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How Open Film Project "Cosmos Laundromat" Made Blender Better

Posted by samzenpus on from the making-it-better dept.

An anonymous reader writes: At the beginning of August the Blender Institute released Cosmos Laundromat: First Cycle, its seventh open project. More than just a 10-minute short film, Cosmos Laundromat is the Blender Institute's most ambitious project, a pilot for the first fully free and open animated feature film. In his article on Opensource.com animator and open source advocate Jason van Gumster highlights the film project and takes a look at some of its most significant contributions to the Blender open source project.

31 comments

  1. Oh finally, a new sample video by Lumpio- · · Score: 2

    I was getting sick and tired of seeing "Big Buck Bunny" every single time somebody wanted to demonstrate something that plays video. Now we at least have an alternative!

    1. Re:Oh finally, a new sample video by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This isn't the first time Blender has put together an open movie. There's Elephants Dream and Sintel.

    2. Re:Oh finally, a new sample video by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      True, but those are movies made with blender and other free software from 2010 and 2006. Watch them now; the quality's different.

    3. Re:Oh finally, a new sample video by aNonnyMouseCowered · · Score: 4, Informative

      The Blender Institute has made two other short movies since Bx3. The full chronology of the "major" (being a relative term) Blender open movie projects:

      1) Elephants Dream (2006)
      2) Big Buck Bunny (2008)
      3) Sintel (2010)
      4) Tears of Steel (2012)

      Tears of Steel is "live action" but has enough frame by frame CGI effects to qualify as animation. The current project is part of its first full-length feature ("full-length" being again a relative term as the movie is projected to last less than an hour).

  2. We're still stuck with Big Buck Bunny as a demo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The new short opens up with a sheep committing suicide by hanging. Pretty fucking grim and absolutely not something that can be used as a demo when showing what Blender can do or as something to run on embedded devices to demonstrate video playback.

    1. Re:We're still stuck with Big Buck Bunny as a demo by ciaran2014 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > Pretty fucking grim and absolutely not something that can be used as a demo

      What? It's a sheep, and the branch breaks and falls on his head. If you think people will find that off-puttingly grim, then I think you've underestimated your audience (or you have a weird audience).

      Or jump to whatever happy part you prefer.

      In any case, the quality is amazing. The grass, for example.

      --
      Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
    2. Re:We're still stuck with Big Buck Bunny as a demo by brantondaveperson · · Score: 2

      Technically, it's great - or at least, it's plenty good enough to show off what Blender is capable of.

      From a storytelling, tone and general watchability perspective though, it's boring, unpleasant and doesn't make any sense.

    3. Re:We're still stuck with Big Buck Bunny as a demo by ciaran2014 · · Score: 1

      I'm not praising the storyline, but it's ridiculous to shoot it down as "absolutely not something that can be used as a demo". The quality is unreal! (Again, look at the grass, or watch Sintel from 2010 and then look at how the characters' bones move in this film.)

      Back to the storyline, in their defence, it's the first 10 mins of a full-length film. It's not a 10 minute short film that's suppose to make sense on its own.

      Or another defence would be that they spent their money on animators and developers and skimped on writers.

      Either way, I see a lot of good stuff in it and I'm impressed.

      --
      Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
    4. Re:We're still stuck with Big Buck Bunny as a demo by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      the start is boring and the rest makes little sense at all, especially the new place for the sheep being a tiny being in a laundromat. lucky for him that he is in the center of it as it's spinning pretty violently.

      it's not a pilot, it's a tech trailer.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    5. Re:We're still stuck with Big Buck Bunny as a demo by kav2k · · Score: 1

      Makes me wonder if this video will be made illegal in Russia.

    6. Re:We're still stuck with Big Buck Bunny as a demo by hink · · Score: 1

      I think people here have different definitions of the word "demo". One use of the word "demo" is what the manufacturers and sellers of all those cheap video playback devices and monitors want - something "cute and silly" to draw the attention of Joe the parent looking for something to mount in their mini-van. Or to show off color range and such.

      Then there is the 3D graphics crowd (hardware makers, programmers, and artists), who think a "demo" is something "stunning" to show off every rendering and graphical trick the software and hardware can do.

      Then there is the educational crowd that is trying to both show off and draw attention. They almost HAVE to choose "cute and silly" over "stunning", the VERY sensitive (and vocal when upset) audience.

      --
      - speaking only for myself, as always
  3. Movies don't have pilots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    a pilot for the first fully free and open animated feature film

    Obviously, Blender didn't teach you much about Hollywood lingo.

