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."

Comments

Success

[reality-bytes]

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. ;)

Re:Success

[realmolo]

Yes, in the open-source world, success is measured differently.

For example, in the land of open-source projects, having a premium "Mrskin.com" account would be the equivalent of "successfully" copping a feel off of Angelina Jolie.

Re:Success

[jgarra23]

Yes, in the open-source world, success is measured differently.

For example, in the land of open-source projects, having a premium "Mrskin.com" account would be the equivalent of "successfully" copping a feel off of Angelina Jolie.

Not only that, a fork would actually be copping a feel from Brad Pitt.

Youtube

[CaptainPatent]

For those of you who haven't seen Elephants dream and don't want to tolerate the 450MB download, here's the Youtube link.

Re:Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if you're a troll or not, but seriously?

I'll admit that Elephants Dream is a bit strange, but its certainly not dull. In fact, unsurprisingly, it sort of exists as a tech demo of what Blender can do, which makes watching it on YouTube rather akin to brail pr0n.

Your other comments are both absurd, Blenders renderer is state of the art, and quite competitive with anything Max can produce as the gallery will contest, plus it has Yafray which kicks arse. As for the GUI, 3D graphics is complicated, and so are the GUI's. A professional learns multiple GUIs and accepts that each has its pluses and minuses. Lesser peons learn just one interface and bash the others when they turn out to be different.

Re:Youtube

[Corwn of Amber]

I'd like to point out that workflow decisions can only be made when you know the whole of your tool. I've seen people lose years of time, because they couldn't be bothered to learn how to do things in the ways the toolmakers already thought about.

Re:Youtube

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

If you understand the concept of 3d modeling already, a good UI should take no time to learn.. none. If you don't understand the concepts, sure, there may be some period of learning required, but the UI of your modeling app should aid that learning process.

3d modeling tools are seen as technical products for a technical audience.. as such the UI is given no serious consideration. Your first statement is partly true, but not entirely. First, each app has a different philosophy behind its work flow. In that sense, no, understanding 3d modelling doesn't guarantee a '0 time to learn' by any stretch of the imagination. For example: Lightwave has a modeler app. You build your model in that app, then load it in Layout and animate it. The benefit is that the tools are designed around direct vertex manipulation. It's very easy to get a nice clean model with no extra invisible points etc. The added bonus is since LW's scene has to load the object in, then modify it, you can easily modify an object later and it won't rock the boat of what's going on in layout. (In other words, you can easily update a character's model after it has been animated. Though not impossible in other apps, it's typically less elegant.) Maya, however, has a different approach. Its idea of modeling involves piling on a series of modifiers/nodes onto some geometry. If you want to slice along the polys of a cube, for example, a 'split node' is attached to the object that modifies the geometry for that result. You can then go back and modify it.

On the surface, you end up with a similar toolset. Both Maya and Lightwave have the split/slice polygon tools. However, the philosophies behind them really make that common toolset problematic. For example, Lightwave doesn't have a modifier based operation. It's like Photoshop in that respect. You mess with the vertices, blammo, you're done. This gives you tools like "Dragnet". That tool allows you to grab an area of verticies and pull, just like working with clay. Maya, however, can't do any operations on geometry without creating a modifier. So if you want to do a tool like I described, you have to create a 'dragnet' node, place its start point, then move it to the destination. That's a good deal slower than how Lightwave handles it.

This is an over-simplification of what's involved, but it more or less illustrates the problem with your statement. I'd liken it to watercolors vs. oil paints. They both require paint and a paint brush, but the techniques involved are nearly inverses of each other. With Lightwave, you model by cutting a lot of pieces away. With Maya, you model bending pieces into shape since its work flow lends itself to doing lots of deformations. To put it another over-simplified way: Lightwave would be better suited to modeling something vehicular with rigid pieces. Maya, however, would totally kick Lightwave's ass when modelling something with a lot of hoses and other bendable things, like the Sentinels from the Matrix. The difference is in the workflow philosophies of these apps, not their toolsets. It's a lot harder to cross-train modelers between apps than you'd expect.

3d modeling tools are seen as technical products for a technical audience.. as such the UI is given no serious consideration. I'm not sure how to read this statement. Either you're saying that the UI isn't developed for the mass audience (which is true, and I have no argument at all with) or you're saying that UI's are just tacked on and the artsts just deal with it, which does happen, but isn't generally true. UIs for 3D apps are developed around the philosophy of the app. If that philosophy isn't understood, then the UI makes no sense. Give a Photoshop guru a copy of Illustrator and tell him to do work in it, and he'll tell you the UI's bad. Different philosophy. A lot of work actually does go into the UI of 3D apps. The problem is you cannot take something as vast as '3D' and slim it down to a UI philosophy like you can with something like Photoshop. Yes, 3D apps aren't unituitive or psychic, but no, it isn't for lack of trying.

Good things coming from the Blender crowd

[Facetious]

I have particularly been watching their open game.

Apricot

[chubs730]

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.

True open source coming to the Big Screen soon

[LetterRip]

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

Success?

[goldspider]

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.

Re:Success?

[RobBebop]

I think Hollywood and conventional wisdom have perverted the term "success" for their own power so that it implies "commercial success".

A more general definition is "an achievement of an objective or goal". To some extent, this is rather arbitrary but having created my own movies (all videos licensed under Creative Commons), I would say that it would be a success for them to just finish it.

Now, to inject my own selfish opinion into the argument of the definition of what success might be for an "Open" project like this, I would list the following, "an work that makes a positive contribution to the culture of humanity". It doesn't have to be a large contribution, but as long as people can gain something from it (a lesson, some entertainment, faith and hope) then it would qualify in my mind as a "success".

This is what I aim for when I mark a publication with the Creative Commons license (which, in addition to the movies, includes this).

Advice

[pete-classic]

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

Success of Elephants Dream?

[Chris_Jefferson]

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.

Anyone doing a less "artsy" project?

[starseeker]

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.

From the last time Blender got flamed on Slashdot

[shadowman99]

"...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.

5 pages?

[dotancohen]

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

Re:Conceptual success

[spoco2]

But two things were lacking on that front
producing quality content for films.: It really wasn't quality at all, I didn't find anything impressive at all in regards to the animation or texture/overall look. So even disregarding the plot I found it substandard.

and secondly, if it had been a story that was actually INTERESTING then maybe they would have helped their cause so, so much more. ("Man, did you see that crazy [funny/sad/emotional] cg film on the net... that was awesome" "I did, and did you know it was completely done with FREE software! Crazy... crazy") By ignoring a plot and any semblance of making it at all engaging they by and large wasted their efforts. A little bit of pre planning/script writing would have gone a LOOOOONG way.

Nice idea, Emo.

[Trogre]

But will the movie be safe, Emo? Emo, will it be safe? Emo!

Re:Blender

[ultranova]

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.

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.

Sign of times to come...

[mcrbids]

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.

Re:A Swarm of Angels

[montyzooooma]

A Swarm Of Angels has been a frustrating experience for me. I was initially very interested with it but it became apparent that there is a creative team in place who make the decisions and then these decisions are put to the vote. So you're voting on which of the creative teams visions you go for. I don't think there is any significant material input into the creative project by the swarm.

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.