How Open Film Project "Cosmos Laundromat" Made Blender Better

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.

Comments

Oh finally, a new sample video

[Lumpio-]

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!

Re:Oh finally, a new sample video

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

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).

We're still stuck with Big Buck Bunny as a demo

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:We're still stuck with Big Buck Bunny as a demo

[ciaran2014]

> 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.

Re:We're still stuck with Big Buck Bunny as a demo

[brantondaveperson]

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.

how this changed blender

[Gravis Zero]

* 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.