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Trailer For Blender Open Movie Sintel Ready
l_i_g_h_s_p_e_e_d writes "The trailer for Sintel is ready. (We discussed the beginnings of this project in 2007.) Sintel is a Blender Open Movie project created using only FLOSS software. 'For the entire creation pipeline in the studio, we will only use free/open source software. We have less than two months now to finish this completely. ... Imagine the tension that's building up here to get everything perfect. For today, we'll celebrate a big step forward.' Download here."
Quickly, Downolad! To the Up-mobile!
I've been following this movie for a while now and wish them the best of luck. It's not too late to buy a copy of the movie and every purchase they make allows them to work longer on the movie.
(We discussed the beginnings of this project in 2007.)
Well, that is incorrect. You've linked to an article about Peach and Apricot projects, both of which were completed.
This is a seperate, 4th project, Durian (Orange being the first)
Latest estimate in fact is eleven and a half minutes, minus credits.
1080p Trailer:
Ogg Theora 43M
Mp4 H.264 15M
Léa Gris
You completely miss the point of the project. They don't want to make a movie for profit, like studios would, but they want to make a move to determine what they need to do to improve the authoring software and do that while making the short movie.
It's a collaboration between the artists and the developers, that work on the next major version of blender (2.5x) and will directly interact during the project (they'll work in the same location).
They also want to use it as PR to get people interested in the software, use it, improve it, contribute to current and future projects with development, feedback, community activity and money.
They do a very good job with that IMO.
I wrote it in Open Office, atop Linux, with a stuffed penguin on my desk.
What's it about? you ask.
Does it matter? I said, "It's an Open Source Book!" Aren't you paying attention?
Hey, I know, I'll license it under Creative Commons, how's that? Now it'll be really good!
If you are interested in supporting this project you can preorder the DVD which will come with the complete 3D, texture, and assets to make the film under CC Attribution 3.0 - http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info_n.php?products_id=120
Like all Blender Institute open movie projects, these help to drive forward Blenders capabilities and put them to the test in a production environment.
Some of the major improvements that have happened for this project are things like increasing how many millions of polygons our sculpting tools can handle (45 million on decent hardware); another major upgrade to our animation tools; improving our rendering quality; improvements in simulation quality; and of course numerous interface upgrades.
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And it seems this movie will contain a lot more dialog than the first FLOSS movie (where the only conversation was: "emo." "EMO!" "emo?").
for a fair comparison you need to know the data spent for equal quality, and I don't think you know that here
This comparison shows that Xvid, x264 at H.264 Baseline Profile, and Theora are all fairly close, but x264 Main Profile needs about half the data for a given quality.
they're not even playing catch up right now. read the summary
The summary has a large number of errors and was written by someone without any affiliation with the project, nor apparently even a clear understanding of the basics of the project. Also while in some aspects we are playing catchup, in others we are pulling ahead of the competition.
There have been some technical issues on the project that are currently being worked on but all 3D animation projects have technical issues throughout production, especially ambitious project.
i don't intend to be rude or belittle others' hard work (harder than i have ever done), but if you really want to make a movie, you don't care about the politicks behind your tools. you simply use the best available, which let you bring your idea/story to life most easily, letting you concentrate on the movie making part.
This isn't about the 'politics', the film is a test project for the tool robustness etc - all Pixar animated shorts you've seen are also tech demos. Animated shorts happen to be a really good way to iron out the bugs in 3D technology improvements. Just as with Pixar animated shorts, the artists take pride in their work and want it to have artistic merit and entertainment value. Our artists have the added motivation of the short film being used as a promotional tool for Blender.
otoh, what these people are doing is essentially a compromise. they want to develop software as well as make a movie. and in my experience compromises in art usually don't work. an artist does not care about anything but his creation.
You've misunderstood the goals. There isn't a compromise because the goal is mostly about the 3D software.
and yes, it is quite sad to see the graphics quality somewhat worse than crysis running with all effects on. i have always been excited by open source sw and cc licensed works of art but at times like these i realize that without lots of financial backing, mainstream movies are just not possible. and that kind of money you won't get if you plan to give away your product for free.
Crysis had a budget about 50-100 times larger than the budget for this film - watching the cutscenes - there is no hair, no cloth simulation, no subsurface scattering effects, almost all of the surfaces including the bodys of the characters are hard surfaces which is trivial to animate, light and render. The body animation is all motion capture and facial capture (and not high quality at that). The texture quality in Crysis is far worse. Your visual acuity appears to be lacking if you think that Crysis has superior visuals or animation skill. Also the Durian project has another 2 months of time left before completion and most of that will be polishing related.