A break from cartoonish open movies?

And how would that helps improving the software? :slight_smile:

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Strong disagree there. I have watched it lots of times. My children are a fan as well. I really like the atmosphere of Dynamo Dream.

I actually like it very much that the open community and the financial advantage of using blender results in movies being made that ‘the average Joe’ might think boring or too slow, or too niche.

And I do hope the Blender Studio keeps going the way they did before. I actually really like the weirdness of Elephant’s Dream or Cosmos Laundromat. My kids really like ‘Spring’, they watch it on repeat on sunday mornings.

Different tastes I guess.

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Yeah, sadly, I don’t we’ll be getting that for project Heist…
I believe Ton’s words describing the concept were something along the lines of “Minimal plot, maximum impact”…

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Blender is awesome indeed . (There is a but)

The hidden truth as to why you are not having more “Realistic movies” unless you are talking about mixing mo-cap with some sci-fi world and playing on the uncanny valley IS ALSO TECHNICAL (Not just budget and talent) as people will tell you, but there is an actual technical ROADBLOCK,

Blender is just not good enough and lack in features to make a “live-action like” movie.
PBR is not fully supported, hell its not half-way supported yet ,

The development team still need to resolve their “Muh bubble rendering” spectral renderer for more accurate colors under some conditions,

the NLA editor may as well match a blender version 1.0 being so lacking.

If you want to render caustics in blender (And caustics rendering is expansive), you may as well buy all the computers in the US for processing power.

AND , their physics engine… well, i WISH IT DIDN’T EXIST because it causes more problems existing than just scrapping it out (Got nothing to do with computing powers, its their solvers and the way they wrote it).

All that said, its still a great product but i do believe this is why they are limited to cartoon-like movies.

They announced that they are currently working on a new realistic open movie about a week ago…

I suppose we will find out whether you are correct about those other points in about 7 months :upside_down_face:

This can hurt some, but i also believe it’s the case,
when working with really hollywoodian like scenarios we can really start to see the limitation of blender.

Tbh i did this thread because i felt that they stay a bit too much in their confort zones when making these open movies, when we see the similarities between the last few ones, but well this is only an opinion, perhaps i’m dead wrong :slightly_smiling_face:

I suppose we will find out whether you are correct about those other points in about 7 months :upside_down_face:

Yeah indeed, that’s very good news
i’m very curious to see how much they will push this project, the more they push the boundaries, the less limitations blender will have, let’s hope

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Maximum impact of what? If you’re not using story to impact an audience emotionally, you’ll certainty have an impact on their boredom. You can’t visually bludgeon people into liking your short film. Many Hollywood films try and the result is often a forgettable movie.

If the story isn’t exciting to hear as a pitch and it isn’t exciting to read as a script, it will have a hard time being exciting to watch as a movie no matter how visually stimulating. Think of any movie that had a strong emotional impact on you. Was it the thousands of man-hours spent on the background CGI? Or was it a character’s struggle that you connect with? Perhaps a difficult decision that character had to make?

I think it’s good that the Blender Studio is using photo-realism as a constraint for their next film, I’m hopeful it will help with much needed development in neglected areas of Blender, but that consideration should be separate from developing an emotionally impacting story. Otherwise, considering the Blender Studio’s limited resources, time would be better spent just making tech demos and asking for community feedback.

Yeah right 3D artists choose their softwares because they find the demo reel cute and emotional :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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What a bunch of killjoys you guys are.

I just happen to like all open movies up to now.

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Its a discussion, Nobody is killing anyone’s joy, Don’t get emotional.

I was tempted to use a less polite word, but settled on ‘killjoy’ as sufficiently old-fashioned to not really insult anyone. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Story is king, indeed, But i would say that there are some cases in which visuals managed to carry bad story OR NO STORY(it goes by personal taste).

