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Blender Siggraph Showreel 2012

62

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2xzn6bEN_U&feature=colike

By the Blender Community, edited by Paul Caggegi.

Paul writes:

The Blender Siggraph Reel for 2012 saw over 140 entries submitted - all quality stuff.

After trawling through all the entries, downloading, labeling, compressing and getting the team to select their favorites, I cut together this awesome 2:30 minute reel which debuted at SIGGRAPH 2012.

The most amazing this was that I did it all from my home office in Sydney, Australia, and within hours of completing the final approved edit, it was uploaded to ftp, downloaded at the exhibition hall in LA and broadcast on the screen at the Blender booth - and in glorious 1080p HD resolution, no less.

All up, there are about 24 different entries in this reel, which showcase some of Blender's most exciting features - from motion tracking, to modelling, rendering to compositing.

A huge thanks to all who sent in their work. I hope you enjoy this stunning showcase.

Link: Process Diary post.

62 Comments

      • The sheer mind numbing volume of art that has been created in Blender this year including games and stills, is going to ensure that work on a show reel is gonna need to start very early indeed for 2013. In fact every piece I see from now till then I will save and compile just to make sure we catch all the wonders. Thanks guys, top effort. We should do a review for the community at large. Not a new year thing tho (yuck!)

      • Luca Napoletano on

        Editing is indeed "Strange".
        Usually one would open with only the best stuff, then in the middle intertwine "medium to very good" stuff, in the end again the best stuff.

      • Hee Paul, thank you for your efforts.

        But I have some harsh comments that I want to share.

        I am sorry that the most amazing part of this reel is that the ftp protocol actually works...
        If you know what I mean.
        In my opinion the reel could/should be more artist/art focussed and less the-technology-works.
        Meaning better cc3.0 by crediting the artists on their work in a class A font, with a class A gfx/motion-design.
        And better blender brand representation by not mocking about with the logo and keeping brand values as described on the http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/logo/ blender logo page.
        ( Meaning no blends/ no 3d/ nothing, stick to what the logo looks like for better brand recognition. )
        Google 'coca cola logo' or 'starbucks logo' to see how professionals use their brand.
        And how amateurs use it: https://www.google.nl/search?q=linux+logo&tbm=isch

        Try to fit a story in the edit.
        Or at least have the footage dance to the music. Now it seems the music and the footage have no correlation.
        This is difficult because the footage and the music have no correlation, but just using the beat to change to the next clip is not going to make a good edit. Try to follow the melody to find what the music is telling and then find bits in the footage that has the same empathy or mood or story...
        Like... why is the slow Ha-Ha-Ha bit in the faster pasted bridge of the music? It makes the edit look wrong.
        There is a perfect drum-kick in the music that could have been used to speed up the edit...
        A real demo edit takes at least a day's for a minute, and a week to shuffle different versions... lol.

        So glad I'm not making these reels... Hard work and everybody knows it better...
        Anyway...
        Thank you for your ( must have been ) hard work. And deadline stress and getting something to show for for Ton/Blender at Siggraph. ( Now get the material and make a good vimeo version! ;-)

        • Yup. It's easier to criticise than to do. :) If you'd like to put your money where your comment is, you've got one year to produce a kick-ass logo addressing all the criteria you stated above for the 2013 reel.

      • At least one render is done in YafaRay, which is the old house at 1.00. Other years have happened the same, there were YafaRay renders in the compilation but YafaRay was credited nowhere. You can take the narrow approach and accept only stuff rendered with Blender/Cycles, or you can take a more open approach and not only accept work rendered with other open engines, but also credit in some way those other tools Blender artists use in their open source pipelines, such as YafaRay, Luxrender, Luminance 3D, the GIMP, MyPaint, etc. It is a way to show respect and gratitude to developers of these tools, and in the same way to honor the two-way beneficial symbiosys these tools have with Blender.

        • It was edited in Final Cut Pro, and not in the Blender NLA - should I credit FCP too? It's a Blender showreel. If a render was done in YAFRay, it can be legitimately submitted to a YAFRay showreel also.

