Blender-Rendered Movie 'Flow' Wins Oscar for Best Animated Feature, Beating Pixar (blender.org) 72
It's a feature-length film "rendered on a free and open-source software platform called Blender," reports Reuters. And it just won the Oscar for best animated feature film, beating movies from major studios like Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks.
In January Blender.org called Flow "the manifestation of Blender's mission, where a small, independent team with a limited budget is able to create a story that moves audiences worldwide, and achieve recognition with over 60 awards, including a Golden Globe for Best Animation and two Oscar nominations." The entire project cost just $3.7 million, reports NPR — though writer/director Gints Zilbalodis tells Blender.org that it took about five and a half years.
"I think a certain level of naivety is necessary when starting a project," Zilbalodis tells Blender. "If I had known how difficult it would be, I might never have started. But because I didn't fully grasp the challenges ahead, I just dove in and figured things out along the way..." Zilbalodis: [A]fter making a few shorts, I realized that I'm not good at drawing, and I switched to 3D because I could model things, and move the camera... After finishing my first feature Away, I decided to switch to Blender [from Maya] in 2019, mainly because of EEVEE... It took a while to learn some of the stuff, but it was actually pretty straightforward. Many of the animators in Flow took less than a week to switch to Blender...
I've never worked in a big studio, so I don't really know exactly how they operate. But I think that if you're working on a smaller indie-scale project, you shouldn't try to copy what big studios do. Instead, you should develop a workflow that best suits you and your smaller team.
You can get a glimpse of their animation style in Flow's official trailer.
NPR says that ultimately Flow's images "possess a kinetic elegance. They have the alluring immersiveness of a video game..."
In January Blender.org called Flow "the manifestation of Blender's mission, where a small, independent team with a limited budget is able to create a story that moves audiences worldwide, and achieve recognition with over 60 awards, including a Golden Globe for Best Animation and two Oscar nominations." The entire project cost just $3.7 million, reports NPR — though writer/director Gints Zilbalodis tells Blender.org that it took about five and a half years.
"I think a certain level of naivety is necessary when starting a project," Zilbalodis tells Blender. "If I had known how difficult it would be, I might never have started. But because I didn't fully grasp the challenges ahead, I just dove in and figured things out along the way..." Zilbalodis: [A]fter making a few shorts, I realized that I'm not good at drawing, and I switched to 3D because I could model things, and move the camera... After finishing my first feature Away, I decided to switch to Blender [from Maya] in 2019, mainly because of EEVEE... It took a while to learn some of the stuff, but it was actually pretty straightforward. Many of the animators in Flow took less than a week to switch to Blender...
I've never worked in a big studio, so I don't really know exactly how they operate. But I think that if you're working on a smaller indie-scale project, you shouldn't try to copy what big studios do. Instead, you should develop a workflow that best suits you and your smaller team.
You can get a glimpse of their animation style in Flow's official trailer.
NPR says that ultimately Flow's images "possess a kinetic elegance. They have the alluring immersiveness of a video game..."
A Razzie Award for UI (Score:3, Interesting)
When I kicked the tires on Blender a bit more than a decade ago, I decided it was among the worst UI's I had ever seen. Maybe it's optimized for productivity instead of quick learning, but it sure the hell tilted the trade-off lever away from learning; probably snapped it off.
Has it since been improved?
Re: A Razzie Award for UI (Score:3)
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Re:A Razzie Award for UI (Score:5, Interesting)
I took a look at it when slashdot first announced it was being released as open source. Was quite meh.
I took another look at it after I got my current 3d printer and now I make basically everything in it. I'd probably be better off with some kind of CAD, but...meh, blender works well enough for everything I've needed it for, which includes building things that have e.g. threads, gears, etc.
Re: A Razzie Award for UI (Score:2)
Re: A Razzie Award for UI (Score:4, Interesting)
This, so much.
I did my early 3D print designs in an old version of Light wave 3D (VFX software), trying to avoid having to learn a CAD program. Eventually as my old Lightwave version started to get hinky on new OSes, I had to pick up a CAD program, and the difference for your work and workflow is huge.
With VFX software, you're (often) editing or creating a mesh of polygons that mainly have to look good. Meanwhile, to be well-printable, your objects have to be "manifold" (imagine that means: 'will hold water without any leaks'). VFX software isn't concerned with making manifolds, and while your print slicing software can fix some manifold issues, you really have to get it pretty right. Also, editing a mesh for CAD proposes is pretty much a pain.
