Blender has come a long way from being just an open-source CG software that has a lot of cool features for producing short films and games. Over the years, the Blender Foundation, with the help of other organizations and crowdfunding, released several short films showcasing Blender’s capabilities. The foundation used these film productions to make improvements to the software. Let’s take a look at how these films were made possible using open-source resources. It’s a pretty long list so grab some popcorn, buckle up, and enjoy the ride.
Elephants Dream
Created in 2006, Elephants Dream, codename Orange, was the first of many short films created by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Institute using Blender as the main software. It is an experimental science fiction with a dreamlike story, where an old man named Proog, guides another man through a machine.
There is no clear storyline and point, much like in a dream, which could make for a confusing film. The main goal was to showcase the capabilities of Blender as a good open-source software. Having no clear storyline helped with this goal since the team could do whatever they wanted because of little to no boundaries in the story.
It took a team of six artists eight months to create Elephants Dream. Back in 2006, rendering this 11-minute short took 125 days. It might sound a little too much but don’t forget that it was 2006.
In the course of production, new and improved features were added to Blender to achieve the artists’ vision, including a node-based compositor to enhance the color and texture of the scenes. The film also highlights Blender’s power in creating good animation with simple rigs.
In 2008, Elephants Dream was included in the Museum of Modern Arts, Design and Elastic Mind Exhibit. It also received the award of Best Short Film at the first European 3D Festival in 2010.
Big Buck Bunny
After the somber Elephants Dream, the Blender Institute opted for a lighter and brighter film with Big Buck Bunny in 2008. Codename Project Peach, BBB follows the story of the gentle Big Buck Bunny as he tried to comically avenge the murder of two butterflies in the forest by three bullying rodents. This is the first short created by the Blender Institute, a division of the Blender Foundation focused on developing open-source content, films, and games.
Work started in October 2007 that lasted for six months with six artists. Having a big, fat bunny as the main character with rodents as antagonists, Blender focused heavily on using and improving the software’s hair rendering, UV mapping, shading, and skinning to have better fur effects. The film also showcases Blender’s rigging and constraints abilities to successfully rig fat characters which proved to be a challenge.
The change in genre and vision was a deliberate move that Ton Roosendaal, Blender’s principal author, felt would encourage improvements to the software as they are driven by the needs of the films.
Sintel
Sintel is the third open movie released by Blender. Codename Project Durian, the film is a fantasy adventure telling the story of a girl, Sintel, who was on a journey to look for her dragon, Scales.
With six artists and two developers, it took seven months to produce the film, starting in May 2009. There was a significant increase in budget for this film, the goal focusing on improvements of the Blender 2.5 series to make them more stable and usable.
The enhancement of the sculpting and modeling tools, efficient detail rendering, and better illumination produced results that give good details to the characters and environment in the short film. The improvements could be clearly seen in the amount of detail spent on Sintel and other characters. Still, there were some parts of the film that contrasted greatly with others due to their simplicity and lack of detail which could be attributed to artistic decisions rather than Blender’s capability.
The film created some noise when Sony filed a copyright case against Blender for Sintel. A possible explanation was that Sony added Sintel to its 4k demo pool of movies to showcase its ultra HD TVs. Since Sintel was under the Creative Commons license, allowing users to freely use the content, Sony was free to do this.
There’s a chance that the film was somehow added to Sony’s content ID for which the company could claim copyrights, triggering YouTube to shut down the original film. The issue has since been closed and Sintel is back to free use.
Tears Of Steel
Tears of Steel is a combination of live-action and CGI. Codename Project Mango, the sci-fi short film is set in the dystopian future where a group of warriors and scientists come together to save the world from destruction at the hands of robots.
Production began in early 2012 spanning up to seven months. Just like its predecessors, the film is meant to drive enhancements in Blender’s features to produce quality effects. Probably the biggest highlight in this project is Blender’s power for good camera tracking, photorealistic rendering, and compositing, effectively blending the film’s CGI component with live-action. Improvements in color grading enhanced the feel and set the tone of the movie as well.
Aside from the desire to improve features, the Blender Foundation also aimed to create more projects to help the software gain more professional acknowledgment from artists, create publicity and PR, and produce open-source materials for educational purposes.