    1. Re:Movies don't have pilots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a pilot program, rather than a pilot episode, you dolt.

  4. Looked great.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Looked great until the orange beard man showed up. Somehow it was the dayglow hair rather than a suicidal knot-tying sheep that killed the suspension of disbelief

  5. Quality almost too good. by Kludge · · Score: 1

    We're riding on the edge of the uncanny valley here.

    1. Re:Quality almost too good. by meerling · · Score: 1

      That video isn't in the uncanny valley, unless you really are a loony toon. (Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, etc.)
      The characters are too cartoony for that, even the human.

  6. Cosmo's Laundromat, eh? by lord_mike · · Score: 1

    Is that anywhere near Cosmo's Factory?

  7. Watch it before Sony takes it down! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Given Sony's history of fraudulently claiming ownership of a previous open blender movie, I wouldn't be surprised if it is only a matter of time before they do it again.

    Here is the last time the pulled an open blender movie down:
    https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140406/07212626819/sony-youtube-take-down-sintel-blenders-open-source-creative-commons-crowdfunded-masterpiece.shtml

  8. Loved the short... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...much better that Toy Story. I certainly want to see the whole thing.

  9. Sintel is pretty good. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It's got dragons and snow and mountains and stuff.

  10. how this changed blender by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 3, Informative

    * Improved hair/fur simulation and rendering
    * Enhanced 3D view (with cool effcts like screen-space ambient occlusion and depth of field)
    * Painting features and performance increases (including cavity masks)
    * Updated/improved dependency graph
    * Forceviz forcefield visualization
    * Filebrowser preview of image sequences (including playback)
    * Sticky keys
    * Progress integrating open source libraries such as OpenVBD (volumetric data), Alembic (mesh caching), and Ptex (high-detail textures)
    * Two external-to-Blender tools for rendering and pipeline management, Flamenco and ATTRACT
    * Lots of bug fixes
    * And of course, a wide array of small, but time-saving enhancements all across Blender (particularly in tools for animating, sculpting, and sequencing shots). These are the kinds of important improvements that can only be made by being in the same room as artists while they work.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  11. The reason we can't have nice things by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A dozen people busted their arses for a year, raising money and developing free software to make a film about a suicidal sheep who gets sucked into a rainbow cloud, they set a new standard for quality of open video, and you dismiss it with "Can't use this; too grim".

    Subject.

    1. Re: The reason we can't have nice things by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What is the goal of the project? To have something that graphic artists will be impressed by? Good job, i guess, though those will be the first to see the technical shortcomings. Nice project in the same way as a ham who designs and builds his own radio.

      Is it to impress other nerds? It's 10 minutes long and totally amateurish in every respect other than the visual artistry. Why should we care? There are lots of other videos to watch on YouTube if we're bored.

      Of course these guys wouldn't want to spend a year working on it if they didn't get to write it and voice it themselves. But that's not the audience's problem.

      I guess there's a third group - people who want free content to use as a demo video to sell video hardware. If they say they can't use this because it's grim who is anyone else to disagree?

  12. Re:Thumbs down for insensitive content! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hey, I was botched as a kid! You should have put "trigger warning" in all caps in the subject line before using that word!

  13. Re:Thumbs down for insensitive content! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Having an attempted suicide to start the film is very poor. Suicide is a larg problem, particularly in the youth.

    Ignoring that a problem exists in media doesn't make it less of a problem.

  14. Re: Thumbs down for insensitive content! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Who said it was meant to be a comedy?

  15. How "Titanic" made a better 64 bit Linux kernel by ClarkMills · · Score: 1

    http://www.linuxjournal.com/no...

    The article is an excellent read, the movie was made ~1997 too.

    "The Linux distribution used was Red Hat 4.1. At that time Red Hat was shipping Linux 2.0.18, which didn't support the PC164 mainboard, so the first thing we had to do was upgrade the kernel. During our testing we tracked down a number of problems with devices and kept up with both the 2.0 and 2.1 series of kernels. We ended up sticking with 2.1.42 with a few patches. We also decided on the NCR 810 SCSI card with the BSD-based driver and the SMC 100MB Ethernet card with the de4x5 driver. It turned out to be a very stable configuration, but there was one serious floating-point problem that caused our water-rendering software to die with an unexpected floating-point exception."

  16. Download? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Where's the download? With previous blender-released movies, there were always download links with different qualities available. This time I only see a website to watch it.

    Philipp