On the other side, CAD programs (those I've experienced) make manifold geometry by design. You're not editing a bunch of triangles to make something round. It's great for creating and manipulating objects that look like machine parts, doorknobs and houses. OTOH, if you want to create a character with it, it's probably gonna start out looking like a cube with eyes. Much better to go back to a VFX program like Blender (or a more modern Lightwave 3D) for character work.
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It's not just manifold geometry that makes the difference, though.
The biggest difference is in having a real parametric history. You can mimic a lot of this in blender by stacking modifiers, but at a certain point, you end up needing to apply the modifiers (eg. to make a single edge of a boolean "real" so that you can apply a fillet, for example)
If you later need to make a modification, any of the actions that happened before you applied the modifier stack are now lost. With certain edits you might be compl
Re: A Razzie Award for UI (Score:2)
Yeah, all true, but deeper than I decided to go.
For anyone who didn't follow: you can do a screw thread in Blender and make a bunch of triangles. You can do a screw thread in CAD and spec it as an M3 thread. If you wanna change it later to an M4, in Blender you'd have healing up and re-constructing of your mesh to do. In CAD, You just change the spec to "M4".
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I was one of the Slashdotters who contributed to buying it out so it could be open sourced.
That's one "gofundme" I've never regretted even if it's never been of direct benefit
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IIRC I think I gave at least $100 USD.
If I'd known where it would lead I would have done my best to scrape up $1000.
But looking back I was in a bad way at the time, having been badly impacted by the fallout from the DotCom crash and the company I was working for at the time went into a tailpsin & folded less than a year later.
But I suppose all's well that ends well
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Has it since been improved?
It basically looks and acts nothing like it did a decade ago. You could confuse it to be a completely different program.
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You should have seen the original GUI back then around 2000 when NaN released the source code...
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Quit wining. 3D toolkits are hard. (Score:2)
No dumbed-down UI concept is going to change that, not for any professional level 3D/Compositing/NLE/Post-production/etc. tool in the world.
Blenders UI used to be quite unusual, now it's closer to mainstream. But it always has been good, in parts very good right up to outstanding. For instance, Blender was the first 3D tool to have a fully OpenGL accelerated UI and a fully configurable UI. That was back in the year 2000(!). Yes, completely configging Blenders UI to your liking was quite an adventure 25 year
This should shake things up (Score:4, Interesting)
A small, upstart Pixar once soundly kicked the crap out of Disney films years ago, simply because Disney was the large, cautious entity taking no risks and making movies by committee.
Now Pixar and Dreamworks have the same bloat problem Disney does, and all the work has been coming off flat.
Perhaps the ability for indie works to eat the large studios lunch might, just might kick them back into taking some creative risks again.
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Hopefully, Ne Zha 2 (came out too late for this year's Academy Awards) will also do the same next year.
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"In the aether I appear in fiery forms, And in the aer I sit in a silvery chariot; earth reigns in my black brood of puppies." -- Porphyry knows what's going on.
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Hopefully, best foreign and animated.
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Perhaps the ability for indie works to eat the large studios lunch might, just might kick them back into taking some creative risks again.
There's a difference between winning self-congratulatory awards (The Oscars pretty much is the film industry patting itself on the back) and making money. Last I checked, Disney is still printing cash with their latest Marvel flick. Captain America Beats a Dead Horse, or something along those lines. As long as big budget blockbusters keep filling cinema seats, the big studios have nothing to worry about from some Nintendo Switch cutscene aesthetic animated indie film.
I'm surprised it comes up as often as
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Printing cash? It flamed out after two weeks and will be lucky to break even.
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Printing cash? It flamed out after two weeks and will be lucky to break even.
it's made something like $300 million worldwide. People did go to see it, problem is that Disney just spent too much on making it.
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I never really understood why Disney was regarded as high end animation. It was always poor compared to what was coming out of Japan, for example. The writing wasn't great either, the stories were mostly just recycled public domain stuff that didn't really say or do anything particularly interesting. There were a few stand-outs like Robin Williams and Genie, but Pixel really elevated the storytelling to a new level that Disney was seemingly unable to reach.
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Disney was only regarded as high end animation in its early ears. It really wasn't held up as anything amazing beyond. Pixar was, and still is to this day truly high end. But ultimately the Pixar problem now is some of the stories suck.
