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Open Source On the Big Screen
An anonymous reader writes "Following the success of Elephants Dream, the Blender Foundation is developing a follow-on open movie called Peach, set for completion later this year. Computerworld has up an interesting interview with Matt Ebb, lead artist from Elephants Dream (the interview is split over 5 pages). Ebb talks about the making of the world's first open movie and offers some advice to others wanting to start such a project."
Just before anyone wades in...
...this probably refers to the successful completion of the open project as opposed to box-office success or other notional gauge of success. ;)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
For those of you who haven't seen Elephants dream and don't want to tolerate the 450MB download, here's the Youtube link.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I have particularly been watching their open game.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
As a blender/crystal space user I'm more interested in the development of Apricot, the open game based on the movie. It'll be great to see improvements in the area of 3d Linux game development, and certainly make it a more attractive platform for developers in the future.
Has anyone taken the source files to the project and created anything else with them?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The movie Plumiferos http://www.plumiferos.com/index-en.php will be coming to the big screen some time early next year. A feature length movie done entirely in Blender (modeling, animating, rendering, non linear editing, etc.)
LetterRip
I'm probably not alone in that I've never heard of this movie nor studio. Not saying that I alone am a good measure of a movie's success, but I'd like to know the criteria by which this is being judged a success.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I have some advice for these guys: Get a script!
Elephant's Dream was a huge technical achievement, but the final work was an abject failure as a film. A "movie" isn't just a series of pictures that appear to move when displayed in rapid succession. Tell me something. Move me. Give me a character I have a fighting chance of identifying with.
Do something to transcend mere moving-pictureness.
-Peter
Hmmm I got modded Flamebait for criticizing GIMP's UI.
now that hurts.
if you are developing a open source tool for artists - particularly in a market where the proprietary alternatives are deeply entrenched - why aren't you working with artists from day one to get the UI right?
That's right. Not only can they render movies that look like Hollywood movies, the scripts suck about as bad! This is easily on the level of a Disney movie, maybe with less cute talking animals.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Does/will the Elephants Dream and Peach DVD movies come with region locks, anti-skips, or other consumer-hostile technologies?
Elephants Dream was a success? You mean a film which almost no-one ever heard of, and almost all of those who watched it didn't like?
While it was cute to make an open-source film, it would also have been nice to have a decent plot and scripting. I've seen many better stories in flash on newsgrounds. Heck, I've seen better plots on ytmnd.com.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
Don't click, minicity link (as expected).
I have no problem with making an artsy movie that has hidden meanings, and clearly the Elephant's Dream guys knew what they were doing. It would be interesting if some folks with a bit more mainstream focus would pick up the ball and try it - it might really help Blender too.
Any movie is going to be judged by a combination of its technical achievements and its storytelling. A lot of the reviews I have read of Elephant's Dream are sort of "what was THAT about" and clearly that was an expected response. Fair enough. Now I'm curious to see if the ground breaking work can be used to create something with a bit more mainstream appeal, that the wider press could pick up and promote with the expectation that most viewers would be entertained. Are there free movie scripts being written anywhere? Maybe if there's a central forum with scripts being reviewed by a community a team could take one of the highly ranked ones and see what they can do with it.
Maybe we can make some "stars" in the Open Movie world - script writers, voice actors, what have you.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
This is perhaps the biggest problem of Elephant's Dream. Has the script been under some sort of review, I don't think it would have passed.
I think there's some irony to the fact that on virtually every level except as an good movies, Elephant's Dream is a huge success. As a demo reel for Blender, a way of making the workflow more usable, a means for enhancing the viability of Blender... a huge success.
But as a film... Not so much. It doesn't really tell a story, and the plot (such that it is) doesn't make sense. If this is all being imagined on the part of one of the characters, there's really nothing to let us know, and the "real" world fails to intrude. Who is this other character, and why are they together in the first place? It just doesn't work.
Project Peach takes a similar approach - while all the outputs of the project will eventually be open to the public, the actual process - plotting, character choices, storyboarding - are closed to the public. In theory, it's to prevent the "surprise" of the story from being spoiled. I'd argue that film experience something like "Cars" and "Toy Story" was just as good for the people who worked on the film as it was for those who didn't. In some cases, it was probably better, when they could finally see the fruits of their work come together.
In contrast, have a look at Animation:Master's Tin Woodman of Oz. Although they're a commercial project, the model is much more open than Blender's. The discussions are open on their boards, the animatics have been posted, and there's constantly open discussion about the project. Any member of the community can join in and contribute, from design, rigging, voice acting, music and animating. There's no "secrets" to the project.
