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Entertainment

Blender's Open Movie Project 156

Posted by Hemos from the better-dialogue-then-ROTS dept.
MrAndrews writes "I just read on the Blender home page that Ton Roosendaal is going to be creating an open movie project called "Orange", which should kick off development sometime in the fall: "The Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, have agreed on producing a 3D Animated Movie Short, to be created with the Open Source 3D suite Blender and other OS tools such as Yafray, Python, Verse, Gimp, and Cinepaint." Moreover: "... the resulting movie - including all the production files and software - will be published under an open public license." Open source entertainment is another step closer to reality!"
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Blender's Open Movie Project More

Blender's Open Movie Project

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  • Will FOP be soon behind? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Free Open Porn for all!

  • Trying to understand the point (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @03:53AM (#12631867) Journal
    I'm not sold on Open Source entertainment. I have my tastes, you have yours. I doubt that you'd appreciate my imposing my creative vision on your work, and I know that I would resist your attempts to impose upon mine. Collaboration in creativity leads to such wonderful dreck as sitcoms and "dramedys". Just say no.

    What I suppose is interesting about this is that the final product will be open and available for others to use. Free from copyright, so to speak. It seems like a nice idea, much like Creative Commons [creativecommons.org], but it doesn't seem like some really huge step forward in any respect.

    The complete open-sourcing of the toolset would be cool (Blender and a few others are already open).

    • Re:Trying to understand the point (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Beolach ( 518512 ) <beolach@NOsPaM.juno.com> on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @03:57AM (#12631880) Homepage Journal
      So make a fork. If you disagree with the direction something is going, and that something is Open Source, you can take what you do like, and leave what you don't. If you're the original creator, and you don't want people doing that, then don't use a Open Source license. Since these people are using an Open Source license, I doubt they would mind if you made a fork of their movie.

    • Re:Trying to understand the point (Score:4, Informative)

      by Beolach ( 518512 ) <beolach@NOsPaM.juno.com> on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @04:07AM (#12631906) Homepage Journal
      What I suppose is interesting about this is that the final product will be open and available for others to use. Free from copyright, so to speak. It seems like a nice idea, much like Creative Commons, but it doesn't seem like some really huge step forward in any respect.
      Sorry for the double reply, but this is a common misconception that I forgot to mention in my other post. Open Source does not mean free from copyright. Many Open Source licenses have stipulations on what you are required to do in order the use the licensed material in a certain way - for example, the GPL states that if you make any derivitive works, those derivitive works must also be licensed under the GPL. It is only because the material licensed under the GPL is protected by copyright that the GPL can make this stipulation. If the material was not protected by copyright (in the public domain), then anyone could use it in any way they wanted, without abiding by any stipulations of any license agreement.
    • Then again, collaboration also leads to great things too. You can't lump everything into one basket and say "it will suck, without question, because of this".

      Don't like how something is going? You yourself can lead it in another direction if you wish. I don't know how many times I've watched a movie lately and said to myself "wow, this really needs to be edited more". Case in point is Revenge of the Sith...there are a few things in there I would slice out to make it a better movie. One would be to take out
      • There'd be nothing left of ROTS. On the other hand, I thought the film The Village would have been 100% better if they'd cut the early scene that reveals the "twist" of the film. You could actually have enjoyed the movie as a horror flick, the whole time thinking "man this is a cheap production" and then when the twist hits you could see that it wasn't a horror at all. In fact, I'd like to get that movie out on DVD and just press "skip" at the appropriate place for someone who has never seen the film.

    • Re:Trying to understand the point (Score:5, Insightful)

      by natrius ( 642724 ) * <niran&niran,org> on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @04:13AM (#12631927) Homepage
      I'm not sold on Open Source entertainment. I have my tastes, you have yours. I doubt that you'd appreciate my imposing my creative vision on your work, and I know that I would resist your attempts to impose upon mine. Collaboration in creativity leads to such wonderful dreck as sitcoms and "dramedys". Just say no.

      I agree. Stories aren't things that can be put together piecemeal, and generally don't adapt well to the traditional open source paradigm. However, there are other ways that Free thinking can help this type of creative project.

      There are some aspects of these projects that can be done piecemeal. Films typically have soundtracks, and most filmmakers aren't composers/singers/musicians as well. With shared work out there, filmmakers can build on top of the music that other people have put out there.

