Wow, this is awesome news, and I look forward to monitoring the progress of the film and the publicity/ improvements it brings upon blender!

Cool! I wanna be a part of this!

This is great news. Really looking forward for more information!

Indeed, great news. I’m curious to find out more about the leaps in actual production. It’s going to be a great ’07 – with 2.5 coming out soon (not soon enough tho-).

Interested to watch the actual CVS system implemented with this one…is Verse dead? Anybody?

And are we implementing new OpenGL stuff? This is going to be one helluva project…

I can’t wait…>bounce, bounce

Sounds awesome! I look foward to seeing the finnished film, and also wathcing as it develops! The concept draws look really funky, so it should be great!!!

owww…. nice characters (could use a little work) but I am happy you guys went with the cartoony style!

/me is tempted to go model one of the characters right now!

Yes!
That’s great.

- AniCator

really good news :)
keep us updated

This is excellent news. I’m so excited!

There’s fur on those characters!

This is going to be so fun. :D

I was really hoping that the next Project Orange would be a short live action film, like the short film “405: The Movie”, http://www.405themovie.com/Home.asp

What I had hoped for was for a DVD with 2K film scans (or digital) of raw footage of entire scenes, shot at 24 fps with 4:4:4 color, shot on blue and/or green screen, so everyone could practice compositing with professionally produced raw footage.

I would like to see Blender demonstrate digital sets, characters, props, explosions, bridges collapsing, car chases, composited with live action footage of miniature models and puppets. And as far as Blender development: a motion tracker, further develop Noodles with animated garbage mattes etc.

Certainly someone would donate the rental of F900 cameras, lights, etc, and could get a cinematographer interested to shoot it, and maybe, maybe, get a Hollywood celebrity to volunteer to star in it.

If two guys can make a short like the “405: The Movie” with no budget, Project Orange could too!

I would like to see Blender shine as a professional visual effects tool.

Maybe next time.

GREAT NEWS!

[quote=Calvin]

OMG, that hamster is awesome!

http://www.blender.org/typo3temp/pics/2fb41b51fd.jpg/quote

nice artwork, just hope the feet don’t stay the wrong way around, unless of coarse that is a characteristic feature of our the dear mouse.

Nice roughs though!

i love this news, one of the cool things about this is we will probably end up with new toys like we did last time.

Oh I really hope Jan Morgenstern does the music again. Hopefully he’s not engaged with other projects…

Wow. All the best…and will this movie be a short?? The blender institute and the official game project with Crystalspace 3D is really very exciting news. :-)

… is the fact that I have soooo much to learn until I can consider myself to be half as good as necessary to participate in such a movie.

But maybe there are other ways in which I can help – I’d really love to participate. Be it for translating, checking the story, doing some soundtracks and the like.

Yt,

Gunnar

Sweet! This is exciting news about the movie and game. :D

One thing I don’t understand though is how come they’re using crystal space instead of ogre? I would’ve thought ogre would’ve been preferred with the integration thing and all.

Wouldn’t it be cool if it could all be rendered on BURP!

This really caught me off guard- congratulations to all the artists who made the cut! Good luck with the film!

I don’t think the’ve given the call yet, from the site:

- June 16: Public call for portfolio submissions
- June 26: Closing date for submitting portfolios
- June 30: Announcement team (+ define spares)

I’d love to help as well, but for the movie, I don’t think my work is up to the level they seek, yet, if it ever will be lol.
The game thing though….
if they could organize it so that the community can actually contribute stuff (models animations etc) that would be cool.
genre? who cares? fps seems cool enough, but what about a hybrid. sauerbrauten allows you to make your level as you play it. little big planet seems really cool as well. physics and creating your own solid platform game. this idea goes really well with open source IMO.
a coop multiplayer rpg like zelda? With elements of little big planet? Top down shooter like alien swarm?
Anyone remember battlezone? Take the UNREAL/Starcraft/battlezone1 mood, combine it with the strategy stuff of battlezone2, throw in player movement of call of duty United offense/FEAR, and give it a kick ass story.
Brainstorming doesn’t hurt, and it’s easy….

@Niaho: I agree, I would love to see ogre used, as it is one of the best OS graphic engines around. Problem is, it’s just that, a graphics engine, where as crystal space is a complete game engine (including networking, sound, input, etc.) To add all of those extra pieces to an ogre based engine would probably be outside the project’s scope. Besides, people have been working on the crystalspace/blender for quite a while.

@Tombjo: Great idea. That would be a great way for people to contribute, and it would make life easier for the project team as well. (Weren’t there problems with render time during Orange?) Only question is if BURP is up to the challenge

(Just the a random thought.)