Of course, you've got to be a paying customer to actually have a copy of Animation:Master in the first place, and their boards were notorious for banning people who complained about their products. It's also forbidden to discuss competing software in their forum.
Still, I think it's a model worth looking at, especially as a counter example to these so called "open" projects that Blender embarks where the end result isn't revealed until the end.
Yes, I'm aware that stuff is released on the blogs. Note that these often have censored bits, so particular bits of information about the film itself isn't leaked. Technical details are much more open.
I'm not arguing that the results - other than perhaps the video itself - aren't great. But I have to disagree strongly with the use of "open" tag as applied to the process itself. And TWO shows that a more open model is certainly viable in some forms (which put other constraints on the project, like increasing the time to market).
If you want to understand the difference between a tech demo and a movie - and how the evolution of a story teaches you mastery of your craft - you need look no farther than this: Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 1 [Blu-Ray $20]
"...It's about time we get some competition, but especially it's time someone makes a 3d program the average slashdot reader can understand and use." Ton Rosendahl I personally cannot wait for Blender to become simple enough for noobs everywhere to start rendering pictures of spheres. The 3d world can never have enough "first renders". Cluestick: Add a light and a camera, or your render will be black. Bonus points if you actually aim your camera at the object to be rendered.
It was technical demonstration, so don't feel too surprised it had a crapy plot. As far as video quality goes, I found this video quite nice.
More about it here
Because artists have no freakin' idea what a good UI is. The fact that all the major tools for modeling have completely horrid UIs is not a coincidence. 3d modeling apps are the proverbial kitchen sinks.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Don't want to see five pages of ads? Here's the one page, for-print version:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1111810628;fp;2;fpid;4;pf;1
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
why aren't you working with artists from day one to get the UI right?
Maybe because, since you're not interested in selling copies, you don't have an incentive to involve them in the development process?
For extra points, does the "selling service" model generally give an incentive to produce better or worse UIs than "selling licenses"? Discuss.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
on nikola tesla's life?
What is minicity? I've seen it quite a bit lately but don't know anything about it. Is it a shock site? Is it a virus?
About the scenario, these guys should take a look at A Swarm of Angels, which takes a much more open approach at creating a movie. The community can contribute to the two candidate scenarios being written. Then there will be a vote choosing between those two.
Here's an older Slashdot article about this project, "Creative Commons Filmmaking Remixes Modern Cinema", and the Wikipedia link.
Kinds played this: Sea Battle
And awesome game where you look through a parascope at little metal nazi submarines and you try to hit them with lightbulb torpedoes. Great fun, and the whole thing is made of solid steel, so it felt like you were using a real parascope... come to think of it, it might actually have been a real parascope.
It's not that easy.
Computer modeling and animation is a very complicated, very specialized sort of thing. It's a complicated piece of software, and you can't just expect that you can turn it on and start animating. Modeling and animation are complicated and hard.
It's a bit like complaining that the UI of a 747 is poorly designed. Compare Blender to any other advanced 3D software program, and you'll find that it's complexity is commensurate with the industry.
Blender's been designed to work in a particular way: one hand on the mouse, one hand on the keyboard. To make this work, you need to read the manual and learn the shortcuts.
Learn that, and Blender's a real joy to use. And the advanced Blender users aren't willing to give that up to make your life easier.
If you - like me - can't memorize arcane key combinations to save your life, you're screwed.
If you're looking for open software, try Art of Illusion or K3D. If you've got a bit of money, have a look at Animation:Master. I'm keeping an eye on JPatch, but that project seems to be stuck in single developer rewrite hell at the moment.
If you have ideas for a better UI, the Blender community is very open and will listen to what you have to say. Now, on the other hand, if you don't have any ideas on how to improve it, why blame the developers? The UI was designed by artists because Blender is used by artists. Believe it or not, that makes it very efficient for the artists to use. Yes, there is a learning curve since it does not look like every other 3D app, but that does not mean that it is lacking in quality.
But will the movie be safe, Emo? Emo, will it be safe? Emo!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Blender is great software with a not-so-great GUI. Actually, it's not so much that the GUI is badly thought up, it's that its learning curve is terribly steep at the beginning because it doesn't follow any of the usual UI conventions people are used to. You need to invest a few hours of learning upfront to feel comfortable at even the most basic tasks. I'm sure people who use Blender very frequently can be very productive with this GUI, but I'm also guessing that those people are outnumbered by several orders of magnitude by would-be occassional users that just end up giving up because the GUI is too unintuitive for them.
