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."

Comments

Kudos to Blender!

[Anonymous Coward]

And thanks to George Lucas for supporting the project. His vision made it possible.

It still has a long way ahead

[Eugenia Loli]

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.

Re:It still has a long way ahead

[binarylarry]

Just admit it, you're freaked out by my robot hand!

I've watched more than a couple of movies recently that were done wth maya that didn't look this good (total recall and dredd 3d come to mind.)

Re:It still has a long way ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Cycles, the new Blender internal renderer use to render this is a new GPU based path tracer renderer and it's not perfect yet, but I think a lot of what you're complaining about can be blamed on the artists not being of hollywood quality and lack of time/resources, and not the actual renderer or animation program (although both areas could use a lot of improvement in Blender). Cycles is a path tracer like any other that should, in theory, be able to do most things that other modern renderers can do (and in some cases more, since it's a path tracer). That being said, to set up a photorealistic scene, to match lighting, to get the materials right, takes a lot of experience and time and that does not come cheap. The goal of the Blender Foundation and these projects is to make "tech demos" to run the software through real world trials and develop features that are useful in a real world production pipeline. The goal is not to make things perfect. Besides. If you don't like the look Cycles gives to renders with blender you can use any number of external renderers including fully unbiased ones like luxrender or commercial GPU based unbiased path tracers like Octane.

Re:It still has a long way ahead

[Psyborgue]

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.

Re:It still has a long way ahead

[Intrepid imaginaut]

It looks a damn sight better than most TV shows.

Re:It still has a long way ahead

[Bram Stolk]

My major criticism in the lighting. It seems greatly over-exposed in several places.

That's easy to fix.
Source material is all open source, you can render it again at different exposure settings if you have a render farm.

It's more than just a movie, it is an open sourced renderer PLUS open sourced model/animation data.

Well done, Blender Foundation.

Re:Not entirely open source software

[Psyborgue]

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.

Now I've seen it ..

[dgharmon]

Now I've seen it, what's it about?

Re:Now I've seen it ..

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

it appeared to be some negotiation between man and robots, and there is a love despute between 1 man and 1 robot. It seems that the human military was aware of this and were using it as some attempt to bridge relations between the humans and robot species.

But who the fuck knows. I loved it.

Re:Now I've seen it ..

[guruevi]

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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