      Taking video clips from a shared work can be useful as well. In many typical dramas and sitcoms, they show a little clip of the city the story is taking place in or a shot of the skyline. Most people don't have the resources to do that sort of thing, but if a video that incorporates such a clip has been shared, another creator can make there work better by leveraging off of work that has already been done.

      The traditional open source methodology seems to be the focus of this article, however it seems that they have a core group working on the creative concept [blender.org], though they say that others from the community will be involved as well. The collaboration of many people on the technical aspects of the film will work fabulously, but there are some things that just don't lend themselves to that way of working, and I think they realize that. I think the main benefit from shared crative works is being able to reuse bits of that content that suit new works, not the way people put them together. People have collaborated on creative works for a long time. The new development is that the product of that work will be able to be built upon by others.

      I actually have a research project on this topic that I should be working on instead of reading Slashdot.

      • Re:Trying to understand the point (Score:5, Insightful)

        by arose ( 644256 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @05:59AM (#12632226)
        Stories aren't things that can be put together piecemeal, and generally don't adapt well to the traditional open source paradigm.
        Ever heard of folklore?
      • I've been mulling this whole open entertainment concept for a few years now, and what you said was what I always came back to: too many directors and you get a big mess.

        The key, I think, is not that anyone can or should be in charge of changing the script, but that anyone can contribute to the final product. How many developers have commit access for the Linux kernel? How many can suggest changes and have them integrated if they're good? How many can fork the entire codebase at any given time to focus o
      • I agree. Stories aren't things that can be put together piecemeal, and generally don't adapt well to the traditional open source paradigm.

        With your post you have complete ignored any literary work created more than two hundred years ago, which includes some of the finest examples of western literature. The list looks a little something like this: William Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Beowulf, any western folk tale / legend / myth / fable you can think of. All of these works were the result of someone takin
      • Films typically have soundtracks, and most filmmakers aren't composers/singers/musicians as well. With shared work out there, filmmakers can build on top of the music that other people have put out there.

        Where's the reciprocity?

        What benefit does a musician get when his or her music is incorporated into someone else's film?
        • I've been working on a theory like this, and my feeling is that there needs to be some kind of credit system implemented as a standard, where each addition along the chain adds a "point" for the contributor... so if recorded lyrics that ended up in a totally different song, and that song ended up in a movie, you'd be getting a share of the profits based on what the weight of the lyrics was. THAT's where the trouble is, tho: determining relative weights to such a diverse array of contributions.

          We have the
    • I agree entertainment is not something that is better of "free" per se. Though it can be. It's a matter of taste.

      However, I guess you have to see this project more as a proof of concept, that it is possible to create something like that using only open source tools. To try convincing others to use them to create open source or non-open source entertainment.

      Tristan.
    • It's my understanding that most - no, all - US entertainment shows are written under a collaborative process. Including X-Files, Buffy, Friends, Seinfeld etc. All movies employ teams of writers, either consecutively or together. The UK has a tradition of lone writers however the series tend to be short-lived and not as successful. So come on already, enough of the lone creative genius. Genius schmenius. Huh!

      Of course successful programs fall off towards the end. THey all do. That's why they're dropped

      • It's my understanding that most - no, all - US entertainment shows are written under a collaborative process. Including X-Files, Buffy, Friends, Seinfeld etc.

        This is only because they have so many episodes. A series of X-Files is 18 hours of material. Even the most dedicated writer could not work at the required pace or under that kind of pressure.

        All movies employ teams of writers, either consecutively or together.

        Some movies do the consecutive thing, and only in Hollywood. If you're making an a

    • Collaboriation hardly means Piecemeal (Score:4, Insightful)

      by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @10:30AM (#12634007)
      I'm not sold on Open Source entertainment. I have my tastes, you have yours. I doubt that you'd appreciate my imposing my creative vision on your work, and I know that I would resist your attempts to impose upon mine.

      You don't seam to "get" collaborative projects. Don't feel bad--I used free software almost exclusively for years (based on quality, not politics) before I understood how and why collaborative projects work so well. When one is spoon-fed "you get what you pay for," "profit motive required for progress/production," "no one will create without monopoly entitlements (patents/copyright)," and similiar corporate untruths all of one's life (and we have all been spoonfed that nonsense since they day we were born), free collaboration can be a very difficult concept to get one's head around. As I said, it took me years, and I'm generally fairly quick.

      First, collaboration != piecemeal. For that matter, Free Software is rarely piecemail either--equating the two shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the process and its results.