My hope would be that they implement a GUI for occassional users that follows the standard GUI conventions; it doesn't need to include all the more obscure features, because occassional users won't know how to use them anyway. Provided Blender's core functionality is properly separated from the GUI in the code, it probably shouldn't be much effort, and it would open up Blender to lots of new users.
I found blender's UI awesome.
It's all created using opengl so everything is zoomable and they've made it really easy to customise the way you layout your work space.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
The thing about Blender is that the UI is the keyboard. If you expect it to act like 3DStudio or Maya then you will forever be banging your head.
Throw away everything you know about what to click and follow the new Summer of Documentation tutorial they teach you all the keyboard shortcuts so they become intuitive in no time.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
nuff said
Uhm no, blender developers actually bragged that their UI was designed in close relationship with their users. In fact this movie wasn't really made to show off what blender was capable of doing but figuring out what was missing from the tool chain to make a feature length movie.
But... the future refused to change.
modo and silo have well done UIs. As does Mudbox. I was able to jump into all 3 with no problem. And before you say they're not major tools, I suggest you look around. A lot of work may be done in Maya, 3DS, etc, but a lot of modelers are moving to specialized apps for modeling. The thing with 3D modeling is it's still partly a technical exercise and not solely an artistic endeavor.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
I tried Blender briefly years ago, but haven't tried it recently. That said, I use the keyboard heavily for my Maya work, same with all other 3D apps I use and have used, save trueSpace years ago. In fact, with the exception of very rarely used tools, every tool in my tool chest of apps is basically initiated with a keystroke.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
That's partly because they try to combine modelling - with two or three different paradigms: polygons, NURBS and subdivision surfaces - texturing, rigging, animating, physics, particles, hair, etc. into a single program. Of course the end result is a horrible mess where it's impossible to find what you want. Which, I suppose, is a long-winded way to say that they're kitchen sinks ;).
Ultimately, the problem is that 2D modeling - drawing - has traditionally been the domain of artists, while 3D modeling has been the domain of engineers and architechts. Artists don't have to know or care about mathemathics, while engineers and architechts have to. Their tools reflect this: brushes vs. millimeter paper. This division has been carried to the computer realm. It is straightforward to paint with Gimp - point and click a place in the screen, and color is added there - but the very first thing any 3D program manual starts talking about is polygons, and then goes on to explain the mathemathical foundation of NURBS. The limits of 2D screens and pointing devices don't exactly help, either.
To top it all off, the popular OBJ format used to exchange 3D models completely fails to retain any of the all-important rigging or animation loop information. As a result, these models are fine if you want to do an image of Lot's wife but not otherwise. We desperately need a higher-level file format which captures rigging, animation cycles (such as walk cycle) and automatic things like blinking and breathing, as well as unconscious gestures, body language and such. In short, a file format to describe a digital actor. The current stuff is the equivalent of assembly, and about as efficient for large projects: good for the CPU, horrible to anyone who has to do anything with it.
And, of course, all this is completely ignoring all the stupid little things like polygons caving into the model like the empty shells they are, NURBS models breaking at seams, the utter masslessness of any model unless the animator specifically goes over each frame and figures out how inertia and gravity affect things, inverse kinetics chains flip-flopping in certain situations, etc.
I wonder when we'll get even the abstraction level equivalent of ANSI C for 3D; compared to the current stuff, it seems pure sci-fi.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
After using a few 3D things I would say the only two ways to stop a confusing UI is either to hide a lot of options and rely on the users memory to find them (the MS twisty menu passages idea) or go 2D.
It is quite comparable in feature set and productivity to most high end 3D apps now (a few rough edges still - ie lack of a fast materials preview using OpenGl acceleration). Its modifier stack, SDS, sculpting, compositing tools, have recieved accolades from users of other software users. With the current SVN builds we have cutting edge animating, skinning, and rigging tools, and a pretty high quality particle and hair implementation. Also the rendering system is getting some really cutting edge stuff as well - see Brechts post about approximate ambient occlusion - http://peach.blender.org/index.php/approximate-ambient-occlusion/ .
Anyone who has failed to be impressed with past versions of Blender, should really consider giving the next release a try, I expect that you'll be 'blown away'.
LetterRip
Blender started it's life as an internal tool at a Dutch studio (NeoGeo). So in fact, it was designed with the target artists in the loop.
