How Open Film Project "Cosmos Laundromat" Made Blender Better 31
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.
Oh finally, a new sample video (Score:3)
Re:Oh finally, a new sample video (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
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: (Score:2, Insightful)
> 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.
Quality almost too good. (Score:2)
We're riding on the edge of the uncanny valley here.
Re: (Score:2)
The characters are too cartoony for that, even the human.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not praising the storyline, but it's ridiculous to shoot it down as "absolutely not something that can be used as a demo". The quality is unreal! (Again, look at the grass, or watch Sintel from 2010 and then look at how the characters' bones move in this film.)
Back to the storyline, in their defence, it's the first 10 mins of a full-length film. It's not a 10 minute short film that's suppose to make sense on its own.
Or another defence would be that they spent their money on animators and developers an
Re: (Score:1)
Then there is the 3D graphics crowd (hardware makers, programmers, and artists), who think a "demo" is something "stunning" to show off every rendering and graphic
Re: (Score:2)
the start is boring and the rest makes little sense at all, especially the new place for the sheep being a tiny being in a laundromat. lucky for him that he is in the center of it as it's spinning pretty violently.
it's not a pilot, it's a tech trailer.
Sintel is pretty good. (Score:1)
It's got dragons and snow and mountains and stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
Makes me wonder if this video will be made illegal in Russia.
Looked great.. (Score:1)
Looked great until the orange beard man showed up. Somehow it was the dayglow hair rather than a suicidal knot-tying sheep that killed the suspension of disbelief
Cosmo's Laundromat, eh? (Score:2)
Is that anywhere near Cosmo's Factory [wikipedia.org]?
Watch it before Sony takes it down! (Score:1)
Given Sony's history of fraudulently claiming ownership of a previous open blender movie, I wouldn't be surprised if it is only a matter of time before they do it again.
Here is the last time the pulled an open blender movie down:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140406/07212626819/sony-youtube-take-down-sintel-blenders-open-source-creative-commons-crowdfunded-masterpiece.shtml
how this changed blender (Score:4, Informative)
* 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.
Re: (Score:1)
Having an attempted suicide to start the film is very poor. Suicide is a larg problem, particularly in the youth.
Ignoring that a problem exists in media doesn't make it less of a problem.
How "Titanic" made a better 64 bit Linux kernel (Score:1)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/no... [linuxjournal.com]
The article is an excellent read, the movie was made ~1997 too.
"The Linux distribution used was Red Hat 4.1. At that time Red Hat was shipping Linux 2.0.18, which didn't support the PC164 mainboard, so the first thing we had to do was upgrade the kernel. During our testing we tracked down a number of problems with devices and kept up with both the 2.0 and 2.1 series of kernels. We ended up sticking with 2.1.42 with a few patches. We also decided on the NCR 810 SCSI card with