@Niahom, methinks: from what it looks like… it is Crystal Space community that has offered to help and willing to cooperate with the Blender Foundation. Including their developers who will be improving the engine as the game continues.

Is there an Ogre community that is enthusiastic as the Crystal Space community in seeing the project to completion?

(Just the a random thought.)

I would like a message in the movie like this girl does
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g8cmWZOX8Q

@B-)art: that’s the only way to go!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5968977073007258412

Is the institute open now?
If not, what’s the time frame?
From the looks of it, I’m guessing it’s near the zoo. Is that right?

Now the Open Game is what gets me going! (not to take anything away from the mouth-watering goodies that another Open Movie will produce!)

Gotta say I agree with Niaho about OGRE, although I understand it’s as much a Crystal Space initiative as a Blender one.

Ok, I’ll do some research before opening my mouth next time. Crystal Space seems to be the natural partner to Blender doesn’t it… (even if it its renderer isn’t quite at at OGRE level.)

Mmmmm! The furry animals route is kinda well-worn, but yes, we want it accessible, so this is how to go! Also, because it is well-worn, it will make it much easier to compare the level of quality of this short with others. So good choice – and a challenge!

Looking forward to the fur/rigging/compositing updates that will come out of this!

I must give a vote for the compositing movie for some time in the future. Blender is now capable of some really cool after effects. It would be a fascinating experiment to produce a short live action film and make the empasis on Blender as an effects studio (kiddies, can we say photo-realistic rendering and camera tracking?).

It’s “it’s”, not “its”, btw

About the CS vs Ogre debate:

It is not a choice against Ogre, nor it’s a strategic decision to replace the Blender engine with Crystal Space.

We just happen to work online with a couple of CS developers already, the CS project seems well organized, and it indeed looks like a complete game engine you can use to deliver a product in. Further, you cannot pick both engines for 1 project… so whatever you choose, it is always leaving out others.

Further it is especially the idea of the Blender Institute to have continuity. So, let’s get ready for a Blender-Ogre next year? :)

-Ton-

Hi, I’m the project manager of Crystal Space. I agree on most of the criticisms on Crystal Space versus Ogre. The documentation is indeed not as good. Our community is indeed not as big and we indeed don’t have as many showcases. However, we are not standing still. Documentation is improving and while our community is not big it is very stable and dedicated. And showcases I’m sure will come in the future.

Ogre does indeed also have external game engines but I have been told (could be wrong on this) that they are not as well integrated as our own CEL game engine. CEL is becoming very popular and the CELstart tool (http://www.crystalspace3d.org/main/CELstart) is gaining a lot of momentum. While Crystal Space itself is relatively complicated if you add CEL and especially CELstart on top of that you can make full and powerful games without even touching a single line of C++. Instead you write game logic using descriptive xml files and/or python scripts.

I strongly believe that the way we are going with Crystal Space is right. That doesn’t mean that I think Ogre is doing the wrong thing. Ogre is a powerful project and certainly a very good choice for any 3D game.

Greetings,

Just like Blender itself, the more this project carries on, the better it gets! Better than Elephants Dream? I’m sure it will be.

Visually, Elephants Dream was excellent, and so to was the soundtrack. The only part I didn’t like was the (somewhat) unclear storyline. A prequel, anyone? I don’t care if the episodes are jumbled up like the Star Wars saga, E.D. already has a great storyline. But that’s the _only_ complaint I had about E.D. – everything else is thumbs up.

Bring on the next project!

I love the concept of an open source movie, but was sorely disappointed by Elephants Dream. As others have mentioned, the script was pretty awful. I seem to remember one of the people involved with the project saying that the narrative reflected the nature of open-source tools – quirky and inaccessible. Time to get rid of that thinking, both for this film’s audience and new users of Blender.

Joeri – claiming ‘art’ as some kind of defense for Elephant’s Dream’s shortcomings is ridiculous. The narrative was incredibly unclear; Tom’s quote was entirely appropriate. Besides, I’m fairly certain his “let’s get rid of that kind of thinking” comment referred to the mindset that links open-source with ‘quirky’ and ‘inaccessible’. How can you argue with that?

Personally, I think the best thing for Blender would be a high level of involvement in the production of a crowd-pleaser, and I’m sure Ton would agree (I see no reason for this to go hand in hand with commercial enslavement, Joeri).

