Slashdot Mirror
Blender Debuts Fourth Open Source Movie: Tears of Steel
An anonymous reader writes "On September 26th the Blender Foundation released their fourth open source short movie called Tears of Steel. This time around, Blender, the fantastic open source 3d modeling/animation/shading/rendering package, was used to mix 3D digital content with live action (PDF). The short was produced using only open source software and the team did an outstanding job."
And thanks to George Lucas for supporting the project. His vision made it possible.
Not entirely open source software! Main Sponsors: NVIDIA
I bet you they used the NVIDIA binary drivers!
I found their previous open movie, Sintel, to be a better short in both story and effects, but nevertheless, they did a fine job.
As a filmmaker and a graphics artist these days, I like Blender and its idea behind it, I really do. This is a copy of what I wrote on my blog about all that: The CGI on this movie still looks like VFX animation and not realistic. It looks fake. Camera tracking is good, modelling seems ok, but lighting and animation aren’t. There are no shadows to talk about, everything it’s too HDR-ish. If that’s what Blender can do in 2012, then color me unimpressed. That’s no Hollywood-worthy CGI. And let’s not forget that this movie was produced by the Blender guys themselves, with hand-picked Blender artists.
Unfortunately, that quality is not even good enough for TV anymore. Sure, there have been worse VFX on TV than what Blender can do, for example the re-imagined version of “V”, but thing is, there have been better ones too. Back in 2010, Stargate:Universe had some amazing VFX in some episodes, more realistic than anything I’ve seen on TV, before or after. An even more important point for TV is the time it takes to do things with the app (since their deadlines are extremely strict). Blender is not that easy to use, Maya can do better, faster.
That doesn't mean that Blender is useless. It’s not. You can’t beat its price and features in the advertising sector (which doesn't require extreme realism, it mostly needs some animation tricks), schools (for obvious reasons), or as a hobbyist artist. Blender can also prove to be a life-saver for indie filmmakers who primarily have the time to deal with Blender (rather than the money to buy other packages). So if *I* was doing an indie short movie, I would use Blender, because it's good-enough for what I would need to do, and I have indefinite time on my hands. So it’s got its uses in the world. It’s just that I don’t see it being able to compete for Hollywood movies and serious TV shows.
Loved it! Man, those graphics are stunning. I never would have thought Blender would turn into this all those years ago.
I enjoyed watching. I like the stuff coming out of Blender. I just wish I could find a 3d artist who wanted to do a virtual world with me. I wrote code for an action MMORPG engine over 7 years, but no artist ever wanted to sign on to do 3d models. Ah, I can always revisit it in the future.
God spoke to me
europe's going to fix hollywood by taking over ^___^ (no more sucky movie starting NOW!)
First of all, I should say that the Mango team really did a great job! Cheers.
So the rest of you know, the project was on a very small budget, and in general, the movies are used to develop Blender itself by adding new features that will be taken advantage of in the movie itself. For example, this movie was a test bed for the new Cycles render engine and the motion tracker (which was pretty darn good).
While some of the animation was a little robotic in spots, and the color could have used a little more tweaking, the software itself is actually very capable of achieving "Hollywood" looks, but there just isn't enough time or man power available to critique it to such a point.
For those of you interested, take a look at Cycles, it can do GPU (CUDA, OpenCL is alpha quality atm) or CPU, and can give some _very_ realistic results (google around for some samples, trust me). Also, the motion tracker does a phenomenal job, if you have the time to spend to get "perfect" results. Combine all that with stuff like physics engines for stuff like fluids, smoke or just simple rag doll physics and you can get some really neat animations. But I should warn that the amount of processing power you need to do even short animations can be quite high.
Anyways, as someone in the community over the years, all I can say is check it out and and be sure to visit http://blendernation.com to keep up on the news and see thousands of images and movies that other professionals are making with blender.
PS - Don't forget that the Mango team was split between developing, bug fixing AND making the movie at the same time (at least for some of the artists), so keep that in mind :)
Cheers
I don't know if there is some sort of TOP SECRET BURN BEFORE READING link to a pdf (or other download) for the current version but there are several things about Blender i would like to know how to do.
Oh and if you respond with JFGI or anything that is not a current (2.63 )DOWNLOAD of a TEXT then i will assume you are also sending me a large sum of money via email
1 in UV painting how do you setup a model with an existing texture for UV paint??
2 for that matter how do you link a texture to a material (to use for UV paint)
3 is there a way to simplify a mesh without ripping the mesh apart?? (ie remove 30% of the verts and have the surfaces reclosed)
of course if you are a blender wizard i have a few fairly simple things i need for the MakeHuman project (not looking for an exclusive and yes i will credit you for the work).