And pretty much shows you why it's actually a bad idea :
- When you let hardcore artists design an interface, they'll design what's most efficient for them : an obscure interface where absolutely every function is a short-cut and available at the finger tips. The hardcore artists will be able to use it blindingly fast. The problem will be that they're going to be the only able to actually use the software, because they'll be the only ones to whom the keyboard short-cuts make a sense.
- Blender had to become open source before some member of the community took the time and the effort to make nice contextual menus.
Tools developed internal for the target audience are the worse, because the devel/users focus mainly on utilisation speed and completely neglect the learning curve because they don't need to learn the software in the first place, as they're the one who build it.
To produce more accessible tools, you actually need to have a larger community, that includes people specialised in designing good UIs and people who have to start learning the tool and which will report where the tools isn't obvious to learn using.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Why should the download be 450 megs? Surely you can just download the source code, make sure Blender is installed, and type 'make'?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Elephants Dream was a success? You mean a film which almost no-one ever heard of, and almost all of those who watched it didn't like?
Who cares if it sucks? Fantasmagoria wasn't exactly an amazing piece of work by today's standards, but as the world's first cartoon (1908) it was a good indicator of things to come.
Yes, including your beloved Family Guy...
This is a trend-setting movie, underscored by the woes of the MPAA and RIAA. Media is moving away from centralized cathedrals and moving inexorably towards individualized bazaars. Nothing that the **AA can do will change this fact, since it's really a consequence of technology getting forever cheaper.
The plot is weak, the voice acting is terrible. But like Fantasmagoria, it kicks off a trend of forever-improving material.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
LetterRip
All I ever hear about is how they're using Blender for the movie. However, 3d modelling and animation is only a part of the production process. What I want to know is what other programs are they using?
What audio programs are they using? They've got to record dialog somehow (unless it's a silent movie.)
Which video editing programs? You know, like organizing scenes, cutting the "negatives," etc.
I think the promotion of the video editing programs would be more beneficial than promotion of Blender itself, as many more people are interested in doing things with camcorders than 3d modelling.
There's always one.
Blender was a fantastic UI which is very powerful if you haven't been polluted by other interfaces. But that's okay, you go back to using notepad, I'm happy with vi.
Moaning about the blender interface on /. is about as useful and interesting as me moaning about how slow and complicated Photoshop is to use because it's not like the GIMP. Seriously it took me a few minutes to figure out how to resize an image in Photoshop recently because I haven't used it in about seven years.
"Blender's UI sux" comments have been done to death. They are boring and pointless. If you have a need to use it, learn the UI, otherwise quit whining, or go and whine at say 3D Max developers for creating a UI that is so slow and inefficient and takes so much unhealthy mouse work to get basic things done that they have forever closed your mind to new possibilities.
I don't therefore I'm not.
If coding was easy everyone we be an expert C++. But that takes time and patience to learn and so do 3d modeling applications. There is a lot of whining going around about how hard blender is to learn, but the truth is it isn't any harder to learn than any other advanced computer related activty./P.
once more into the breach
someone find a tutorial for this dude,
then we can speculate in a month's time.
Maybe more "access" to the program is the solution idiots.
3D through a 2D window will inherently be messy but I do not believe most UIs are terrible. The reason most UIs are awful is because the artist wants to customize it later, will use hotkeys almost exclusively and rely on playing one tool off of another as seamlessly as possible.
Take Maya's hotbox for instance. I wish I could have the hotbox in every application I use. It's my favorite interface paradigm ever developed.
Each application has a specific way of working that once understood is almost always fast and fluent.
Yes worrying about edge topology etc can be a chore, but it's much less so now with sculpting applications and a good foundation on good edge flow.
The math isn't invisible yet, but it's pretty close.
To suggest that
Install Blender, open Blender, press F12 and you have a render of a cube. The default scene in a new Blender install comes with a plain cube, a camera aimed at it and a point light. If you want a sphere delete the cube and add a sphere. If you want it to be coloured add a material to it. Nothing beats reading the documentation to find out how something works
That's what makes it such a terrible UI. If a program starts out with an admonition that it has completely thrown out all existing UI conventions, it's an admission of failure, IMHO. Think of what a pain in the ass it would be if every program or new piece of hardware did this.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Exactly. It's like complaining that the Violin is difficult to learn. People get results out of a tool based on the effort they're willing to put into it.
I think that is going a bit too far.
Perspective drawing is surely an exercise in mathematics. If you are trying to capture motion, abstract forms in nature. - the shape of a cloud, the power of a wave breaking against the rocks. - you are probably thinking mathematically on some level.