      Second, unlike writing a novel (where what you say has some applicability, though by no means is it an axiom--there have been collaborative novels written in the sci-fi genre by well-known authors that are excellent) nearly every film and telivision project of any size involves multiple writers (in the case of telivision projects, sometimes hundreds of writers), and hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people performing supporting functions (compsing the soundtrack, performing the music, lighting, choreagraphy, set design, editing, post-production, etc.).

      In short, virtually every project of any size is a collaboration--we're just not used to seeing it as such. Indeed, there is absolutely nothing intrinsicly different between a large collaboration done under the the auspices of a commercial enterprise and that done under an open collaboration, other than perhaps the overall budget that is available. Star Wars Episode 3-1/2 "Revelations" is a fine example of a fan film made entirely through collaboration on a tiny budget.

      Yes, collaboration can and does produce absolute dreck. So to does Hollywood...in abundance. Profit motive and corporate-feudal power structures do nothing to insure quality, nor are the a prerequisite to the production of quality, whether it is software or a film.

      I do agree, doing the entire project start-to-finish using only free software would be a powerful demonstration of what is possible using only the resources of the Free World.
    • What I want is open source creation of resources. Sharing 3D models, for example. Public domain music for the soundtrack, etc.

      Heck, look at all the free advertising that anime gets via AMVs.

      It'd be nice if you could buy an extra DVD of film footage with the actors walking in front of blue screens before the background was put in. Or a Golem skeleton that you could attach your own 3D model to and re-render the scene for a video.
      • <shameless plug>
        I am working on a project that aims to better co-ordinate that kind of idea... pulling together ideas and art at various stages of development, making them searchable, retaining credit and license information, and helping people find the other parts of the puzzle they need to get their idea off the ground. This Blender thing goes in a slightly different direction, but the end result should be close to the same: giving people more tools and resources to do cool stuff.

        If anyone has

    • I doubt that you'd appreciate my imposing my creative vision on your work, and I know that I would resist your attempts to impose upon mine.

      This statement shows that you have misunderstood the idea of OS style development. Namely, you have missed that:

      1. I cannot impose anything on your work; you are free to fork the project and do whatever you want with it. You are even free to only fork the part that you disagree with (say, one scene) and keep everything else in synch (3D models, backgrounds, other s
  • I can't find any details on a plot or anything. I did find on their site that the script has not yet been written. Have they even decided what the movie is going to be about?
  • Don't offer a prize. Offer a nice big advertisement on the front page of blender.org pointing to where the work can be downloaded and linking to the home page of the group that creates it, but don't offer a monetary prize. Why? Because when you offer a prize everything becomes an economic rationalisation. "Ok, the prize money is $10,000, that means I can work 100 hours on this thing and I shouldn't try to get others to help me cause then I'd have to give them a cut." People will always work more for ku

    • People will always work more for kudos than prizes. Even if you offer to give kudos and a prize, people will think entirely in terms of the monetary value of that prize.

      Now, if you do offer kudos, they'll first have to convert it to money-equivalent value...
      It is the first thing I thought reading your post : "Hey, how much is that worth, an ad on Blender.org ?"

  • How about Weta or Pixar? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pjbass ( 144318 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @03:56AM (#12631878) Homepage
    As far as I recall, doesn't Weta and Pixar use Linux for their OS in the render pools? I concede that LOTR certainly didn't open-source the artwork, nor did Nemo et. al, but how much closer to open-source entertainment are we with this? Do I get to see the movie for free (small donation optional)? I'd go see it if I got my Sour Patch Kids for free I suppose...
    • This is beyond just using Linux on servers; this is an entire movie made using only open source tools.

      Honestly I don't see the point. Who cares if the data is created with Open or Closed source tools, just as long as the resultant data is worth the resources their spending on it, at least that's my opinion about it all. I guess to those in the project, it simply proves the tools are "good enough", and that it can be done, if anyone was suicidal enough to attempt it.

      • Re:How about Weta or Pixar? (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It is interesting as a proof of concept. I'd love to see if they make their musicians use only open-source tools. Unless they plan doing it the old fashioned way (write a score, get a bunch of people to play it live) there's not a lot of options. Rosegarden isn't up to scratch, and even if it was there's a massive shortage of decent virtual instruments.