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Now I've seen it, what's it about?
AccountKiller
"Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License". link
"The film itself -- as well as original footage and all the studio files -- will be released as free and open content; the Creative Commons Attribution license". link
AccountKiller
Humans vs machines, how original. Acting sucked by the way, so did the plot.
Ah...the feeling is mutual when it comes to post titles that stopped being funny a decade ago.
This movie is hit and miss. The bottom line for the Blender Foundation is to get people talking about Blender. Nobody really expected their underdog 3d program to be able to produce amazing visual effects. The more of these movies they produce, the more people will be talking about Blender.
However, what they could stand to produce are movies that tell a more compelling story. Is it visually compelling? Sure, but Tears of Steel leaves the audience with all sort of questions about what is happening, who the characters are, what is at stake....and we haven't a clue.
Memory overwrite at 90%!
Captain! We have to abort!
Jesus, a 13 year old would find this embarrassing.
And Normand Brathwaite wants credit for "larmes de metal".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7rR0JQW3W4
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is too heavy.
Well.
For the first time ever, the computer-generated part is more believable than the human-acted part.
So therefore this kind of thing will make it into the next big movie...with real actors.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Not being one for cussing and memes, I just watched the shit out of a fucking well made movie! I tried to be criticial of the CGI, but as a casual movie watcher I found the effects more than good enough to easily get caught up in the story. If the goal was to make software capable of tightly integrated special effects, I say well done. And people are already working to make it better? Get outta here you vector render wizards, I already have enough trouble telling fake photos from their pixels.
"The CGI on this movie still looks like VFX animation and not realistic. It looks fake. Camera tracking is good, modelling seems ok, but lighting and animation aren't."
Maybe a movie with such a ridiculous plot isn't meant to be realistic? Unrequited love brings the world to ruin but in the end love still saves the day. Really?
Take a look at the mango juice the black sniper sips. It should have been easy enough to turn the carton in something that resembles a real world brand instead it looks like a generic stage prop simply labeled MANGO, the project code name. Look also at the retro pixelated font used for the text output on the computer terminals. If this were a realistic movie set in a future where virtual reality has become a reality, you'd expect something at least as crystal as Apple's vaunted retina display. There's also that large button that turns red and displays "ERROR!!!" when something goes wrong, a sure sign that this is comic sci-fi.
So yes the stylistic look appears to be deliberate. You can see examples of such CGI unrealism mostly in fantasy movies like Lord of the Rings, but Tears of Steel isn't exactly straight-up hard sci-fi.
By coincidence, a printout of SlashDot that fell through a wormhole from 1,000 years in the future included a story with the summary "On September 26th the Bender Foundation released their fourth open source short movie called Tears of Steel."
Rumors have it that it's about an anonymous robot who runs out of Olde FORTRAN Malt Liquor, and so is unable to drown his sorrow at the realization that his lazy *** is failing at its prime directive: to kill all humans.
I liked the part where they made the boy rerun various lines to see if the outcome of the discussion would be different. And they had previous attempts listed on a chalkboard. Who hasn't sometimes played around with the idea of trying various permutations and seeing how the future shapes.
By the way the bots kind of reminded me of Alyx's "dog" in Half-Life 2.
Horrible directing, most of the acting (they can thank the director for this), the fight scene timing, the directing, the cinemetography, the plot, the script, the shadowless fakeness, the 2nd rate green screen, the IN YOUR FACE graphics calling waaay too much attention to itself, the creepy cult-like enthusiasm it has of itself... It says, look at the (literal) crap you can make with Blender, now go watch a good movie made with Maya/3ds Max.
Have seen all of the films from blender so far. This one is their best. The human guys in the background were acting less than the robots.
~ Best man at your service.
As a 15 year veteran of the film and vfx industry, I was impressed by this short. The story, acting and directing sucked, but the vfx were impressive for what it is.
Blender will be used by major hollywood productions in the near future, as Autodesk buy up every decent piece of software and ruin them.
The problems I saw were more in compositing and art direction in general, aside from the creative side of things.
Great work!
As one of the people who helped pay to free Blender from it's commercial heritage, I love to see the kinds of things people are doing with it, even if I rarely use it myself.
Blender is anything but easy to get into. For the complete neophyte, what are the best sources of documentation in order to learn how to learn it without getting frustrated?
Note, I'm not talking about a series of "this is Button XYZ, and here's what it does by itself", but rather "here is a practical end-goal, and these are the steps you must follow in order to achieve said goal".