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Well, because they were the high end for a long time. But, as usual in business, they eventually became stale and faded away as other, younger and more intrepid studios, rose to become the new stars in the show.
Re:This should shake things up (Score:4, Interesting)
Disney had high production values. They had high frame rates, high quality photography, the whole thing was just really clean. These days anyone can manage that, but back in the day, not so much. Your average anime did indeed pass them at some point, but it's also worth remembering that most earlier anime was pretty chunky and choppy, and only a few cinematic standouts like Akira had the same kind of production quality as a Disney movie.
Good FOSS does this. (Score:2)
There is no two ways about it: Blender is a gallion-figure FOSS project and Ton and the Blender crew deserve all the accolades they're getting.
Once something like that comes along it causes - often overdue - disruption. That's the way it goes.
Look at Git for such an example. If anybody came about with Perforce today they'd be laughed out of the room. Subversion and BitKeeper aren't even actively developed anymore. There's simply no point. The CGI space is seeing that with Blender in recent years.
How's that now? (Score:3)
So this was just another Pokemon film?
Re:How's that now? (Score:4, Informative)
EEVEE is the rendering engine. There are two options, EEVEE and cycles, which specialise in different kinds of things. EEVEE is much faster, cycles is a traditional raytracer so if you rely on things like detailed, accurate transparency, then cycles is for you. It is much, much slower.
Couldnâ(TM)t watch (Score:3)
Somehow they managed shaky cam in an animation. Everyone involved should be shot.
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you owe me a cup of tea. potohuwa extra special. and a keyboard.
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Re: Couldnâ(TM)t watch (Score:3)
Re: Couldnâ(TM)t watch (Score:4, Informative)
The one thing that makes the difference between snapshots and art is image composition. Motive selection, color concept, timing and light may add the bit that makes a really good picture but composition is the K.O. factor.
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An established artist might be able to sell photos without light as high-concept, but they're not good photos. I try to compose well, but a frame that's several stops underexposed is unusable.
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The framerate also seems choppy. This movie definitely didn't win because of the graphics.
Framerates are a stylistic choice in animated films. They can be used in different variations to evoke different emotions. Take for example Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Did you notice that the frame rate of Miles Morales actually changed throughout the movie? Or maybe that Hobie Brown had 1/4 of the frame rate of the scene for just the character?
They could render it at 120fps if they wanted. This has nothing to do with blender's capabilities.
Rendered in 200x150px and upscaled with AI? (Score:1)
Why stop at the animation level? Couldn't you just render it to photorealistic imagery easily nowadays?
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Disney made Pixar WOKE. Disney F*cked the Brand. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Maybe if Christians weren't spending all their time and effort making as hard as possible for people to have families.....
That's a different take. The only people I know who are having children are the religious.
Modern womanism demands career over motherhood.
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Maybe if Christians weren't spending all their time and effort making as hard as possible for people to have families.....
That's a different take. The only people I know who are having children are the religious.
Modern womanism demands career over motherhood.
That may be so but it is also them making it more difficult. Not your everyday Johnny Christian mind (other that with their votes), just the ones in charge removing any kind of support or incentive and generally making life as expensive and difficult as possible that having kids just seems like the worst possible idea for the young.
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Maybe if Christians weren't spending all their time and effort making as hard as possible for people to have families.....
That's a different take. The only people I know who are having children are the religious.
Modern womanism demands career over motherhood.
That may be so but it is also them making it more difficult. Not your everyday Johnny Christian mind (other that with their votes), just the ones in charge removing any kind of support or incentive and generally making life as expensive and difficult as possible that having kids just seems like the worst possible idea for the young.
Make no mistake, I am atheist and if the Christian gawd is real, I am happy to go to hell because he's a genocidal psycho. And I ask all my christian friends "if you properly worship gawd and upon your death, enter into the glorious kingdom of heaven - can gawd change his mind and send you to hell for fun?" The answer is "of course" - "You trust that guy who tells you to kill your neighboring tribe, all except the little girls - they are to be taken for your fun and enjoyment - that guy?" Paraphrased of cou
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The superman series "clan of the fiery cross" seems to have had an impact.
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Oops. You said the word ("WOKE") that outs you as a right-wing nut-job. I stopped reading after that.
Oops. You used the phrase ("RIGHT-WING NUT-JOB") that outs you as someone hopelessly mired in one-dimensional political tribalism and childish name-calling. If you had written anything beyond that, I wouldn't have bothered to read it.