        Trying to do a score in Ardour/Rosegarden vs. say Nuendo or Sonar would be extremely painful.
      • [QUOTE]I guess to those in the project, it simply proves the tools are "good enough", and that it can be done, if anyone was suicidal enough to attempt it.[/QUOTE]

        Part of it is to prove that the tools are 'good enough' and to show off to the world that they are good enough. Part of it is the fun and the challenge.

        Not sure why you think it would be 'suicidal' to attempt it. The modeling tools and uv tools are plenty fast and mature enough right now (not to say that there aren't nicities that could be add

        • Re:How about Weta or Pixar? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @05:05AM (#12632096)
          As a student, I looked into many different fields before I chose computer science. One of which was digital film making. I spent a summer shadowing a documentary film crew, and I can tell honestly tell you that the amount of work that goes into even the simplest of films is insane.

          When we start talking digital animation, the amount of work leaps exponentially. Long hours of modeling, shading, color checks, lighting checks, triangle counts, waiting for renders, etc. It's a tough business.

          The "suicidal" part comes in when someone suggests making a feature length film, animated, basically with no money to pay people to come and work for you. You're looking at a group of 10 to 20 dedicated people, spending a great deal of their lives for the next year or two, churning away at scenes, storyboards, models, textures, etc, until finally they come up with something, instead of Pixar's or Dreamwork's thousands of support personel. You're looking at 10 to 20, midrange servers whereas Pixar or Dreamworks has hundreds, possibly thousands of highrange servers in their rendering farms.

          Now, will the final product be worth it? Hell yes if it's a good story, looks good, and feels good. Put it in theaters, get a couple million in ticket sales and you've instantly paid for your venture. But the problem is getting even that far. And for that, I would call you suicidal, but I would commmend your work.
          • [QUOTE]The "suicidal" part comes in when someone suggests making a feature length film, animated, basically with no money to pay people to come and work for you.[/QUOTE]

            Well, they have full funding for 5 full time artists for and 1 full time coder for 6 months. Plus funding of a budget for talent that is not needed for the full time period. Also there will be plenty of volunteer effort from the Blender community (there are a number of talented artists who will likely want to contribute but do not have t

  • Great news (Score:5, Funny)

    by saintm ( 142527 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @03:57AM (#12631879)
    Lets hope it does for movies what Tux Racer has done for video games.

    Oh.

  • Funding? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kjh1 ( 65671 ) * on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @03:59AM (#12631886) Homepage Journal

    While this would be quite an accomplishment should it come to reality, and could set the establishment on its ear, I can't help but thinking from browsing through their site that it's still 'vaporware'. Just take a look at the Sponsors [blender.org] page. They're requesting 6 quality 3D Unix machines and a 10-system rendering cluster, among other things.

    I wish them the best of luck in their endeavor.

  • Blender + Orange? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone else thinking what I'm thinking?

  • The tools used (Score:4, Informative)

    by LetterRip ( 30937 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @04:02AM (#12631895)
    Since they will be using Blender, you might be interested in the upcoming features that the next release will have along with some of the scripts available

    have a look at the development digest

    http://cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=233256 [cgtalk.com]

    Blender now has manipulators and universal undo - two things that lots of slashdotters complained were missing the last time Blender was mentioned on slashdot.

    LetterRip

  • Folk music (Score:4, Insightful)

    by el_womble ( 779715 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @04:11AM (#12631918) Homepage

    Open source entertainment is nothing new. There are plenty of examples from Folk Music and Hymns to Pantomime (christmas plays, that have nothing to do with christmas). You hear a song, you play a song, you change the lyrics/tune to suite your own politics. You never claim to have written it yourself, you just say something like "Here is a song I heard over in Sheepy Magna, it goes a little something like this..."

    Copyrighted entertainment is new, and a little bit counter intuitive. My understanding is that it was brought about to protect the incomes of the artists, whilst provide recording companies to profit from the sale of recordings. Now, as recording companies start to fear for their livelyhood, it seems to be coming full circle.

    People have always been able to make a living from providing entertainment and they always will (if they're good), they have not always been treated like gods and they have not always been richer than our leaders. Never mind the dotcom bubble bursting, I think the entertainment copyright bubble might be leaking a bit too.

    • Re:Folk music (Score:3, Insightful)

      by natrius ( 642724 ) *
      Copyrighted entertainment is new, and a little bit counter intuitive.

      Copyrighted entertainment is as new as the means to copy the entertainment is. Copyright came right behind the printing press. It expanded after the player piano. Being able to copy creative works changes how things work.

