Blender Foundation to Create Open Movie, Open Game

Eloquence writes "The Blender Foundation, which maintains the open source 3D tool Blender, has announced two new projects, codenamed Peach and Apricot. Project Peach will be a new open source movie, following in the footsteps of last year's Elephants Dream project (which was initially codenamed Orange). Apricot, on the other hand, will use Blender in conjunction with open source 3D framework Crystal Space to create an open game, thereby showcasing both technologies."

Comments

should be good

[joe 155]

Elephant dreams was good, but it was really more of a "here's what we can do" rather than a film. I watched the HD version (which was nice to be able to get) and was really impressed. It wasn't really a film though in the sense of story progression, more of a trailer for the technology. I hope that the new film will be film length. The person whose doing it sounds good though, they won an award for their previous project... hopefully it'll be a good film

This will be interesting

[Aranykai]

Can one of these open source movies gain some public eye? Indie films are starting to be recognized, so I think there is a good chance it can be done and receive recognition. As to the game, I wish there was more info available. Too early to judge, but it has promise :)

Re:This will be interesting

[aichpvee]

That's funny, as a Maya "weenie" I find Blender to have a weird learning curve but seems like you can do some really nice stuff with it after taking the time to learn how it works. Also the interface actually seems to make a lot of sense in a pretty non-traditional way. I still like Maya better and think it's workflow is a lot nicer. But I'd never say you couldn't do anything decent with Blender and it's definite step up from a 3ds max.

I'll have to argue about the "Pixar quality animation" part, though. There's some seriously weak animation in Elephant's Dream (not all of it, just some) and you won't see that in a Pixar film.

Not the Blender game engine?

[Animats]

It's too bad they're not using Blender's own game engine. Blender has an integrated 3D animation system and game engine.

The trouble with the Blender game engine is that it doesn't scale well. The Blender game engine can be used "without programming", but what that really means is that you have to draw connection diagrams with hundreds or thousands of connections. Then you get to debug the wiring. For a non-trivial game, it's painfully difficult to debug.

It's an occasional fantasy of programmers that wiring visually functional blocks together is easier than programming. Engineers who wire up real hardware know better. That's why we have VHDL.

Fortunately, you can extend the Blender game engine in Python. Unfortunately, it's CPython, which is 60x slower than C. This isn't a hit you can afford in most games.

Why not Ogre instead of Crystal Space?

[CompSci101]

Ogre3D

It looks like Ogre is at least as fully featured, and has some commercial games being developed on it right now.

By the way, this is a legitimate question -- I'm not a developer using either suite so I'm kind of curious if people out there have used both or if there was some rationale for the choice of one or the other.

C

Movie project

[gr8_phk]

I never saw the last blender movie, but heard the graphics were good and the story was bad. I'd really like to see them take a proven story (public domain like one of Grims fairy tales - poke around Project Gutenberg) and make a movie out of it. If they choose one that Disney has already commercialized that would be even more interesting - and may get some free publicity if they threaten the team.