When it comes to entertainment out in the real world, it so happens that most artists just aren't willing to donate their free time for some illusory cause.
The lead artists and developers were paid, although there were individuals who donated time for modeling, animating, etc.
But what software did they use for the editing the video sequences? What software did they use for the music composition? Did they edit the script in OpenOffice? Did they manage the project using OpenProj?
Blender was used as the non-linear video editor, compositor, color correction tool, and all other 3d and video related aspects. The music was done in various proprietary software. Script don't know, probably openoffice and MS Word (It was worked on by different folks, I think the BI folks probably used Blender but the outside writer likely used MS Word). For project managment they used the OO spreadsheet and notecards, and paper, etc.
The Blender Institute rents a server farm to do that actual rendering. It's cheap (relatively) compared to owning all the hardware, and anyone could use the same service the Institute uses, but it's not like this movie was rendered on some guy's laptop.
They actually bought their own hardware for a renderfarm for this film. Previous renderfarms were donated time by sponsors.
Drinks all around for the folks behind this, but in many ways it's still far short of what Hollywood can do
Not really. Blender Foundations budget for this was about 30,000 Euro a minute. A typical Hollywood flick has a budget of a million euro a minute or more. Increase our funding by nearly two orders of magnitude to match that of hollywood and you can get a competitive result.
The Blender Game Engine is actually quite suitable for an introductory game design course, and it has two completely free books written for learning it, plus a huge number of example games and scripts. Almost all of the logic can be scripted with 'logic bricks' (a minor amount of simple python scripts are needed for some typical behaviours).
If he's taken GPL code and put it in Thesis, game over. It's GPL. Period. Whatever he could have argued about API calls is now irrelevant.
At this point, the only thing I'm curious about is what would happen to WordPress users who start to distribute Thesis without his permission.
While GPLing his theme might be a remedy there is no guarantee that it will be a remedy of the courts choosing. Also even if he copied some code, an affirmative defense known as 'de minimus' has been established that allows for some amount of copying without it being infringement. Similarly if the code is purely functional in nature it can often also be exempt from copyright. Essentially you don't seem to know anything about what you are talking about. Of course I to don't have a law degree, but I at least have some knowledge of the basics and limits of copyright law.
I think a lot of free/open source software isn't nearly as popular as it would be if not for piracy. If people who pirate MS Office had to pay for it, they would almost all be using OpenOffice. So for at least opensource software - piracy is causing them much more limited success.
Simply because you or I cannot find an immediate use for something does not mean that it is not useful. Who knows, in 15 years, knowledge gained through these experiments could lead to a better method of harvesting energy from some unknown source, or coming up with a better means of propulsion or medicine for a problem that we thought was mundane (subatomic cure for the common cold? who knows).
It is for this reason that science should be pursued so that when someone infinitely smarter than you combines this bit of knowledge with another bit, mankind sees a tangible benefit.
The flaw with this reasoning is that we have all sorts of interesting possible research. It isn't expensive super collider vs no research it is 10 billion dollars used for building a super collider vs 10 billion spent on other research.
Also forgot to add, that many users (DB, spreadsheet, standard office documents, and creativity, scientific, technical) would benefit from dual monitors for productivity.
What type of workers do you have? It makes a huge difference if you are rolling out just business desktops that do nothing other than an office suite, email, web, and DB queries, versus whether you have folks doing CAD, Engineering, Scientific or Creative applications. For the former, any modern computer will probably be more than enough, for the later some users will need the most powerful computer you are willing to pay for. For instance many 3D applications can make use of a huge number of cores for rendering, compositing, manipulating dense 3D models, or image filters, max out your ram, and put the hurt on top end dual graphics cards.
I'm sure this has everything to do with getting the right kind of people to use blender, but I've tried a million times to use that damn program and it's interface just baffles the f^ck out of me. And I'm someone that uses Maya, Lightwave and a host of other 3D apps.
