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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.
NVIDIA might have supported them as a matter of advertising, since it is a GPU related project.
> Come buy our stuff, it was used to render that movie you liked!
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.
The renderer they used is a GPU based path tracer called Cycles (there is a CPU fallback as well but in comparison it's very, very, very slow). The renderer supports both OpenCL and NVIDIA's CUDA but is a lot faster more mature with CUDA... and yes, to take advantage to CUDA in Linux you do need to use the NVIDIA binaries so far as I know. I'm not familiar with the details but if NVIDIA has supplied hardware to the blender foundation it could explain CUDA being more mature.
Yeah. My portfolio could use work but anything I said inaccurate?
Now I've seen it, what's it about?
AccountKiller
On topic 3 I recommend the "remesh" or "decimate" modifiers.
"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
The current docs are mostly available here. As to your first two questions, they are pretty well covered in the manual. As to the third question, there is really no good way to do it while preserving decent topology and UVs. If you have a messy mesh, you probably want to retopologize it and lay out new UVs. You might want to use 2.4 for this and, when you're done, import it into 2.6. I say this becuase I know the tools in 2.4 are good and haven't yet used the 2.6 tools for this (they went through a massive redesign and the documentation was apparently never written). If you're lucky you can bake/project your old mesh's texture onto the new mesh but i'm not sure if Blender can do that (there are, however, programs that can, although I can't think of any open source at the moment).
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.
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"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.
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.
Thanks. I appreciate it. I haven't updated that site in about 3 years (busy with work and other stuff), but might do it in the future. Check back in a few months.