Slashdot Mirror
Creative Commons Video Challenges Hollywood's Best
Supercharged_Z06 writes "A short film entitled Sintel was released by the Blender Foundation under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (YouTube link). It was created by an international team of artists working collaboratively using a free, open source piece of 3D rendering software called Blender. No Hollywood studio was involved in its making. Pretty remarkable what can be generated these days with open source software and some dedicated, creative talent. If a short film of this quality can be produced without Hollywood right now, imagine what will appear a few more years down the road."
The question here is that talent alone cannot create anything without the right tools. Artists shouldn't have to sell their souls to buy their supplies.
Van Gogh had to make his own paint because he was so poor he couldn't afford to buy it. Blender is Van Gogh's paint.
They're going to be distributing not just the movie, but everything you need to re-create the movie (or a derivative work). The movie itself is only 14 minutes long, but the full distribution takes 4 DVDs! All under a CC license. Hard to see how you could call this anything but an open source movie!
it so happens that most artists just aren't willing to donate their free time for some illusory cause.
Funny, that's what they used to say about programmers! And, of course, no musician has ever put on, say, a benefit concert for charity. Everyone knows that true artists are motivated entirely by money and nothing else.
The movies (and games) that the Blender Foundation sponsors serve two purposes.
First, they act as a showcase for the technologies currently available.
Secondly, and far more important for the software, the work flow and features required by modern animation teams drives the development of the Blender on. Sintel is built with the latest generation of Blender - 2.5 - which is still in beta. The requirements of Sintel have been developed in Blender in tandem.
Someone said 'it looks like a game trailer'. While I suspect it was intended as a put-down, it is actually a tremendous compliment. Modern computer games pack huge artistic and development muscle, cost tens of millions of dollars to develop and pull in the technical muscle of huge companies. That Blender can enable a small team of deveopers, animators and digital artists to produce something like shows the capabilities of the team and the software.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
[...] it does lack a number of very important features for professional work. But it's perfectly competent within it's limitations. I don't use it, I use Photoshop because I need some of those important features
For over ten years now, whenever GIMP is compared to Photoshop somewhere on the net, invariably someone comes out of the woodwork claiming that GIMP lacks "certain professional features". Every time, I inquire politely what these features might be. What is it that "professionals" do or need that the GIMP can not do or provide?
I have never gotten an answer. Not once.
The one thing that is invariably mentioned is that Photoshop somehow allows you to work in a cmyk space. Which is of course the mark of the UNprofessional hack, since real professionals worry about light. Composition. Art. And leave the technology details of the print process to a bit of code that does the cmyk separation after the fact (which the GIMP has been doing for many years).
I have thus given up. I have concluded that those who claim some kind of "missing professional features" are just tools that have been duped into shelling out major dollars for an image editor; with capabilities that they could have gotten for free.
You too, as usual, claim some vague "features" that the GIMP is supposedly lacking. Which is a lie, of course: if there were any truth to it you would have mentioned such features to strengthen your point. Which you can't, because you've never actually used the GIMP.
Right now, of course, you're frantically googling in an attempt to find some such features you can then post here in some childish attempt to show me wrong. And of course you will deny having done so. 'Tis par for the course on the internets, I guess.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.