of taste.
However, I guess you have to see this project more as a proof of concept, that it is possible to create something like that using only open source tools. To try convincing others to use them to create open source or non-open source entertainment.
Tristan.
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.
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.
You don't seam to "get" collaborative projects. Don't feel bad--I used free software almost exclusively for years (based on quality, not politics) before I understood how and why collaborative projects work so well. When one is spoon-fed "you get what you pay for," "profit motive required for progress/production," "no one will create without monopoly entitlements (patents/copyright)," and similiar corporate untruths all of one's life (and we have all been spoonfed that nonsense since they day we were born), free collaboration can be a very difficult concept to get one's head around. As I said, it took me years, and I'm generally fairly quick.
First, collaboration != piecemeal. For that matter, Free Software is rarely piecemail either--equating the two shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the process and its results.
Second, unlike writing a novel (where what you say has some applicability, though by no means is it an axiom--there have been collaborative novels written in the sci-fi genre by well-known authors that are excellent) nearly every film and telivision project of any size involves multiple writers (in the case of telivision projects, sometimes hundreds of writers), and hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people performing supporting functions (compsing the soundtrack, performing the music, lighting, choreagraphy, set design, editing, post-production, etc.).
In short, virtually every project of any size is a collaboration--we're just not used to seeing it as such. Indeed, there is absolutely nothing intrinsicly different between a large collaboration done under the the auspices of a commercial enterprise and that done under an open collaboration, other than perhaps the overall budget that is available. Star Wars Episode 3-1/2 "Revelations" is a fine example of a fan film made entirely through collaboration on a tiny budget.
Yes, collaboration can and does produce absolute dreck. So to does Hollywood...in abundance. Profit motive and corporate-feudal power structures do nothing to insure quality, nor are the a prerequisite to the production of quality, whether it is software or a film.
I do agree, doing the entire project start-to-finish using only free software would be a powerful demonstration of what is possible using only the resources of the Free World.
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