      You describe a time when people create works to entertain themselves and didn't need copyright to prod them along. Folk music and hymns were satisfying entertainment until someone who was really good at singing decide

      • In the spirit of healthy debate, I'll retort

        People didn't need to go to concerts to hear music, because they could hear it in the comfort of their own homes

        That simply isn't true. People have never stopped going to performances. There is simply no comparison between a live performance and recorded one. If anything performances are getting bigger audiences than ever before because of the massive advertising that recorded performances represent. The performance arts that have 'suffered' because of 'pir

        • As someone who makes a living thanks to Copyright, I'd like to chime in. (not necessarily to argue, but just to sort of give my take on the whole thread)
          I am an artist, and I do consider myself "truly creative". Even without copyright, I would still create art.
          That said, I make a living three ways, the first is selling prints of my artwork, the second is creating new artwork on comission, and the third is licensing artwork I've created.
          Without copyright, I wouldn't be able to be profitiable doing any of

          • I think we are coming to the same conclusion, but from different ends. We both want you to be able to generate money so that you can continue to generate art. What we don't want is corporation XYZ (or anybody else) from being able to make money off your art without your permision - that just isn't fair.

            If people are selling prints of your work, then you are clearly entitled to a cut.

            If a body decides to use your art to promote their product they should provide you with a fee - as they are profiting from y

        • I'll add a new point to my original post. Copyright is only of value where the product is the copy.

          What copyright does is allow a creator to make the copy a product in the first place. What a creator posesses is talent. It's pretty hard to sell talent. You can either perform that talent for a charge, or because of copyright, you can sell recordings of that talent. CDs are far more profitable than tours are, and while some people use an album as an advertisement for their concerts, most of the established

      • A few things.

        I agree with you that "Copyrighted entertainment is as new as the means to copy the entertainment is. Copyright came right behind the printing press. It expanded after the player piano. Being able to copy creative works changes how things work."

        Each time a new technology comes along enabling the distribution of creative works, a new business model evolves exploiting that technology. Depending on the business model, new legislation is introduced to support the new industry. There is usually

        • Ever check out anime music videos?

          I think that small artists benefit from sharing and larger artists with significant marketshare are hurt by it.
    • Open source enterainment is new to the world that requires the term "open source entertainment" to imply a new, old way of doing things. It's really just an attempt to say: "Whoa, we went way too far in the other direction... let's find some happy middle ground."

  • More details on the people involved in the project (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LetterRip ( 30937 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @04:15AM (#12631934)
    Those of you not involved with Glender won't recognize the names of three of the individuals involved in the project thus far,

    Bassam Kurdali aka slikdigit - created the animation 'chicken chair' among others.

    Andy Goralczyk aka @ndy - has done both gorgeous stills and lively and fun animations.

    These are two of the best artists/animators using blender, both have excellent imagination and the talent to accomplish any bit of artistry they put their minds to.

    and lastly Ton Roosendaal - he is the creator of Blender and the primary driving force behind its open source development.

    With this combination of talent being the driving force behind project Orange, we can be sure to expect something truly entertaining and masterfully executed.

    LetterRip
    • Bah that is what I get for not previewing and posting at 1 in the morning - I of course meant Blender.

      LetterRip

    • Re:More details on the people involved in the proj (Score:4, Interesting)

      by nunchux ( 869574 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @04:29AM (#12631997)
      That's all well and good, and I'm sure it will be beautiful, but who's writing the actual story? I work in animation and I have seen many beautiful shorts, demos and portfolio pieces by many extremely talented technical animators... And most of them are boring and meaningless exercises, if that. Or they're based on a joke that's not funny in the first place.

      Myself, I'd rather watch the pathetically animated but extremely funny Home Movies on Adult Swim than the beautifully and painstakingly rendered but pointless Final Fantasy movie. Good characters and storytelling should come first, I hope this project realizes that before embarking on this effort...

  • Kiss my shiney metal ..... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is great news. I always thought those other losers where keeping that talented robot back. Can't wait for the movie to come out.

