Open Source On the Big Screen 120
An anonymous reader writes "Following the success of Elephants Dream, the Blender Foundation is developing a follow-on open movie called Peach, set for completion later this year. Computerworld has up an interesting interview with Matt Ebb, lead artist from Elephants Dream (the interview is split over 5 pages). Ebb talks about the making of the world's first open movie and offers some advice to others wanting to start such a project."
Apricot (Score:4, Interesting)
Success? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone doing a less "artsy" project? (Score:4, Interesting)
Any movie is going to be judged by a combination of its technical achievements and its storytelling. A lot of the reviews I have read of Elephant's Dream are sort of "what was THAT about" and clearly that was an expected response. Fair enough. Now I'm curious to see if the ground breaking work can be used to create something with a bit more mainstream appeal, that the wider press could pick up and promote with the expectation that most viewers would be entertained. Are there free movie scripts being written anywhere? Maybe if there's a central forum with scripts being reviewed by a community a team could take one of the highly ranked ones and see what they can do with it.
Maybe we can make some "stars" in the Open Movie world - script writers, voice actors, what have you.
Not Really Open... (Score:1, Interesting)
This is perhaps the biggest problem of Elephant's Dream. Has the script been under some sort of review, I don't think it would have passed.
I think there's some irony to the fact that on virtually every level except as an good movies, Elephant's Dream is a huge success. As a demo reel for Blender, a way of making the workflow more usable, a means for enhancing the viability of Blender... a huge success.
But as a film... Not so much. It doesn't really tell a story, and the plot (such that it is) doesn't make sense. If this is all being imagined on the part of one of the characters, there's really nothing to let us know, and the "real" world fails to intrude. Who is this other character, and why are they together in the first place? It just doesn't work.
Project Peach takes a similar approach - while all the outputs of the project will eventually be open to the public, the actual process - plotting, character choices, storyboarding - are closed to the public. In theory, it's to prevent the "surprise" of the story from being spoiled. I'd argue that film experience something like "Cars" and "Toy Story" was just as good for the people who worked on the film as it was for those who didn't. In some cases, it was probably better, when they could finally see the fruits of their work come together.
In contrast, have a look at Animation:Master's Tin Woodman of Oz [hash.com]. Although they're a commercial project, the model is much more open than Blender's. The discussions are open on their boards, the animatics have been posted, and there's constantly open discussion about the project. Any member of the community can join in and contribute, from design, rigging, voice acting, music and animating. There's no "secrets" to the project.
Of course, you've got to be a paying customer to actually have a copy of Animation:Master in the first place, and their boards were notorious for banning people who complained about their products. It's also forbidden to discuss competing software in their forum.
Still, I think it's a model worth looking at, especially as a counter example to these so called "open" projects that Blender embarks where the end result isn't revealed until the end.
Yes, I'm aware that stuff is released on the blogs. Note that these often have censored bits, so particular bits of information about the film itself isn't leaked. Technical details are much more open.
I'm not arguing that the results - other than perhaps the video itself - aren't great. But I have to disagree strongly with the use of "open" tag as applied to the process itself. And TWO shows that a more open model is certainly viable in some forms (which put other constraints on the project, like increasing the time to market).
Re:Blender (Score:5, Interesting)
That's partly because they try to combine modelling - with two or three different paradigms: polygons, NURBS and subdivision surfaces - texturing, rigging, animating, physics, particles, hair, etc. into a single program. Of course the end result is a horrible mess where it's impossible to find what you want. Which, I suppose, is a long-winded way to say that they're kitchen sinks ;).
Ultimately, the problem is that 2D modeling - drawing - has traditionally been the domain of artists, while 3D modeling has been the domain of engineers and architechts. Artists don't have to know or care about mathemathics, while engineers and architechts have to. Their tools reflect this: brushes vs. millimeter paper. This division has been carried to the computer realm. It is straightforward to paint with Gimp - point and click a place in the screen, and color is added there - but the very first thing any 3D program manual starts talking about is polygons, and then goes on to explain the mathemathical foundation of NURBS. The limits of 2D screens and pointing devices don't exactly help, either.
