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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!
Blender isn't perfect but Maya has it's own bag of very frustrating issues. Almost nobody uses Maya straight out of the box anyway. Most major studios do a serious amount of custom development to get Maya into a workable state and while Mental Ray is a very good renderer, Maya's internal is not at all. FWIW, there is a Blender exporter for MR as well, but i'm not sure how developed it is. If you don't like the look of Cycles, which is understandable since it's still in it's infancy and needs a lot of work (it doesn't even support true motion blur yet, although it can output motion vectors), there are any number of external renderers. The advantage to Cycles is that it's a path tracer that runs on the GPU and can give you realtime feedback in the viewport that is identical to a render (WYSIWYG). It's very very fast, but still needs a lot of work to bring up the level of accuracy and usability. Absolutely it's not ready for Hollywood out of the box, but if studios, collectively, all put the same amount of work into Blender as they did into developing scripts, plugins, and so on for commercial projects, it would be ready. It would be nice if studies could learn to cooperate like that. If they did, not only could they shatter the Autodesk monopoly, they could take the software out of the equation and focus more on things like artist talent and so on.
Ya know, YouTube has this setting where you can watch movies in HTML5 instead of Flash and then put the setting higher than 360p, maybe closer to 720p.
As far as an independent demo, this is pretty awesome. This isn't a multi-million dollar Hollywood cutscene or even a video game cutscene - this is a freaking demo made by some art students and a set of programmers that is supposed to show off how these scenes render natively without any post-production modification or filtering.
If you ask me, the effects were on par with the effects in the Transformers blockbusters in terms of quality. The render could use some polishing up in some places but for a tech demo this is pretty good.
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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.
It's a good job that making hollywood movies isn't the only reason to use a 3d package then. Considering the software is free and (I'm assuming) the artists involved have not been paid hollywood cgi money for their involvement, this movie is very impressive. The story was not, however.
Maya is quite an under featured and buggy if you use it out of the box. Autodesk add a few new features each iteration, but rarely fix long standing bugs or improve polygon modelling tools or productivity features like better and more consistent real-time feedback. As far as I'm concerned, Maya's best features are the animation tools, the ability to animate just about any parameter and the ease of customisation. Where I work, for almost every step of production other than animation, external software or plug-ins are used to do the major work. Here are a few examples: Nex for modelling, zbrush for high poly modelling, uvunwrap for uv mapping, octane for rendering. I mostly do 2d so I can't recall the other plugins used, but I'm pretty sure almost every step has some plugin that is used over the default tool because the in Maya the default tool is often no good.
That's not to say you can't do great things with out of the box Maya, it's just way more hassle to get good results.
Blender feels fairly solid and polished, but I have to admit that I HATE the non-standard interface and controls... Why the fuck does the left mouse button by default do nothing (well, it moves the pivot thing, but that's basically the same thing when you are just getting started), why can't you deselet objects (aside from pressing a to toggle ALL on off), why do you have to press a key to activate anything, why is it so easily to accidentally move objects? The keyboard shortcuts are mental. Instead of mapping the most common translations to qwer (select, move, rotate, scale), where they are easy to find, they are on g (grab), r (rotate) and s (scale). What happens if your primary language is not English? What useful meaning do those bindings have? There are too many single key controls that do major things that you might accidentally press... I could go on. Then I watch some Blender tutorial and the person doing the tutorial seems to have no problems with the UI and I just feel like I'm a retard.
Somehow, however, I feel like I can trust Blender more than Maya - I just have this feeling that Maya is built on top of a massive horrible messy codebase that the programmers don't really control anymore - but Blender's UI keeps me from getting used to it since I have to keep using Maya at work - it's very hard to switch between the two because the interfaces are so different.