Planet Blender

How long is the movie?
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-04-15 21:52:48

Colin answers…

The Ian Report #492 - 789 is a Magic Number
Ian Hubert's Posts - Project London - 2010-04-15 16:27:52

(A screen capture from Project London showing The Goose landing at Icaria's floating restaurant.)

AH! We've been meeting with sound design guys this week—I AM SO PUMPED! These guys are brilliant! And I'm not just saying this! I was uncertain about how this was all going to go down; uncertainty has turned to pumped-itude! -More on this later, once we get the team all together!

So... I just counted. The opening reel (that is, the first 9 minutes of the film) has 140 VFX shots. That's 15 per minute, or one VFX shot every 4 seconds. For 9 minutes.

Admittedly, the opening reel is a bit more VFX intensive than most (though not all) of the film, but still. The whole film has 789 VFX shots (give or take a dozen). Whoa.

The thing is; as most folks reading this are already totally aware, the only thing that number is representative of is the number of VFX shots. It has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the film, or the story, or even how much work has gone into the reel (Though... I mean... it's a lot. Months and months and months on just scene 8 alone. Just that some of the VFX shots took a matter of seconds, and some took days, that's my point).

A lot of times I hear things like, "They should have spent more time on script, and less on VFX", as if it's this trade-off that has to occur. As if you have to pick; you can either have good story, or good visuals- DECIDE! It's a comparison that's always kinda perplexed me, cause honestly it's apples and oranges.

Mmmmm.... things soon to come will be rad!

Ian Hubert
Writer Director

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Blender, that elusive free 3d app
mike's digital anthology - 2010-04-15 14:35:53

A while ago, I was invited to give a short talk at a small gathering of CG professionals in my hometown Vancouver, Canada. My 20-minutes presentation is suppose to be a show-and-tell that gives people an overview of Blender, a software that almost everyone in the room has heard of, but has no real experiences with. Most people downloaded it and ran it at one point, but admitted that they didn’t invest too much time on learning it.

As some of you might know, Vancouver is a pretty major hub for media and film production. It’s home to Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Rainmaker, a whole slew of movie and TV VFX studios, and more recently, Pixar. The ~30 attendees all had very strong industry background, except me. (To my disappointment, no attendee has worked at Emeryville) But more importantly, it was apparent that they all consider Blender to be immature, with limited features, and see it as a toy more than a production-ready tool.

To be fair, this view on Blender is not surprising to me. But I was surprised by the overwhelming positive response after the talk, people were impressed with what Blender can do, they did not seem to expect a free software to be able to do so much, so fast. I demoed with a pre-release Blender 2.5, showcasing sculpting, compositing, rendering, the game engine, as well as some of my previous work. People were positively surprised to see what Blender can do, and few perhaps would even start to see Blender as an alternative to Autodesk’s offerings. Of course, no one in their right mind would change the production pipeline overnight from Maya/Max to Blender, but establishing Blender as more than a toy in the industry is good enough for now.

What I realized from this presentation, and the point of this post, is that if we want to get more people to use try out Blender, we need to show them what it can do. Listing features, talking about code refactoring, or focusing on the open source advantages, is not going to sell the product. We need to inspire. Let’s show people what Blender is capable of through artwork and video demostrations.

Show. Don’t tell.

Tip: Changing the Interaction Presets
Blender Cookie - 2010-04-15 14:01:09

This quick Blender 2.5 video tip demonstrates how to use the newly committed “Interaction presets” to make Blender mimic the keyboard shortcuts and navigation of other applications. Note: this feature is only available in Blender 2.5 test builds, revision 28196 and up.

http://blendercookie.com

Exclusive: Modeling the Female Head 01
Blender Cookie - 2010-04-15 11:59:29

“In this Citizen exclusive Blender 2.5 video tutorial, we begin the process of modeling a full female head. The series will be taking an in-depth at the techniques needed to accurately model the subject, including accurate anatomy and topology. This first part demonstrates how to set up the background images and creation of the structural edgeloops [...]

http://blendercookie.com

Modeling for architecture: Plugin with more extrude options for SketchUp
Blender 3D Architect - 2010-04-15 02:21:05

One of the best tools to use along with Blender in architectural visualization is SketchUp, because of the simplicity of the modeling tools, which allows an architect to create quick volumes to evaluate the shape of a model. I always recommend to my students that before a project goes to the visualization stage, we have [...] Related posts:

1. Multiple extrudes in SketchUp to improve architectural modeling A very common workflow for architects working with architectural visualization...
2. SketchUp 7.1 released with free plugin to import DWG and DXF files This week an update for SketchUp was released with a...
3. Modeling terrains with displacement maps in SketchUp and Blender 3D The creation of terrains and sites can be accomplished in...

FDTKと使用された(BlogPet)
CG系blog - 2010-04-15 02:18:33

きのう輪ゴムが、FDTKと使用された。

*このエントリは、ブログペットの「輪ゴム」が書きました。

Memory & JeMalloc
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-04-15 00:55:36

While memory is a dry topic, many of you would have experienced Blender grind to a halt (or worse), with big files the workstation can’t handle.

Yesterday Beorn was having trouble loading a scene which was taking a lot of memory, After concluding it wasn’t a memory leak in blender I looked into why Blender would show 75mb in use while the system monitor shows over 700mb.
It turns out is because the operating system cant always efficiently deal with applications memory usage and ends up using a lot more ram.

So I tested jemalloc, an opensource drop-in replacement for the operating systems memory allocation calls, used by firefox, facebook and freeBSD according to their site.

I was surprised to find memory usage went down by up to 1gig in some cases, without noticeable slowdown, using less memory in almost every case.
It can also decrease render times in cases where the system starts to use virtual memory.

The first example loads a complex scene, and then a blank file, notice there is over 600mb difference.

The second graph shows rendering the sintel model, I’d like to have made a few more examples but don’t have much time right now.

While testing we found Blender exposed a bug in jemalloc’s thread-cache, Jason Evans was kind enough to look into the problem for us, fixing it the next day in bugfix version 1.01.

JeMalloc is now used on every workstation, if all goes well we may include this with Blender as Firefox does.

For more info see: http://www.canonware.com/jemalloc/

- Campbell

Notes…

• Hoard was also tested, but it didn’t improve memory usage all that much.
• Edited, now ‘decrease rendertimes’.
• Comparing against the default allocator in Linux (modified ptmalloc), one could argue the problems is because of bad memory usage within Blender, from what I have read the default malloc in linux is quite good. Nevertheless it may prove to be an advantage for us.
• For anyone who wants to test on *nix, you don’t need to rebuild Blender, just pre-load:
  LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libjemalloc.so blender.bin