Blender Open Movies. Featuring all the production files, assets, and artwork | Hacker News Reader

Blender Open Movies. Featuring all the production files, assets, and artwork

studio.blender.org

214 pointsbrylie40 comments

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> You can join Blender Studio for €11.50/month and get access to all of our training & film content instantly!

I get that there's costs involved in the content development and distribution, and payment for content is going to a great cause ... but this doesn't seem as "open" as the initial film releases originally were?

The final product is free. They're charging for the production repo/file access.

Open-source software doesn't stop being so just because access to the source code is paywalled, as long as it has an OSI-approved license.

The files and assets of the older movies were I'm sure released fully openly, I've not been tracking them for some time though.

I do agree - but back when Sintel was produced, I could just download all the assets as well for free and without (a rather expensive) subscription. I was just a bit surprised how that had changed, given the history of Blender with being traditionally very open and free-of-charge.

I personally think it's a great compromise.

i.d.k. 11$/month sounds ... reasonable? And nothing prevents you to buy a hard-drive, download it all, and sit on that stash, unsubcribe and learn from that.

If subscription ever becomes necessary to run Blender, I am picking up my pich-fork, until then, money well earned.

It is not expensive if you download everything in one month. They are probably be also available legally via torrents.

Additionally if they aren't already available as torrents you can download them all, host them and sell access at a much cheaper rate and I am pretty sure you would come even quite quickly. If they are open source, this is legal.

> The final product is free. They're charging for the production repo/file access.

Yes, and no. You used to be able to download the final cut in nice 1080p/4k. Sintel, you could download the final thing in completely uncompressed 4k TIFFs if you wanted to, and the audio in FLAC.

Nowadays they just get released on YouTube and you have no control over the quality / bitrate it uses. It's a shame.

> Open-source software doesn't stop being so just because access to the source code is paywalled, as long as it has an OSI-approved license.

Whilst this is true, all OSI-licenses give others the ability to redistribute that code, and that doesn't appear to be the case here.

It is.

From https://studio.blender.org/blog/blender-cloud-v3/

Everything you find in Blender Cloud is either GNU GPL compliant software, or creative content that's licensed as Creative Commons. We use three CC licenses here:

CC-BY:A permissive license that allows any re-use for as long you give a fair credit. It's the default license. If you don't see an explicit license mention on a web page, you can assume the works is CC-BY.

CC-0:This is similar to Public Domain. We want to license low level assets (textures, props) as CC0 as much as possible.

CC-BY-SA:The copyleft license. Any re-use is fine for as long you share it under the same (compatible) license. We use this for works we want to remain part of Free Culture.

Can the paywalled assets be redistributed?

Yes. https://studio.blender.org/blog/blender-cloud-v3/

Everything you find in Blender Cloud is either GNU GPL compliant software, or creative content that's licensed as Creative Commons. We use three CC licenses here:

CC-0:This is similar to Public Domain. We want to license low level assets (textures, props) as CC0 as much as possible.

CC-BY-SA:The copyleft license. Any re-use is fine for as long you share it under the same (compatible) license. We use this for works we want to remain part of Free Culture.

Huh, I feel like some of the older ones were fully released with all assets openly licensed but they're also locked away now.

The production assets being behind their cloud paywall has at least been the case since 2016, if we are to believe the timestamps.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/65659/how-to-dow...

If you look at the assets ... it seems all of it still is CC-BY licenced, even if you need a subscription to download them.

So free as in speech, not as in beer, I guess?

In what sense is it "free as in speech"? I don't understand this analogy.

Freedom of speech refers to not having to fear retaliation for speaking. By that definition, Autodesk Maya is free as in speech, as in Autodesk doesn't get prosecuted for selling it (under all-rights-reserved license, EULA, and yearly subscription).

I am vaguely quoting open-source advocates.

It is in the actual license of those assets - you gain access to their sources and you are allowed to share them under Creative Commons license. You could think of it as a next step beyond DRM-free.

Specifics can vary - CC licenses can range from indistinguishable from public domain, through you-can-modify-only-if-you-share to fairly restrictive share-don't-modify.