Give the release that comes out around Siggraph a try. You can set your navigation presets to Maya and other 3D apps, and the default layout is more similar to other 3D applications. Also a lot of inconsistencies have been eliminated within Blender.
they're not even playing catch up right now. read the summary
The summary has a large number of errors and was written by someone without any affiliation with the project, nor apparently even a clear understanding of the basics of the project. Also while in some aspects we are playing catchup, in others we are pulling ahead of the competition.
There have been some technical issues on the project that are currently being worked on but all 3D animation projects have technical issues throughout production, especially ambitious project.
i don't intend to be rude or belittle others' hard work (harder than i have ever done), but if you really want to make a movie, you don't care about the politicks behind your tools. you simply use the best available, which let you bring your idea/story to life most easily, letting you concentrate on the movie making part.
This isn't about the 'politics', the film is a test project for the tool robustness etc - all Pixar animated shorts you've seen are also tech demos. Animated shorts happen to be a really good way to iron out the bugs in 3D technology improvements. Just as with Pixar animated shorts, the artists take pride in their work and want it to have artistic merit and entertainment value. Our artists have the added motivation of the short film being used as a promotional tool for Blender.
otoh, what these people are doing is essentially a compromise. they want to develop software as well as make a movie. and in my experience compromises in art usually don't work. an artist does not care about anything but his creation.
You've misunderstood the goals. There isn't a compromise because the goal is mostly about the 3D software.
and yes, it is quite sad to see the graphics quality somewhat worse than crysis running with all effects on. i have always been excited by open source sw and cc licensed works of art but at times like these i realize that without lots of financial backing, mainstream movies are just not possible. and that kind of money you won't get if you plan to give away your product for free.
Crysis had a budget about 50-100 times larger than the budget for this film - watching the cutscenes - there is no hair, no cloth simulation, no subsurface scattering effects, almost all of the surfaces including the bodys of the characters are hard surfaces which is trivial to animate, light and render. The body animation is all motion capture and facial capture (and not high quality at that). The texture quality in Crysis is far worse. Your visual acuity appears to be lacking if you think that Crysis has superior visuals or animation skill. Also the Durian project has another 2 months of time left before completion and most of that will be polishing related.
You want to do a tech demo, make it, and shop it out to companies. putting it out in the public means you open yourself to the public market.
The open film and game projects by the Blender Foundation/Institute each have different technical and artistic targets. The funders of these projects are primarily existing users of Blender and public institutions such as art institutes. The artists are interested in more robust and powerful features to help them get their work done. They are also interested in attractive visuals to help them to promote Blender to other artists and to those interested in becoming 3D artists.
No one involved in the project, either in producing it or funding it, probably much cares what your opinion of artistic results are or what the 'proper goals should be'.
please tell me. if i make a movie with blender, do i HAVE to make it cc attribution? or can i have it all rights reserved?
Anything you create yourself you can put under what ever license you want. Blender itself is just a tool - just as using Open Office doesn't make your office documents GPLed; using GIMP doesn't make your photos and paintings GPLed, similarly using Blender has no impact on what license the content you create is licensed under. If you use someone elses content (ie assets from Durian) then you have to abide by their licensing terms to avoid copyright infringement.
Whatever happened to Machinima? I figured by now viral machinima movies would routinely sweep the Net, a plugin for it would run on most browsers, more kids would watch its movies than watch TV, people would routinely whip up new clips like email, live video would be ported into it automatically.
But it's still totally fringe, practically unheard of. If they'd called it "mechanime", would it have caught on more by now?
The tools for doing machinima are still quite poor. The interfaces for controlling characters, acting, and setting up scenes are clumsy and time consuming. Until the tools become worthwhile it probably won't catch on beyond the novelty level.
Is this 3-D too? Will it be played at all the 3-D theatres?
Currently a 3D version is being considered but it is not guaranteed. It would require additional funding to pay for the compositing development work and for someone to do the compositing work and any other changes needed for 3D. There have been talks with some potential sponsors of such work but nothing concrete yet.
The only deliverables that are certain at this point are a 2k and 4k version of the film.
Article doesn't mention if it's intended as a theatrical release or bit torrent release
It is a short animated film of roughly 11 minutes. It will be screened in a number of theaters and can be purchased on DVD, but you likely won't be able to purchase a ticket to go see it at theaters except at film festivals.