The point is that, while rare, it can exist, visuals over story that is. (Maybe one example)

Search on youtube for a video called : " The Nose ( Le Nez )" (No quotation marks)

On a side note: all of this is why I always would have loved to see Blender Studio also branch out into games a little, again. Not for another Blender game engine, of course. But for game specific tools. Eevee was such a game changer but better baking tools, being able to optimize geometry more efficiently and better UV layout tools to better flatten, pack and optimize UV layouts. Game optimized skeleton hierachies in Rigify… In general - tools that are not as vital to a movie production because you can throw more rendertime and hardware at it.
A realistic new movie is a good step in this direction, though. High end engines are getting closer and closer to rendering anyways. I think it’s a good thing to go into a more realistic direction again. Push boundaries in neglected areas. :slight_smile:

Having those Open movies really is one of the best ideas for the software and I love to see whatever they do. Stress-testing your own tools is always a good idea. Epic also do it with Unreal and it shows in the tools. Unity, unfortunately (for as much as I love it) has always felt like a tool created for tool’s sake but with missing hands on real productions to see where the strenghts and shortcomings are on an actual production.

So yeah: Every change in style for an open movie is absolutely welcome from my side just because of mixing things up. My point for another small game production still stands, though. Especially with Geometry nodes, now!

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well, you still have blender UPBGE (Revived game engine based on blender v3.0) and i can easily say its very decent so far.

with it, do some hacks around :

  • Some hacks with subdividing things based on your location (Faking the way the experimental adaptive subdivision works (But per mesh, the experimental adaptive subdivision works differently and split the mesh unequally), you do that with subdivsion that inherits a driver that goes to your “Player” or “Camera”
  • Using different texture resolutions based on your position (With image sequence, somewhat of a fake mipmap method, again, drivers based on your position to image sequence offset that has a series of textures at different resolutions)
  • Using geometry node to load things on the fly based on your location(Dunno if its possible, need to check)

And you can even fake streaming data with blender (In theory, not sure how it holds in performance, i assume that subdividing on the fly and texture swapping on the fly will cause hiccups in performance)

Add it to it, Blender’s UPBGE with python scripting and you got a full blender game engine (IN THEORY).

The Blender Game engine itself really is not of interest, IMO. Engines are a separate thing and as I’ve written above I wouldn’t want the core devs to spend any time on such a thing. The project always develops the tools needed to finish. So It would absolutely be fair game if a Blender Studio Game was created in any Open Source engine, bei it OGRE, Godot or whatever (though Godot would probably make most sense by now).

What I mean is: I would love to see the development of game specific workflow improvments and tools inside of Blender. So far it’s always viewed as “the movie tools do include game workflows”. Which is true in a way but mostly they are not very specific. PBR Texture Painting, recombination of UV Maps, Better UV Tools in general, better and way easier baking solutions with game engine specific maps, easier exporters or bridges, geometry node converters like with Houdini Engine … That’s the kind of things I am talking about. If the core devs are working with these kinds of tools then the developed technology is sure to be included as a suppordet feature.

I am very curious to what extend the next Open Movie will bring improvements in regards to that. :slight_smile:

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Preach, Couln’t agree more, and lucky for us, there is another fork for blender GAME ENGINE maintained by another group so that’s always an option, options are good.

Blender can benefit indeed from a game engine, While you do have “Walknav” that really needs to be revised, it can help from a movie making aspect to walk around the scene and interact with characters (From the point of stroyboarding and concept at least, adds another level of details in concept making)

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Which branch are you talking about?

In general I don’t really see why these tools should require a separate branch or split. Realtime and movie productions are converging more and more and realtime content is now more important than ever. Most other packages have incorporated tools at least to some extend as well by now. It’s not been a niche market for a long time and especially small indie developers and solo devs benefit from better game tools a lot.

UV improvements and retopo, to be fair, are a very general thing, though. Retopo will already get a boost with one of the Retopoflow devs being on the team now. So I really hope we see improvments in the UV field, next. *fingerscrossed

ok we are derailing from the topic here but maybe i can help with 1 thing.

For retopology there is a plugin , which leads to a non-open source binary, for blender (By one of zbrush developers, i will not plug a link here), if you have about $100 to buy it, that’s the retopology tool that you want for blender.

I am improving UV unfolding. The main code of the patch that adds the island alignment functions has been written, it remains to fix some problems and send it for review

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That. Is. Awesome! :heart:

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