Caminandes
Caminandes is the first of a series of short films independently produced by the Blender Foundation. The short was inspired by Chuck Jones’ cartoons like the Looney Toons. “Caminandes” is a play of words on the Spanish word caminar (meaning “to walk”) and Andes (the mountain range). It follows the story of Koro the llama and his travels, meeting different animals and having comedic experiences. The film has more of the light cartoon mood of Big Buck Bunny.
The entire project has clocked 23 months for the three shorts in the series. One big difference of Caminandes from the other Blender open films is that it focused more on the fun and story rather than the Blender improvements for real-world use. Still, the enhancement of the software’s Cycles engine produced better hair shading. After all, the main character is a llama so it’s only to be expected.
Cosmos Laundromat
Under the name Project Gooseberry, Cosmos Laundromat is the sci-fi story of a suicidal sheep named Franck on a desolate island. He meets a salesman named Victor who offers him the amazing gift of life in different worlds that lasts for just a short while. With the different worlds, the film rings a little closer to Elephants Dream, but the team knew that they had to create a strong story to make the film more cohesive.
The film was put together by three developers, seven artists working for 10 months, and four artists for three months. The goal was to raise the standard of the Blender Institute by trying to create a full-feature animated film using open-source software but the sequel did not push through. It was also used to explore the capabilities of cloud services for projects.
Cosmos Laundromat features Blender’s enhanced 3D view that resulted in great effects like ambient occlusion and depth of field. This added realism in producing better shadow effects by mimicking indirect light sources like the sky and softly reflective surfaces. Blender’s GreasePencil was also used in the storyboarding of the project. The team released weekly live casts showing the processes used in producing the film.
Cosmos Laundromat received positive reviews from big names like Pixar and Disney for the good storytelling, animation, and effects. The beginning of the film, however, raised criticism for the suicide scene of Franck the sheep.
Glass Half
Glass Half is a three-minute cartoon short about two amateur art critics who met in a gallery and created chaos by arguing over the art pieces until they finally arrived at a piece where they could agree. The film was released in 2015 and took seven weeks to produce.
Using non-photorealistic rendering, the film focused more on the storytelling, design, and good animation. This was the first short from the Blender Institute that used rendering directly in the 3D viewport. This helped artists view renders quicker, allowing them to check the characters’ poses, movements, and other possible angles.
Despite being a visual effects software, Glass Half showed Blender’s ability to produce good non-photorealistic works that welcomes the classic drawing style. But the good animation in the film shows the new flexi-rig function that provides easy modification for custom character animation. In previous films, the rigs in the characters were specific. With the flexi-rig, users could now change the characters to match their vision and focus on animation and storytelling.
The Daily Dweebs
The Daily Dweebs is a series of shorts about the dog Dixey and his fun experiences and mishaps in the suburbs. The series was made possible greatly by the subscriptions made in Blender’s cloud.
More than featuring new functions of the software, the series focused more on the detail and animation that can be achieved with good execution and use of the existing Blender skin and light features. Dixey, the main character, was created very simply but with great subtle details. This includes his skin which looks like a simple clay skin at first but shows small textures that add more depth to the character. The use of subtle lighting sets the tone of each episode, mimicking how light actually looks like at a given time of day.
Like in BBB, Dixey’s fleshy body is a challenge to rig and animate. But the details in the characters’ movements, the amount of animation squeezed in every single frame, made the stories more believable. Overall, subtlety in execution made The Daily Dweebs effective in telling a simple story.
Hero
Hero is a 2D animated steampunk tale where two rival heroes battle for a glowing artifact that gives power and life to their homelands. It is funded by Blender cloud subscriptions and it is also the first film produced in Blender version 2.8.
Diverging from the normal 3D films, Hero was meant to push feature-quality production of 2D projects in a 3D environment. For 2D animation, it is common to use onion skinning, a technique used even in old cartoons allowing artists to draw the in-between motion between two frames in a sequence. The Hero team used the multi-frame edition feature of Blender to edit not just the motion of the objects, but to make changes to the objects as well. This gives the feeling of more specific movements to the characters.