While obviously the cost of making this film is nothing compared to a movie studio budget, and the output is pretty much on the same level...
How does the effort these guys put in compare to how much effort a studio would have had to put in? Cause that's the metric that will really tell us if Blender is as good as the pro tools. Volunteers will always be 100% cheaper than professionals, the question is how much time they took to create this.
It depends on which part of the pipeline - in some areas Blender is superior to the majority of its commercial competition (UV Unwrapping, Character Animation) and in some areas it is behind. The budget for this film is actually pretty significant for a short animated film - while some volunteer animation has been done (about 3-5% of total work?) the majority of the work is being done by professional artists and animators - I believe there are about 12 individuals (coders + artists) on the payroll.
For similar quality it is requiring a similar amount of time.
If there charging for the movie, I think they should donate to the software developers, for writing the software to make it possible. On thing about open software is that it can't pay for marketing so the rule, free for those you know, very expensive to everyone else applies.
The Blender Institute is the one creating the film, and it pays for the salarys of a number of our core developers and for our project lead. The films are a way for us to increase the rate of Blender development, prove its capabilities in a high pressure and tight deadline environment, to achieve new development goals, and as a tool for marketing.
Like all Blender Institute open movie projects, these help to drive forward Blenders capabilities and put them to the test in a production environment.
Some of the major improvements that have happened for this project are things like increasing how many millions of polygons our sculpting tools can handle (45 million on decent hardware); another major upgrade to our animation tools; improving our rendering quality; improvements in simulation quality; and of course numerous interface upgrades.
1) The work you did prior to being employed by them belongs to you. Unless you agreed to assign those copyrights beforehand they have no rights to that code. In practice proving what was yours before hand might be difficult. 2) The work you did for them is a derivative work. While they have rights to the new code (depends on the specific laws but generally that is the case), they have no right to your original code so it might well be useless without the original code. 3) The GPL clause only kicks in on distribution - non distributed changes are not required to be GPLed 4) If they use the GPL librarys and distribute the code, then they would be obligated to distribute the code changes
You buy an HD camera. it records in h.264 The moment you upload it tot he web you are supposed to buy another license for that video. The moment you share that video at your friends house on their TV. You need another license. what's that, you want to transfer that video onto a DVD, that's two more license violations.
I wish people would stop and read more about the licensing issues of H.264 They are currently generous, but MPEG-LA can literally revoke all licenses and make everyone pay fora separate license to create,view, edits, or distributes H.264 video.
I've always been curious about this. The patent is obviously required for the creation of the encoding and decoding software. But how can distribution of an already encoded video be in violation of the patent? It doesn't implement the patent, only the results of using the patent. This really needs to be something that the legal basis of needs to be challenged.
This is a common meme but it is in fact BS. Getting good, marketable ideas, that are developable into a commercial success is enormously difficult. Getting crap derivative ideas, or ridiculously expensive ideas with little chance of earning back development costs is really easy.
Unfortunately the plethora of crap means that noone is interested in looking at ideas in general unless they are developed to such a point that it takes minimum effort to turn them into a commercial game.
Anybody who thinks it matters what document editor is used for writing a screenplay has no clue.
He is asking about the game engine of Blender, not the content creation tools. Blender has a game engine that works fairly well for rapid prototyping of games. The author is interested if they are robust enough for doing a game demo. To which the answer is yes, but also 'wrong question'.
Something I forgot in my earlier response - gamekit, a project lead by the developer of the Bullet Physics engine - is meant to allow Blender games to run almost unchanged on various platforms using a BSD licensed engine. So you will be able to port to the iPhone, etc. easily once your prototype within Blender is done.
Slashdot Mirror
When it comes to entertainment out in the real world, it so happens that most artists just aren't willing to donate their free time for some illusory cause.
The lead artists and developers were paid, although there were individuals who donated time for modeling, animating, etc.
But what software did they use for the editing the video sequences? What software did they use for the music composition? Did they edit the script in OpenOffice? Did they manage the project using OpenProj?
