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Comment by iamcreasy | Hacker News Reader

The whole movie is made by Blender? What was the pitfall? Is there any dev blog I can read?

They had a presentation at the blender conference about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZn3kCsw5D8

Yes, almost everything is made in blender except for some textures which were painted in Substance Painter and volumetric effects like explosions which were generated in FumeFX and Houdini before being imported, rendered and composited in blender.

That was pretty cool. Thank you! I wish they talked a little more about the difficulties they faced and how they solved them. If I remember correctly Ton Roosendaal once said one of the purposes of the Blender Open Movie project is to showcase the Blender is capable of handling complex large projects. After 4 open movie project it must have matured enough that Tangent Animation was able to solve most of their problems themselves! Awesome!

A senior lighting artist on the film mentions a few difficulties in the comments below.

- motion blur render times. (They patched Cycles to use Embree as its ray engine to solve this)

- memory consumption

- lack of UDIM

- clunky compositor

https://www.blendernation.com/2018/08/20/next-gen-blender-pr...

Here’s some info I found: https://www.blendernation.com/2018/08/20/next-gen-blender-pr...

Looks like a good movie. And Netflix dubbed it to Swedish! Will probably watch it with my kids some time.

My kid definitely liked it. I love anything CG so I'm extremely interested want to watch again knowing blender was 100% used.

My kids went wild for Next-Gen, I had no idea it was done in Blender! The graphics are first-class, really impressive stuff. I'm an amateur, but I couldn't tell it apart from other studios such as Pixar.

Blender’s built in tenderer is known to be quite good, but I’m not sure they used it on the movie.

Cycles (Blender's built in path tracer) with some modifications. (Cryptomattes are now in 2.8, and the Embree patch will be integrated somewhere after.)

"Yes, cycles was used for everything, though our version of cycles was modified (with stefan's embree core, and crypto-mattes which were beyond valuable for compositing). The version of blender we used was the studios own dev version (which I believe was using blender 2.78 as it's base?)"

https://www.blendernation.com/2018/08/20/next-gen-blender-pr...

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