Blender Debuts Fourth Open Source Movie: Tears of Steel 126
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."
Kudos to Blender! (Score:5, Interesting)
Not entirely open source software (Score:1, Interesting)
Not entirely open source software! Main Sponsors: NVIDIA
I bet you they used the NVIDIA binary drivers!
Re:It still has a long way ahead (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Now I've seen it .. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Kudos to Blender! (Score:3, Interesting)
I am sorry to say that even Lucas could have done better than that. That was the absolutely lamest thing I have seen in a long time.
Don't be such a flipping jerk. Sure, the acting is cheesy, the screen writing is cheesy, but it's still an awesome achievement and it has its entertaining moments. Hey, I've got an idea, why don't you come back here and make another whiny post after you've made a live action film with integrated CGI?
Chalkboard (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:It still has a long way ahead (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a good job that making hollywood movies isn't the only reason to use a 3d package then. Considering the software is free and (I'm assuming) the artists involved have not been paid hollywood cgi money for their involvement, this movie is very impressive. The story was not, however.
Maya is quite an under featured and buggy if you use it out of the box. Autodesk add a few new features each iteration, but rarely fix long standing bugs or improve polygon modelling tools or productivity features like better and more consistent real-time feedback. As far as I'm concerned, Maya's best features are the animation tools, the ability to animate just about any parameter and the ease of customisation. Where I work, for almost every step of production other than animation, external software or plug-ins are used to do the major work. Here are a few examples: Nex for modelling, zbrush for high poly modelling, uvunwrap for uv mapping, octane for rendering. I mostly do 2d so I can't recall the other plugins used, but I'm pretty sure almost every step has some plugin that is used over the default tool because the in Maya the default tool is often no good.
That's not to say you can't do great things with out of the box Maya, it's just way more hassle to get good results.
Blender feels fairly solid and polished, but I have to admit that I HATE the non-standard interface and controls... Why the fuck does the left mouse button by default do nothing (well, it moves the pivot thing, but that's basically the same thing when you are just getting started), why can't you deselet objects (aside from pressing a to toggle ALL on off), why do you have to press a key to activate anything, why is it so easily to accidentally move objects? The keyboard shortcuts are mental. Instead of mapping the most common translations to qwer (select, move, rotate, scale), where they are easy to find, they are on g (grab), r (rotate) and s (scale). What happens if your primary language is not English? What useful meaning do those bindings have? There are too many single key controls that do major things that you might accidentally press... I could go on. Then I watch some Blender tutorial and the person doing the tutorial seems to have no problems with the UI and I just feel like I'm a retard.
Somehow, however, I feel like I can trust Blender more than Maya - I just have this feeling that Maya is built on top of a massive horrible messy codebase that the programmers don't really control anymore - but Blender's UI keeps me from getting used to it since I have to keep using Maya at work - it's very hard to switch between the two because the interfaces are so different.
Re:Kudos to Blender! (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, I pay a subscription to an ink-on-paper SF magazine with a 50-odd (sometimes downright peculiar) year history of publishing and encouraging novel authors to cut their teeth in the art of the short story and novella. Why? Because it takes time for any individual to learn to use the simple tools of word and non-word.
I'd expect it to take a lot longer to learn the more complex tools of the CGI movie. Particularly if it's not your day job.
So I'd say, "Quite well done, but you're not going to scare the professionals. Yet."