To top it all off, the popular OBJ format used to exchange 3D models completely fails to retain any of the all-important rigging or animation loop information. As a result, these models are fine if you want to do an image of Lot's wife but not otherwise. We desperately need a higher-level file format which captures rigging, animation cycles (such as walk cycle) and automatic things like blinking and breathing, as well as unconscious gestures, body language and such. In short, a file format to describe a digital actor. The current stuff is the equivalent of assembly, and about as efficient for large projects: good for the CPU, horrible to anyone who has to do anything with it.
And, of course, all this is completely ignoring all the stupid little things like polygons caving into the model like the empty shells they are, NURBS models breaking at seams, the utter masslessness of any model unless the animator specifically goes over each frame and figures out how inertia and gravity affect things, inverse kinetics chains flip-flopping in certain situations, etc.
I wonder when we'll get even the abstraction level equivalent of ANSI C for 3D; compared to the current stuff, it seems pure sci-fi.
Re:Success? (Score:3, Interesting)
They succeeded in their goals perhaps?
Re:Anyone doing a less "artsy" project? (Score:3, Interesting)
So I think it has a good chance of meeting your hopes and expectations.
LetterRip
Re:Youtube (Score:5, Interesting)
3d modeling tools are seen as technical products for a technical audience.. as such the UI is given no serious consideration.
On the surface, you end up with a similar toolset. Both Maya and Lightwave have the split/slice polygon tools. However, the philosophies behind them really make that common toolset problematic. For example, Lightwave doesn't have a modifier based operation. It's like Photoshop in that respect. You mess with the vertices, blammo, you're done. This gives you tools like "Dragnet". That tool allows you to grab an area of verticies and pull, just like working with clay. Maya, however, can't do any operations on geometry without creating a modifier. So if you want to do a tool like I described, you have to create a 'dragnet' node, place its start point, then move it to the destination. That's a good deal slower than how Lightwave handles it.
This is an over-simplification of what's involved, but it more or less illustrates the problem with your statement. I'd liken it to watercolors vs. oil paints. They both require paint and a paint brush, but the techniques involved are nearly inverses of each other. With Lightwave, you model by cutting a lot of pieces away. With Maya, you model bending pieces into shape since its work flow lends itself to doing lots of deformations. To put it another over-simplified way: Lightwave would be better suited to modeling something vehicular with rigid pieces. Maya, however, would totally kick Lightwave's ass when modelling something with a lot of hoses and other bendable things, like the Sentinels from the Matrix. The difference is in the workflow philosophies of these apps, not their toolsets. It's a lot harder to cross-train modelers between apps than you'd expect.
Re:Blender (Score:3, Interesting)
LetterRip
Re:A Swarm of Angels (Score:4, Interesting)
Shares are being sold in the movie project but there is no chance to participate in profits, in the event that any profits are made. So while the project is on-going some people are being paid for their input and work (fair enough) while those "investing" have no hope of a return on investment over and above whatever entertainment they get from the forums and the opportunity to vote on what colour the poster will be (check it out if you don't believe me but last time I looked you needed to join to view the forums). To me this looks like an ideal investment plan for a potential film-maker - you get your money, you don't have to pay any of it back and individual investors are too small to have any control over you.
There was an initial flurry of activity on the forums then a bit of a gap in official communications while people on the forums talked a load of bull about scripts. Then we heard that a tentative initial script outline was going to be debuted at an upcoming convention, without any creative input from the swarm. At that point I realized it was smoke and mirrors and haven't been back since. If it's turned into some democratic creative Utopia since then my apologies to them.
Now I appreciate that a ship needs a captain and any project like this needs a creative vision but the implied promise was that that vision would be shaped by the members but I don't feel that was the case.