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Blender Foundation to Create Open Movie, Open Game
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jun 11, 2007 12:15 PM
from the opening-new-doors dept.
from the opening-new-doors dept.
Eloquence writes "The Blender Foundation, which maintains the open source 3D tool Blender, has announced two new projects, codenamed Peach and Apricot. Project Peach will be a new open source movie, following in the footsteps of last year's Elephants Dream project (which was initially codenamed Orange). Apricot, on the other hand, will use Blender in conjunction with open source 3D framework Crystal Space to create an open game, thereby showcasing both technologies."
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Ask Slashdot: The State of Open Source 3D Modeling 267 comments
gmueckl writes "Since Blender was released as open source in 2002, it has basically owned the open source 3D modeling scene. Its development has seen a massive push by both the community and supporting organizations. However, the program has been showing its age all along and efforts to improve on it have either been blocked or have failed in the past (note the dates). Authors of new modules are forced to jump through hoops to get their work glued onto the basic core, which still dates from the early 90s and has gone almost unchanged since. There are many other active projects out there like Art of illusion, K-3D, and Moonlight|3D. Each of them offers a modern, much saner, more coherent, and more powerful basic architecture and could match Blender in a couple of months' time with some extra manpower. So how come these projects don't get the level of support they deserve? How come developers are still willing to put up with such an arcane code base?"
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Open Source Movie (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Nope the script and concept art are already close to completion.
LetterRip
Also Essential Blender book (Score:4, Informative)
LetterRip
Parent
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should be good (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a lot of art like this, and it's usually people's first attempts.
They start off with huge complex plots, profound world shaking ideas, and amazing vistas of imagination.
What they don't do is think 'hey, how about we animate a lamp on a desk?'. It takes seasoned professionals to attempt something as ambitious as that.
You get the same thing in cinema, drama, music. It's not till you have been doing it for ye
This will be interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This will be interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Indie movies do not have a 1.4 million dollar budget like many of the ones listed for this years sundance festival.
Download and watch elephants dream. It is a technical example and not a well written story but it was designed to prove and in essence broadcast a loud STFU to all the maya and lighwave weenies that still proclaim that blender is not a professional tool capable of anything decent.
They produced a pixar quality animation with free stuff that YOU can have in your home. The next project is going to focus on a good storyline and probably get submitted to many festivals.
Parent
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I'll have to argue about the "Pixar quality animation" part, though.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as a tech demo, elephant's dream was a massive success. That clip generated an overwhelmingly positive response, increasing blender's profile and tri
Re:This will be interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Not to mention, somehow I doubt a game can be crafted with an open-source development model. A game needs some very strong creative forces behind it to keep it cohesive - if a typical OSS app can't even keep their user interface cohesive [ever look at your typical gnome or kde app's config screen?], something tells me it will be difficult for them to keep their: storyline cohesive, user interface cohesive (like I said, most simple desktop apps have a problem with this), game mechanics cohesive and logical, art direction and style cohesive, etc etc etc. Unless it's just TuxRacer 2.0 (maybe make a version named TuxRaver as a DDR clone?)
Considering the typical absurd workflow logic that goes into most OSS apps I've used (beyond your bread-and-water openoffice, etc)...
You will start out as a penguin in the north pole, whereby you will get a letter from your family in new mexico telling you to come quick because your cousin has died during the construction of the great pyramids. You arrive in Sicily only to find that Siberia has been taken over by mutant cyborgs all named 'Bill Gates.' You must travel to antarctica and battle the chair-throwing monster Ballmer in order to gain the GPL of truth, increasing your hit points by 6.02x10^23 while slowing you to a barely managable crawl. Desperately you make your way to florida, where you successfully battle jack thompson in court and gain the Writ of Winnitude. You combine this with your GPL of Destiny (the one you found during the side quest back in new mexico involving the trout and the cliff wren - you did that, didn't you? it's not in any of the docs anywhere, but it's so obvious! - it's NOT the Gpl of Truth - that item is useless) and are magically transported to a land of rainbows and penguins and free software for everyone. Unfortunately, this paradise is shattered by an Ax of Servitude hewn from the yggsadril-apple. It's shiny, but it works good and is simple to use...
Right about here, most people get bored developing the game and it slowly dies, forgotten in the depths of sourceforge. A few people stop by every couple of months and say, "hey.. there's this bug.. is anyone still working on this?" A few people wax nostalgic about the groundbreaking progress they made on the pixel shader they used to put a shine in the main penguin character's eye (but is not used anywhere else). The controls were odd (you used t to go forward, z to turn left, i to turn right, and clicking your mousebuttons realigned your characters eyes with the directions he was looking) and most people who downloaded it wished pain and suffering on the user interface developers, who decided to go with a "Leopard-meets-vista-meets-diabloII motif."
Note: I love open source software, but really.. I can't see it working in game development
Parent
Re:This will be interesting (Score:5, Informative)
As to Open Source not working. We are going to do this with a solid team that will remain for six months in Amsterdam (Blender studios). So while the end result will be Open Source the way to develop it is like any other commercial game (only with less money and a bit more time constraints).