A thought: The script for Orange…who was responsible? A writer, or an artist/tech-head? I have a feeling it definitely WASN’T the former. I think it would be useful for Peach to specialise a little bit and focus on one thing at a time – the people in placement don’t need to be all things to all people. There’s no reason why the core modeling/animation/production team can’t remain in…err…Amsterdam (? I forget where), while a group of off-site artists collaborate with the team globally, contributing writing, 2d concepts art, scripts, etc.

I’ll be supporting Peach and Blender, regardless, just like always, since before the Free Blender campaign (I’ve already ordered my copy of the new manual :)) and the days of NaN.

Joeri, I have only one thing to say to you:

you should… I mean never go to… no wait…. if you ever have… no, what?… DAAAMN, I forgot what to say…. I know it was something with bunnies…. and peanut butter, I’m sure. Argh, can’t remember. Oh well.

Now where did I leave that handlotion?

Well – I have to say – that in my view, an open movie project should not be unclear but by no means should let the “crowd” dictate to it what it should be about either – I do not think a balance is necessary here… there are plenty of ways of making a script’s message interesting and thought provoking without also making it hopelessly twisted, disturbingly criptic, enigmatic, and absolutely, completely … well … RUBBISH!! I do not think for a moment that ED’s script was anything near well written and it would be nice to have a decent script prepared in advance for “project peach”… in my opinion though, however crude, the subject and characters of any open movie project made in blender should be carefully chosen so as to further development of blender in some specific area(s) – I don’t think that the use of ‘fluff and fur’ was just a coincidence either in regards to this. However, my only concern is that some, if not all, of the features required as extensions to blender’s particles system will have already been coded by jhkarh for the “particles rewrite” and therefore, the development time and (somewhat forceful in the case of ED) coder availabilty caused by another “project orange” type thing could have been better harnessed if the subject of the new movie had different featural requirements from blender such as the involvement of firey scenes or large scale explosions which would require complicated simulatory sort of tools within blender for the project to be realised properly and therefore, the development of such tools would have had to have taken place. Despite saying this however, I think that targets must be chosen carefully as we would not want to attempt something that was beyond the projected capabilities of blender within the given development (and animation/artistic) time-frame – but a subject that takes heed of the impact it will have on the aforementioned development aims and directions of future work on blender itself and the possible (and probable) future feature realisations in blender targeted towards the technical requirements of chosen subject area for the movie in question! On the other hand – we also want to attract attention, both amatuer, and professional/commercial, to blender as an alternative production tool to it’s currently used, commercial counterparts like 3DsMax and Maya and although it may never be able to replace these tools completely (and certainly not in the apprarent near future), the use of blender in the commercial production pipeline could only be a good thing as far as sponsored development and paid support oppurtunities for blender users and coders goes. I do see the concerns here that the direction of blender would be controlled by such companies sponsoring developers for features important to them and not based on what the current community of blender wants but these problems could be avoided – by which I mean that development sponsorships could be established and controlled through the blender foundation itself thereby being up to somebody to organise which developers get to code which features and perhaps by providing a limited number of sponsored places at any given moment in time, there could always be free developers available to code features important to the community. Obviously, breaches of this could occur (this is open source after all) but I think that most developers would be happy to co-operate with such a system if it ever did come to that (coders are a part of the community as well!) and furthermore, it would provide an easy place to find support for any interested companies and it could be gauranteed that somebody somewhere would be working on their requested features also giving buisnesses the incentive to opt for open source which currently has the reputation among the monopoly that it is unreliable as far as support goes.

Just some thoughts – I got a bit carried away – rambled on about some stuff that made it sound like I was trying to dictate what the blender foundation do in the future. Please don’t take this as an insult or apprarent attempted sieze of anybody else’s control. These were just ideas and I really would be the last person to suggest anything to ton or the others who so far have made blender what it is today! I think we should congratulate them on what they have so far done and hope for more (and better) in the future! YAY!!

Now I feel stupid! lol. … oh well!! Take it or leave it though – I won’t get time to reply to any flame wars on what I’ve said and I hope it doesn’t start any. Remember, this is blendernation – the blenderartists forums are a better place to discuss issues like these!…
-epat. :)

If you want to create a work that showcases blender’s potential in 3D animation to the industry, you want a brain-dead plot that even a two-year-old can follow. How smart do you think Hollywood is, anyway? That’s where the money is, and that’s where the production studios are. You want to impress them (and don’t tell me that this is some showcase for something else)? Make a brain-dead flick. Feathers and fluff indeed. Think Pixar, Dreamworks, etc.

Feathers and fluff! Stuff it with air!

Hey
Despite the fact the beta is nearly at the end of first phase, amazing replays will still be available for those who forgot some important games!