Lighting is also a complex element, especially for 2D. How can you make 2D elements’ shadows react to a 3D light source? The team needed to convert the effect and make it appear 2D. The team used a VFX shader developed to make calculations to produce this effect for the film.
Agent 327: Operation Barbershop
Agen 327: Operation Barbershop is the first animated feature film based on the comic Dutch cartoon Agent 327. The concept is similar to James Bond. Agent 327 also fights international villains and crime but in his case, there is very little funding from the secret service agency. Instead of flashy gadgets, 327 relies on resourcefulness to make things happen. The film tells the story of how 327 investigates a suspicious barbershop and faces his nemesis, Boris.
The project took one year to complete with 10 artists. The challenge of the film is to translate the iconic look of the original comic into 3D. The use of Blender’s good modeling feature (with help from other open-source software like Krita and GIMP) allowed the artists to test designs and look development to achieve the main character’s features. The software’s improved render speed and the significant change in the render engine made the motion blurs and hair movements faster than previous Blender versions.
Spring
Set in a valley in the middle of a terrible winter, Spring follows the story of a shepherd girl and her dog to meet with ancient spirits to allow the cycle of life to continue. This is another film that uses purely open-source software like Blender, Krita, and GIMP.
The 8-minute film was popularly created using Blender 2.8 before it was in official Beta. With all the improvements of version 2.8, one great feature that helped the artists in production is the use of Eevee rendering instead of the usual Cycles. It provides up to 12x faster render time which supported quicker turnaround for changes made to the scenes. The improved viewport with enhanced wireframe mode and depth indicators also allowed the artists to better understand object geometry and make changes to the main character’s expressions. The new version’s rigs also made it easier to pose multiple objects at the same time.
NextGen
NextGen is a 2018 sci-fi film about the teenager Mai who resented technology. Mai meets an unusual robot who she initially uses to create destruction but eventually partners with to stop a robot conspiracy.
The film has a notably good motion blur for fast-paced scenes which were made possible by the predictable render times when increasing the blur effect. It also effectively used VDB (Volumetric Data Blocks), a special effect used in DreamWorks, to simulate visual effects like clouds, smoke, and surfaces.
Coffee Run
Coffee Run is the newest addition to the list of Blender’s open films. Created in 2020 by 17 crew members and 7 artists over a 6-month period, the film follows a young woman running through her bittersweet memories in a loop video game style, fueled by coffee.
The film was rendered using Eevee for faster render time. It also extensively used Blender’s nodes and shaders to give detail to this otherwise simple film. The colors were vibrant but not flat. The scenes also showed depth despite looking like a 2D short.
Circle
Circle tells the story of a woman going through a loss. The film shows how the character tries to escape to beautiful past memories in bubbles and the distortion it creates in her perception of reality. The story was written by Ahmad Saleh to cope with the losses he went through because of conflicts in the Middle East.
The film took two years to make with five months in post-prod. It combined CGI and live-action, with the memory bubbles fully created using Blender. The flexible shading system of the Cycles rendering made the modification of the bubbles possible, combining it beautifully with the real-life element of the film.
Alike
Released in 2015, Alike is the story of father and son following their daily routine in a city. The duo are opposites, the son being very enthusiastic and full of life while the dad seems colorless. The film shows how following societal norms and squelching fun could transform a person.
Alike took four years to produce with 21 people. The length of time is not due to the complexity of effects but more to the changes in the story. The film showcases how a film with no script can tell a story with good modeling and animation. It has a simple but effective style, using hand-sculpted effects with the power of good compositing tools on surfaces providing enough detail for close-up scenes.
Multi-rig also saved the team time in handling the animation for scenes with a big crowd that would normally require individual modeling and rigging. Multi-rig is useful to achieve multiple posing for different characters at the same time. They also used a hyper rig which is a single model that can be adjusted to make different characters. Very useful for background people that you’re probably not gonna focus on anyway. The film is a testament to the extent of animation that can be achieved using Blender.
Conclusion
Many other short films are being created year after year using Blender, and not just by the Blender Foundation. The awards and recognition being attracted by these projects are proof of how powerful open-source content can be, driving innovation and creativity in the whole CG industry. As Blender continues to improve, we can surely expect more great works in the years to come.