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"jUsT" (Score:2)
Re:"jUsT" (Score:5, Informative)
3.7 million for an Oscar winning animation? That's not bad at all. Scratch that, it's incredible.
By contrast here are the budgets of the recent winners:
2024, 53 mil
2023, 35 mil
2022, 150 mil
2021, 150 mil
2020, 200 mil
2019, 90 mil
2018, 200 mil
2017, 150 mil
2016, 175 mil
2015, 165 mil
It's a tenth of the budget of the next nearest and something like one 50th of the budget of the average.
So when they say just, it's not in relation to spare cash you or I have, but it is in revelation to what it usually costs to make a best animation Oscar winner.
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Right but my point is 3.7 million is still a fuck ton of cash
On the scale of what?
How much would a software licence add to that if they didn't use free software? .1?
Maybe read TFA? It's not like someone sat down, wrote a cheque for 3.7 million dollars and the chap went off and then made a film. It started as a self funded concept which then got a little funding, then a little more then a little more. Sure when the final budget came in, it ended up as a small fraction, but it would be a huge fraction possibl
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I'm not angry about anything nor am I trying to change your mind. Triggered was the wrong word, I should've said bugs because honestly it's not even an irk. I'm just laughing at the concept of "just" 3.7 million.
I agree i
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3.7 million is an unachievable figure for most people or groups to do a passion project
We're not talking about passion projects here, we're talking about Oscar-winning full-length movies.
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Right but my point is 3.7 million is still a fuck ton of cash, doesn't matter if they usually spend even fucktons morier.
Context matters. If I told you I just bought a new Lear jet for just $1M, a new iPhone for just $100, a meal at a nice restaurant for just $10, or a ticket to see a new movie for just $1, the "just" makes perfect sense in all of those cases, though if you swapped the numbers and items around you'd get all kind of ridiculousness.
In this case, Oscar-winning full-length animated movies generally cost between tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, so just $3.7M is pretty darned cheap, and the "just" is ju
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Just 3.7 million. Just. lol.
It took five and a half years to make it. So, in perhaps over-simplified terms, that's ~$670k year working on it. Let's say you had six people working on the project, and had NO overhead at all beyond their personal income while making it. That's roughly $100k per person before they paid taxes, which is either pretty good or not very good at all, depending on where you live and how. But one supposes they also had some overhead. This wasn't done on their kids' laptops at night. There was music to compose, a
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It cost 3.7 million. There should be no just here. Okay that's like a tenth or less than what usually is spent but still.
So the people who made it should have been earning minimum wage, is that your point? Spread that dollar amount across five and half yeads and even modest team of people and their overhead, and they're making middle five figures after taxes. Is that a lot, to you?
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Let's say you had six people working on the project, and had NO overhead at all beyond their personal income while making it. That's roughly $100k per person before they paid taxes, which is either pretty good or not very good at all, depending on where you live and how.
It was made in Latvia, where wages are not that high, you can probably pay maybe 10-15 people with ~$670k a year.
Isn't it cute when "academics" finally get a .... (Score:2)
... glimpse of art forms and styles the avantgarde of gamers, game developers, computer enthusiasts, 3D artists, modders, demo programmers have been doing for _decades_ and completely lose their sh*t and wet their pants over a cute indie title? Don't get me wrong, I'm happy they're getting the recognition. However, they're going to completely lose their mind when they discover Simon Stalenhag. Years after amazon made a series out of his art. :-D
It's astonishing in what kind of a bubble academia lives in. Es
Completely and utterly 100% done in Blender ... (Score:2)
... 3D, anim, composite, NLE and all. Final master render done on a single workstation PC, averaging .5 seconds for 4k frame.
ROTFL! ... Nice.
Remember when a single RenderDrive used to cost as much as a brand-new mid-range car and had less FLOPS that a current-model Apple Watch?
I do. We've come a long way. I like this.
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I learned about 'nice' c. 1993 when I naively wrote a clustering renderfarm in shell scripts in college to render some povray scenes I was doing for a project. I procrastinated and didn't have time for the render before the semester was over. Had to port it to 64bit for the Alphas.
I didn't know it would take out the whole CS department at once. Oopsie.
The sysadmin was first panicked, then amused, then impressed, then thought he should teach the n00b about resource management.
Anyway, each frame was about
This is all well and good (Score:2)
We're about a hundred comments in and nobody --as in not a single soul--has mentioned a rocket launcher.
Latvia (Score:1)