Greetings,
Parent
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Greetings,
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(I have a jar I keep it in on my desk)
Re:This will be interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Movie project (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Not the Blender game engine? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's too bad they're not using Blender's own game engine. Blender has an integrated 3D animation system and game engine.
The trouble with the Blender game engine is that it doesn't scale well. The Blender game engine can be used "without programming", but what that really means is that you have to draw connection diagrams with hundreds or thousands of connections. Then you get to debug the wiring. For a non-trivial game, it's painfully difficult to debug.
It's an occasional fantasy of programmers that wiring visually functional blocks together is easier than programming. Engineers who wire up real hardware know better. That's why we have VHDL.
Fortunately, you can extend the Blender game engine in Python. Unfortunately, it's CPython, which is 60x slower than C. This isn't a hit you can afford in most games.
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Re:Not the Blender game engine? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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I was hoping that developing a large game in Blender might motivate the Blender game engine people to rethink the design so that it scaled better. The Blender "circuit diagram" approach might work if it had higher-level abstractions, like components made from other components, or "objects". LabView, which is also a "wiring" oriented programming system, has something like that, and it scales moderately well.
Great! (Score:4, Informative)
blender advancement (Score:5, Informative)
CS Project Manager Perspective (Score:5, Informative)
I'm the project manager of Crystal Space. I'm of course very glad that Blender and us will do this project. It is an amazing opportunity to enhance both Blender and Crystal Space to actually make this possible. The plan is to make a really good looking game that can compete (graphics wise) with commercial games. Crystal Space can do a lot already but in some areas we still need some more work (more specifically things related to render2texture like HDR and others). Also for a game like this we need to work on a very good animation system. Having a project like this is of course the best motivation possible.
Another important goal of this project is documentation. As this game is fully open all sources (both code and art) will be made available. And we also plan to release a DVD with a full documentary on the entire creation process. Basically everything will be available (we would release the left-overs of the meals of the participants if we could
And of course the idea is to make a nice and playable game. Six months is not that long but it also doesn't have to stop there. The nice thing about an open game is that it can be extended for a long time to come. Also the game logic will serve as a nice starting point for a new game based on a different setting. So lots of possibilities here.
Needless to say I'm very excited about this project. I think it will be a great thing. Both for us (Crystal Space) as for the Open Source community. If we succeed we will have a commercial quality game but 100% free and open!
Greetings,
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Sweet! where can I sign up. Seriously I'm anxiously awaiting the release.
Art license (Score:2)
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We actually have support for physics using the ODE physics engine.
Greetings,
Open Source Movie? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
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No, that's more like a GNU movie. With the blender Orange project (aka Elephant's Dream), it came with a script and blueprints for a set, and you're free to make modifications to them and make your own movie and distribute it, but you don't have to make your script and blueprints available
Machinima? (Score:2)
Jonah HEX
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The huge difference though is it doesn't include all the models and textures you would find in a game. You can find a lot on the net, but you are not going to get the cohesive art design of a commercial game without a lot more work.
This is one of the goals of their 'Open source' films and games, building
Whats the plot? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't remember any Elephants... (Score:2)
I actually liked Elephant's Dream... but it was a bit high brow. A few car crashes/pirate ships would have broadened the appeal of the movie and gained a wider audience, which is the point of a tech demo, no?
It wasn't just a tech demo - part of the idea, as I understand it, was to use the project as a shake-down for Blender. People don't do major projects with programs like Blender every day, so there's not the kind of in-depth feedback on advanced topics that there should be. By applying Blender to such a task in Orange Project, they were able to see for themselves what went well and what didn't. As a result they identified some things to improve and (more importantly) how to improve them in order to make
Why not Ogre instead of Crystal Space? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ogre3D [orge3d.org]
It looks like Ogre is at least as fully featured, and has some commercial games being developed on it right now.
By the way, this is a legitimate question -- I'm not a developer using either suite so I'm kind of curious if people out there have used both or if there was some rationale for the choice of one or the other.
C
Re:Why not Ogre instead of Crystal Space? (Score:5, Informative)
Greetings,
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the reply -- I didn't go through your site in much detail before, but after about 2 clicks on the second visit I came to the "Ogre vs. CS" comparison page.
I guess you guys get this question a lot ;)
C
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks. The fingers go too fast today.
Maybe Lara Croft will star in it? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:name ? (Score:4, Informative)
What's not open about that?
Parent
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when you give out the script, and all assets used to make the movie such as t he actors, models, sets, etc... I would definitely call that a open source movie.
Espically when you can take that source and create the movie at home. Or even tweak it so the movie is different in your way.
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It is open in that it will all be released under a open license (Creative Commons attribution i think?) including all blend files etc. Of course it is also being made with open tools.
LetterRip
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Greetings,
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Pardon me for asking, but where exactly does th Blender foundation get the funds from to just be able to say 'we'll make a movie and a game this year'? Last time i checked, most (low-key) open source projects were dirt poor. How come this is different with Blender?
The Blender Foundation sells printed high quality versions of its documentation (and commissions new and up to date documentation - ie see the link to Essential Blender earlier); it presells DVD versions of the movie projects; and enough users use it commercially that they can afford and are willing to 'give back' to the foundation. Also the Blender Foundation has support from both commercial and government entities. All of those are possible through both the efforts of Ton (the project lead and chairm