  • Blender (Score:5, Interesting)

    by abell ( 523485 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @04:19AM (#12631955)
    Blender is a truly impressive piece of software. I went a few times through the following steps:
    • Install it out of curiosity
    • Open the interface and try and "figure it out" for ten minutes, being unable to do anything but move and rotate the default cube
    • Close and uninstall and forget about it for months.
    Then I bought an apartment and to test out various furnishing options I finally decided to seriously learn how to use Blender. It took way longer than 10 minutes to come to terms with the interface, but once you learn the various shortcuts interaction with the 3D space becomes really efficient. Now I completely love it and use it even for creating simple images. Who needs a pre-made icon of an arrow when I can generate a 3D model and a 2D rendering of it in a few minutes.

    Not to mention the facts that the package is smaller than your average text-editor, its start-up is almost instantaneous, that it runs identically on Windows and Linux and that you can extend it with Python routines?

    Oh, and did I mention that I love it? :-)

    • I started to learn to use (with no prior experiance in 3D graphics) about a year ago.
      I read the documentation, did the tutorial, made my gingerbread man, animated it, textured it and made it dance.

      That took me a week in total, making me wonder what on earth people complain about when they say they can't use it. Doesn't seem all that hard to me :)

      I now use it to create real life holograms.
    • Notepad is 68KB you insensitive clod!

  • Wouldn't it make more sense ... (Score:3, Informative)

    by maxwell demon ( 590494 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @04:27AM (#12631987) Journal
    ... to join the Free Film Project [sourceforge.net], instead of making another independent project?
  • Shouldn't it be possible to use distributed rendering for theese kind of projects? Rendering could be done with a software similar to seti@home.
  • I have been waiting for the true OS pron since long time ago!

  • Verse (Score:4, Informative)

    by Emil Brink ( 69213 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @04:42AM (#12632038) Homepage

    Heh. As a full-time developer of the related technology, I'm glad the mention of Verse survived into the blurb!

    Verse is a low-level data model, network protocol and programming API for dealing with distributed applications involving 3D graphics and audio. It is completely open and distributed under a BSD license so you can use it in any kind of application.

    For details, see the top-level Uni-Verse site [uni-verse.org] (toplevel page about the current research project). If you're a developer, perhaps heading directly to the Verse [blender.org] pages is more interesting. You could also check out the specification [blender.org] for the Verse core technology. Or why not just surf the CVS and read some code [blender.org]? :)

    If you have questions, you could drop by #verse on FreeNode [freenode.net], or use the mailing list [blender.org]. More developers would certainly not hurt.

    • Re:Verse (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MrAndrews ( 456547 )
      I'm glad the mention of Verse survived into the blurb!

      I left that bit in when I submitted it specifically because I wanted to see if I could drag someone like you into the discussion :) I am curious: what exactly does Verse do for this project, and is it used in Blender dev generally already? It seems like a brilliant technology, but I'm a bit confused about how it works in practice.
      • Cool, I'm glad to be dragged!

        I can't answer for Blender in any detail, as I'm not actually part of the developer pool for it. I work solely on Verse, so far.

        But I do know that there is a developer who is working on getting Blender to use Verse, allowing real-time collaborative modelling across a network. I've seen him demo early versions of the code, so I know it's happening. I can easily imagine that being useful for a project such as this, where (I guess) many artists will be working on the same scenes.
  • Has there been any attempt to create an open source movie script, using maybe a wikipedia? With thousands able to work on that and the screen play, maybe we'll finally have some good movies. ;-)
    • ...or maybe you end up with a group of people who just keep overwriting each other with aimless direction. Just imagine a stadium full of people trying to decide where to eat lunch. Wouldn't be pretty.

  • wer (Score:1, Redundant)

    by photonic ( 584757 )
    From TFWebsite:
    Render farm: Especially during the last 3-4 months, november-march, we need online access to a render cluster allowing Blender to render movie resolution frames. Our estimate is that it will require at least 10 systems to render 3 months continuously.
  • There's no way Bender would go for open source anything - he wants the cash!

    Ohh BLENDER, sorry my mistake.
  • Do you think this would play friendly with music. Say there's a section of the movie that I found interesting musically, do you think they'd let me sample it for free if I agreed to release it under creative commons?

  • Render@home? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by photonic ( 584757 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @05:05AM (#12632095)
    From the linked website:
    Render farm: Especially during the last 3-4 months, november-march, we need online access to a render cluster allowing Blender to render movie resolution frames. Our estimate is that it will require at least 10 systems to render 3 months continuously.
    I am not really familiar with the technicallities of rendering, but wouldn't it be possible to use some distributed client model instead of a rendering farm? You could make a program similar to SETI@home that downloads the wire-frame of the scene and sends back the rendered frame once completed. Might be really nice for a screensaver since you actually have a picture to show instead of some alien noise. They estimate 10 systems full-time for 3 months. I guess the same work could be done in the background by 1000 systems in a few weeks.