Blender was used as the non-linear video editor, compositor, color correction tool, and all other 3d and video related aspects. The music was done in various proprietary software. Script don't know, probably openoffice and MS Word (It was worked on by different folks, I think the BI folks probably used Blender but the outside writer likely used MS Word). For project managment they used the OO spreadsheet and notecards, and paper, etc.
The Blender Institute rents a server farm to do that actual rendering. It's cheap (relatively) compared to owning all the hardware, and anyone could use the same service the Institute uses, but it's not like this movie was rendered on some guy's laptop.
They actually bought their own hardware for a renderfarm for this film. Previous renderfarms were donated time by sponsors.
Drinks all around for the folks behind this, but in many ways it's still far short of what Hollywood can do
Not really. Blender Foundations budget for this was about 30,000 Euro a minute. A typical Hollywood flick has a budget of a million euro a minute or more. Increase our funding by nearly two orders of magnitude to match that of hollywood and you can get a competitive result.
The Blender Game Engine is actually quite suitable for an introductory game design course, and it has two completely free books written for learning it, plus a huge number of example games and scripts. Almost all of the logic can be scripted with 'logic bricks' (a minor amount of simple python scripts are needed for some typical behaviours).
http://download.blender.org/documentation/gamekit2/
http://download.blender.org/documentation/gamekit1/
Also see Yo Frankie - which shows what a team can accomplish in a short time
http://www.yofrankie.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7RRaEvWqJc
Blender itself is now quite easy to create game assets in, and works well as a level editor.
The Game Engine is not exactly cutting edge, but then cutting edge isn't of much benefit for learning game design.
If he's taken GPL code and put it in Thesis, game over. It's GPL. Period. Whatever he could have argued about API calls is now irrelevant.
At this point, the only thing I'm curious about is what would happen to WordPress users who start to distribute Thesis without his permission.
While GPLing his theme might be a remedy there is no guarantee that it will be a remedy of the courts choosing. Also even if he copied some code, an affirmative defense known as 'de minimus' has been established that allows for some amount of copying without it being infringement. Similarly if the code is purely functional in nature it can often also be exempt from copyright. Essentially you don't seem to know anything about what you are talking about. Of course I to don't have a law degree, but I at least have some knowledge of the basics and limits of copyright law.
I think a lot of free/open source software isn't nearly as popular as it would be if not for piracy. If people who pirate MS Office had to pay for it, they would almost all be using OpenOffice. So for at least opensource software - piracy is causing them much more limited success.
Simply because you or I cannot find an immediate use for something does not mean that it is not useful. Who knows, in 15 years, knowledge gained through these experiments could lead to a better method of harvesting energy from some unknown source, or coming up with a better means of propulsion or medicine for a problem that we thought was mundane (subatomic cure for the common cold? who knows).
It is for this reason that science should be pursued so that when someone infinitely smarter than you combines this bit of knowledge with another bit, mankind sees a tangible benefit.
The flaw with this reasoning is that we have all sorts of interesting possible research. It isn't expensive super collider vs no research it is 10 billion dollars used for building a super collider vs 10 billion spent on other research.
Also forgot to add, that many users (DB, spreadsheet, standard office documents, and creativity, scientific, technical) would benefit from dual monitors for productivity.
What type of workers do you have? It makes a huge difference if you are rolling out just business desktops that do nothing other than an office suite, email, web, and DB queries, versus whether you have folks doing CAD, Engineering, Scientific or Creative applications. For the former, any modern computer will probably be more than enough, for the later some users will need the most powerful computer you are willing to pay for. For instance many 3D applications can make use of a huge number of cores for rendering, compositing, manipulating dense 3D models, or image filters, max out your ram, and put the hurt on top end dual graphics cards.
I'm sure this has everything to do with getting the right kind of people to use blender, but I've tried a million times to use that damn program and it's interface just baffles the f^ck out of me. And I'm someone that uses Maya, Lightwave and a host of other 3D apps.