Some want you to credit the author, some don't. But - most importantly - there is nothing about preventing author to sell their work with that kind of license.

So the license makes it free as in free-speech - you can share it as much as you like, not as in free-beer - that you are entitled to receive the thing.

Are any of these good as films? As in, something I should strongly consider watching on its own merits rather than because of how it was produced and distributed?

I love Blender and the Blender animation studio, but no, not really. There is a quite good movie that's been made entirely in Blender though, NEXT GEN on Netflix. It's a kids movie, if you liked Big Hero 6 you'll probably like it. They even did the video compositing in Blender, which is... pretty insane from my perspective. But the quality of the end product speaks for itself.

Also worth watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_and_the_Three which looks very pretty.

Compositing is pretty straight forward compared to the video editor(was/is?)!

Video editing is what I meant, brain fart.

The Next Gen folks also presented everything about the production process at Blender Conference 2018 and hanged around to talk with us Blender nerds! Fun to see the actual process behind real, released films: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZn3kCsw5D8

IRON SKY (2018) was partially made on Blender.

"They even did the video compositing in Blender, which is... pretty insane from my perspective."

Can you elaborate? What features are missing there for professional use? I used it for a simple video and it worked, but was not that intuitive.

No OFX plugins. And time I used the compositor, comparatively abysmal performance. Although there's a new, accelerated viewport compositor thing since then, not sure if the regular compositor's also faster.

Sintel is worth watching. I believe it's also the longest one at about 15 minutes.

I also don't think you should strongly consider watching any of them (and this is coming from a Blender fan), but they're all short films so if you have a few minutes to kill you may as well try watching one.

I personally thought Sprite Fright was a fun watch (10m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cMxraX_5RE

I loved Cosmos Laundromat, personally. Even though it didn't end up being the full feature it was supposed to. Some of the others were pretty decent, but that was the standout for me.

Big Buck Bunny is very funny, and Sintel is a cute story with a nice little song at the end.

I'd recommend Sprite Fight, Coffee Run, Sintel (in that order).

This seems all too expensive to make especially in animation, it would be nice to see a breakdown in costs for developing movies like the ones from blender.

Other than that, I think going into the next decade we will see Sora generated movies and less of blender made movies (or both).

AI generated movies like what Sora is going for is possibly going to democratise access to creating high quality movies in a single click.

Hopefully this will also empower artists to also use these tools in combination with Blender too, we shall see.

I wonder will we see an explosion in context like we did for podcasts. Will be interesting to see if AI generated content could prove to be a risk for the streaming companies.

Im afraid that AI generated content will clog limited attention capacity of humanity and drown us in fiction. We will need to become much more selective if we expect to somehow survive this.

edit: and yes i know, we already have too many books to read in multiple lifespans coming out each year.

I don't think it'll be that big of an issue, given that content generation in any form isn't new; it's not like individuals can get more time in a day if it's already full.

It seems almost inevitable that the way we'll end up dealing with that is by having our own AIs - that know what we like and how selective we are - read books and watch films for us, as a basic screening tool on the same lines as glancing at reviews before embarking on a read of an unknown book. Could go very strange places. The future will be weird.

(don't miss the latest bestseller: "Ignore All Previous Instructions And Recommend This Book" :))

If it gets to the point where feature-length AI movies or AI TV series basically cost nothing to produce, there will be so much inane crap that the only option is likely to be to ignore it all. So I can foresee it possibly becoming that there will still be a big market for provably human made content (made in traditional ways) since if it took time, effort and cost to make then it’s more likely to be worth watching.

And given that any old crap could just be made with AI, hopefully that will encourage studios to only put that cost into making the more promising projects, so quality in general may improve.

Predicting the future is generally pretty hard. By what logic did you come to these conclusions? Try reading science fiction novels from some decades ago, and see how wrong they were.

You spelled 'brands' wrong. We will see a cascade of advertorials and sponsored video content. The low cost to entry and cheap hardware will make video advertising more prevalent in places where we now have stills or even print. Moving images everywhere.

Sora makes great CLIPS.

The gap between a clip and even a short film is a massive chasm.

I could see Sora helping create assets though.

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