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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
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
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
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
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.
on nikola tesla's life?
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
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?
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.
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
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.
They used Reaktor, which is a bit disappointing. Reaktor is more mature than OSS equivalents like om or its successor whose name eludes me now. I'm sure if they had chosen someone else to do sound, someone who knows Linux audio, they could have had fully open source production of the same technical quality. Of course artistic/creative quality can't be measured the same way.
The fact that they didn't use open source sound appears to be entirely because Jan Morgenstern didn't know the toolset and not becuase it was insufficient. It's a shame.
It would be great to see a project like this provide feedback for Ardour, Rosegarden, various plugin developers, etc, or even lead to closer interaction between blender and jack.
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
Shares are being sold in the movie project but there is no chance to participate in profits, in the event that any profits are made. So while the project is on-going some people are being paid for their input and work (fair enough) while those "investing" have no hope of a return on investment over and above whatever entertainment they get from the forums and the opportunity to vote on what colour the poster will be (check it out if you don't believe me but last time I looked you needed to join to view the forums). To me this looks like an ideal investment plan for a potential film-maker - you get your money, you don't have to pay any of it back and individual investors are too small to have any control over you.
There was an initial flurry of activity on the forums then a bit of a gap in official communications while people on the forums talked a load of bull about scripts. Then we heard that a tentative initial script outline was going to be debuted at an upcoming convention, without any creative input from the swarm. At that point I realized it was smoke and mirrors and haven't been back since. If it's turned into some democratic creative Utopia since then my apologies to them.
Now I appreciate that a ship needs a captain and any project like this needs a creative vision but the implied promise was that that vision would be shaped by the members but I don't feel that was the case.