Give the release that comes out around Siggraph a try. You can set your navigation presets to Maya and other 3D apps, and the default layout is more similar to other 3D applications. Also a lot of inconsistencies have been eliminated within Blender.
they're not even playing catch up right now. read the summary
The summary has a large number of errors and was written by someone without any affiliation with the project, nor apparently even a clear understanding of the basics of the project. Also while in some aspects we are playing catchup, in others we are pulling ahead of the competition.
There have been some technical issues on the project that are currently being worked on but all 3D animation projects have technical issues throughout production, especially ambitious project.
i don't intend to be rude or belittle others' hard work (harder than i have ever done), but if you really want to make a movie, you don't care about the politicks behind your tools. you simply use the best available, which let you bring your idea/story to life most easily, letting you concentrate on the movie making part.
This isn't about the 'politics', the film is a test project for the tool robustness etc - all Pixar animated shorts you've seen are also tech demos. Animated shorts happen to be a really good way to iron out the bugs in 3D technology improvements. Just as with Pixar animated shorts, the artists take pride in their work and want it to have artistic merit and entertainment value. Our artists have the added motivation of the short film being used as a promotional tool for Blender.
otoh, what these people are doing is essentially a compromise. they want to develop software as well as make a movie. and in my experience compromises in art usually don't work. an artist does not care about anything but his creation.
You've misunderstood the goals. There isn't a compromise because the goal is mostly about the 3D software.
and yes, it is quite sad to see the graphics quality somewhat worse than crysis running with all effects on. i have always been excited by open source sw and cc licensed works of art but at times like these i realize that without lots of financial backing, mainstream movies are just not possible. and that kind of money you won't get if you plan to give away your product for free.
Crysis had a budget about 50-100 times larger than the budget for this film - watching the cutscenes - there is no hair, no cloth simulation, no subsurface scattering effects, almost all of the surfaces including the bodys of the characters are hard surfaces which is trivial to animate, light and render. The body animation is all motion capture and facial capture (and not high quality at that). The texture quality in Crysis is far worse. Your visual acuity appears to be lacking if you think that Crysis has superior visuals or animation skill. Also the Durian project has another 2 months of time left before completion and most of that will be polishing related.
You want to do a tech demo, make it, and shop it out to companies. putting it out in the public means you open yourself to the public market.
The open film and game projects by the Blender Foundation/Institute each have different technical and artistic targets. The funders of these projects are primarily existing users of Blender and public institutions such as art institutes. The artists are interested in more robust and powerful features to help them get their work done. They are also interested in attractive visuals to help them to promote Blender to other artists and to those interested in becoming 3D artists.
No one involved in the project, either in producing it or funding it, probably much cares what your opinion of artistic results are or what the 'proper goals should be'.
please tell me. if i make a movie with blender, do i HAVE to make it cc attribution? or can i have it all rights reserved?
Anything you create yourself you can put under what ever license you want. Blender itself is just a tool - just as using Open Office doesn't make your office documents GPLed; using GIMP doesn't make your photos and paintings GPLed, similarly using Blender has no impact on what license the content you create is licensed under. If you use someone elses content (ie assets from Durian) then you have to abide by their licensing terms to avoid copyright infringement.
Whatever happened to Machinima? I figured by now viral machinima movies would routinely sweep the Net, a plugin for it would run on most browsers, more kids would watch its movies than watch TV, people would routinely whip up new clips like email, live video would be ported into it automatically.
But it's still totally fringe, practically unheard of. If they'd called it "mechanime", would it have caught on more by now?
The tools for doing machinima are still quite poor. The interfaces for controlling characters, acting, and setting up scenes are clumsy and time consuming. Until the tools become worthwhile it probably won't catch on beyond the novelty level.
Is this 3-D too? Will it be played at all the 3-D theatres?
Currently a 3D version is being considered but it is not guaranteed. It would require additional funding to pay for the compositing development work and for someone to do the compositing work and any other changes needed for 3D. There have been talks with some potential sponsors of such work but nothing concrete yet.
The only deliverables that are certain at this point are a 2k and 4k version of the film.
Article doesn't mention if it's intended as a theatrical release or bit torrent release
It is a short animated film of roughly 11 minutes. It will be screened in a number of theaters and can be purchased on DVD, but you likely won't be able to purchase a ticket to go see it at theaters except at film festivals.