    Some issues that I could imagine:
    -reproducibility: subsequent frames that were rendered by different clients should look exactly the same. This means that only a project provided rendering core can be used, no tinkering allowed by the user.
    -copyright (not an issue in this case): suppose Toy Story 7 would use this concept. I guess Disney/Pixar wouldn't be to happy if all the frames were posted online well before the final release. Posting only low-res previews might actually create a big buzz.

    • Bandwidth (Score:2, Interesting)

      by anno1602 ( 320047 )
      The problem here is the amount of data that needs to be transferred: You need all the textures, models, objects, everything from a scene before you can even start rendering. That can be quite a significant amount of bytes. And the resulting rendered frames are, while not large, still huge in comparison to SETI@Home. To sum it up, the CPU-time/data-size ratio is not as favourable. Consider that even in "professional" render farms of a few hundred nodes on a LAN, the delivery of scene data and return of rend
    • You'd need people to go through frame-by-frame to make sure that someone hasn't slipped goatse in.

  • Blender is "deceptively good" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Vektuz ( 886618 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @05:29AM (#12632160)
    I recently switched over to blender from the more 'expensive' tools due to its extreme flexibility, open source nature, but also because it actually makes a lot of the big tasks pretty simple. It takes a little longer to learn the interface, but as people are starting to learn, different is not necissarily bad. Blender3D and the amazing "Wings 3D" winged-edge modeller make a powerful team.

  • The next killer app (Score:3, Interesting)

    by master_p ( 608214 ) on Wednesday May 25, 2005 @05:31AM (#12632167)
    One of the next killer apps is the "movie director", i.e. an application that allows the direction of a movie using 3d graphics. There have been attempts in the past, but the technology at the time did not allow it. With all the 3d graphics power available now, it is quite feasible.

    The success of the Halo movies, the game 'the Sims' and Pokemon success are prime examples that people like the 'director' concept.

    Finally, Lots of people have been asking in various forums how to direct their own anime. A 'movie director' application would make it possible.
    • I read about this kind of product a few months ago (probably here) where one of the newer game engines was being adapted to work in a super-Machinima environment... you would basically just "tell" the characters to go from A to B and wait, and then move the camera around to capture the shots as you like. RvB with finer control. My feeling is something like that is almost entirely in the UI, so if one could completely re-write how people interact with Blender's animation tools, you could probably achieve w
    • Such apps exist. See Storyboard Quick [powerproduction.com], which is a cross between PowerPoint and Poser used to make movie storyboards. This is an unusual tool, not widely used outside the film industry. It comes with a good supply of canned characters, props, and backgrounds. (There are add-on libraries, like "Twentysomething" and "Law and Order").

      If you're going to make an animated film, first you need a story and a script. A good storyboard is the next big step. It's customary to then make the storyboard into a time

  • In a writing class we took, the teacher basically told the whole class to write a story. One person would write a page and then hand it off to the next person. All I remember is that the first person started the story off in some lab at a university, with some professor looking for funding or something, but eventually it morphed into a ninja/kungfu thriller with an ending that involved the professor blowing up her former lover with a rocket launcher.

  • It is predictable that few are understanding how big this is. Computer graphics have soaked into entertainment such that people have not yet captured their impact. How is an open movie different from a normal movie? Is the inspiration of the artist dumbed down?

    Open entertainment is great for subjects or that happen not to fit the usuall bounds of 44 to 160 minutes. In can also be participatory, allowing viewers to watch scenes over again from different views or with different cuts. Distracted by ho

  • Does anyone know of a halfway decent video editing program that's GPL?

    Currently looking at Zwei-Stein. Is there anything out there better than that?

  • They asked for people to volunteer equipment for a render farm. I don't have the l33t programming skills to write the code, but it would be cool if we could help render in a SETI@home style distributed rendering.
  • I still want to see more work done on Blender CAD.

    Blender is a great visualisation package, but is absolutely terrible when trying to design real-world objects to scale, or something as simple as changing the overall colour of the object.

    There's not actually that many changes that would have to be made to the codebase to achieve decent CAD functionality. I'd fix it myself but don't have the time. A sentiment echoed by many other developers, no doubt.

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