While obviously the cost of making this film is nothing compared to a movie studio budget, and the output is pretty much on the same level ...
How does the effort these guys put in compare to how much effort a studio would have had to put in? Cause that's the metric that will really tell us if Blender is as good as the pro tools. Volunteers will always be 100% cheaper than professionals, the question is how much time they took to create this.
It depends on which part of the pipeline - in some areas Blender is superior to the majority of its commercial competition (UV Unwrapping, Character Animation) and in some areas it is behind. The budget for this film is actually pretty significant for a short animated film - while some volunteer animation has been done (about 3-5% of total work?) the majority of the work is being done by professional artists and animators - I believe there are about 12 individuals (coders + artists) on the payroll.
For similar quality it is requiring a similar amount of time.
If there charging for the movie, I think they should donate to the software developers, for writing the software to make it possible. On thing about open software is that it can't pay for marketing so the rule, free for those you know, very expensive to everyone else applies.
The Blender Institute is the one creating the film, and it pays for the salarys of a number of our core developers and for our project lead. The films are a way for us to increase the rate of Blender development, prove its capabilities in a high pressure and tight deadline environment, to achieve new development goals, and as a tool for marketing.
If you are interested in supporting this project you can preorder the DVD which will come with the complete 3D, texture, and assets to make the film under CC Attribution 3.0 - http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info_n.php?products_id=120
Like all Blender Institute open movie projects, these help to drive forward Blenders capabilities and put them to the test in a production environment.
Some of the major improvements that have happened for this project are things like increasing how many millions of polygons our sculpting tools can handle (45 million on decent hardware); another major upgrade to our animation tools; improving our rendering quality; improvements in simulation quality; and of course numerous interface upgrades.
4 BPS*24 hrs/day*60min/hr*60sec/min = 345 600 barrels per day, not 1 million.b
NAL, but here is my interpretation
1) The work you did prior to being employed by them belongs to you. Unless you agreed to assign those copyrights beforehand they have no rights to that code. In practice proving what was yours before hand might be difficult.
2) The work you did for them is a derivative work. While they have rights to the new code (depends on the specific laws but generally that is the case), they have no right to your original code so it might well be useless without the original code.
3) The GPL clause only kicks in on distribution - non distributed changes are not required to be GPLed
4) If they use the GPL librarys and distribute the code, then they would be obligated to distribute the code changes
You buy an HD camera. it records in h.264 The moment you upload it tot he web you are supposed to buy another license for that video. The moment you share that video at your friends house on their TV. You need another license. what's that, you want to transfer that video onto a DVD, that's two more license violations.
I wish people would stop and read more about the licensing issues of H.264 They are currently generous, but MPEG-LA can literally revoke all licenses and make everyone pay fora separate license to create,view, edits, or distributes H.264 video.
I've always been curious about this. The patent is obviously required for the creation of the encoding and decoding software. But how can distribution of an already encoded video be in violation of the patent? It doesn't implement the patent, only the results of using the patent. This really needs to be something that the legal basis of needs to be challenged.
Getting ideas is the easy part.
This is a common meme but it is in fact BS. Getting good, marketable ideas, that are developable into a commercial success is enormously difficult. Getting crap derivative ideas, or ridiculously expensive ideas with little chance of earning back development costs is really easy.
Unfortunately the plethora of crap means that noone is interested in looking at ideas in general unless they are developed to such a point that it takes minimum effort to turn them into a commercial game.
Anybody who thinks it matters what document editor is used for writing a screenplay has no clue.
He is asking about the game engine of Blender, not the content creation tools. Blender has a game engine that works fairly well for rapid prototyping of games. The author is interested if they are robust enough for doing a game demo. To which the answer is yes, but also 'wrong question'.
Something I forgot in my earlier response - gamekit, a project lead by the developer of the Bullet Physics engine - is meant to allow Blender games to run almost unchanged on various platforms using a BSD licensed engine. So you will be able to port to the iPhone, etc. easily once your prototype within Blender is done.