    • That actually doesn't matter at all. Most of the stuff in the Maya demo reels is rendered with an external render engine. So I guess Autodesk should remove all the shots from feature films from their reel..... No they really shouldn't.

  1. Intro logo and fonts in the end are horrible, nice video editing though. These kind of "errors" are the ones which keep Blender down to the amateurs audience, as long as Blender official site. More design people, more design!

    Regards

    • There is such a desperate attempt to escape the 'amateur' audience these days. The demo reels of other apps is choke full of clips from block buster movies and triple AAA games I don't think its fair to even try go head to head on that ground.

      Nice reel I'm a bit disappointed that I couldn't spot anything BGE related in there. I am not a BGE user myself but you should see some of the works these guys are doing really good. Some of the works one or two felt a bit weak to be in here. It felt more like student level work at times.

    • Yeah my bad. Was waiting until 11th hour for an animated logo but one never showed, so had to do all that in five minutes before deadline. If anyone wishes to send me an intro, I'd be happy to replace. Font suggestions also welcome. :)

  2. Thats a solid reel. Lots of quality stuff there. I noticed a lot of advertisments being used. Some of the choices I found a bit strange though: e.g. the one where you see the sort of sign post starting at 0:24. I do not get the showcase character for this one.
    But maybe that's just because I would have loved to see my submission included as well ;)

  3. It's a good "reel" but it's a bit low on "Show". It felt more like the autodesk showreels, technically nice but somehow too much "engineered" (so to speak), but never the less is quite good and I like it!

  4. Quite impressive!!!

    Only the soundtrack is disappointing. All these amazing animations would have deserved a better sound.

  5. I really enjoyed it! Didn't watch with sound though, so can't speak for the editing to music aspect. But I remained interested all the way through.

    Also, is it just me, or has the quality of the blender work vastly improved this past year? Round of applause for all blender users everywhere! :)

  6. Good reel, but I was surprised that the "big guns" weren't there - Sintel, Project London, even bits from upcoming Tears of Steel - Where are those clips?
    I think that somebody has to edit a reel without the time limitation (like a Siggraph date) so that even small aspects like a good logo entrance will be taken care of.

    • They weren't submitted. We had to go on submissions alone. We didn't have the man-power or time to go door-knocking and asking. No submission=no consideration. Maybe they don't look at Blendernation/facebook/twitter #b3d #blender hashtags every day. There's always next year.

  7. Undeniably a beautiful Blender Showreel. But ... in my opinion, the 2011 reel was more impressive. Much longer (4:43), but never boring. Ian Hubert's fragments for instance were breathtaking ! But also Olivier Amrein's and others were. The 2011 showreel was also a lot more funny and friendly (the Kajimba fragments especially were very charming, but also Pepe School Land, Big Buck Bunny and others made me smile several times). Sintel had some very heroic fragments too. And personally I prefer the ribbon at the bottom of the reel with the names of the artists (Artist-friendly and informative).
    Regarding the reel of 2012 in particular : a few fragments are extremely short. Too short (for me) to enjoy, too short to overawe. And why is that Puyeon sign in the reel ? That is so common that it distracts. Summary: Not bad, but not the very best. At least, in my opinion ... :-)

  8. Nice reel - however I don't think you should include work that's obviously from a tutorial, and not give credit to the tutorial creator. Pretty easy to recognize Andrew Price's Nature Academy work in this, uncredited. The reel should be the top work, not tutorial work.

    • Which one would that be? We received submissions complete with name, job title, and how Blender was used. Every artist who submitted was credited in the end. Just two artists requested an extra credit - which I've added. Andrew Price did not submit anything as far as I am aware. Believe me: nothing is obvious to you when you're trawling through all the entries at 2am, compressing and uploading for the team to select the best ones.

  9. I enjoyed the real - I remember last years being impressive but can't remember anything from it (probably due to my old age? :) Overall, i found this new one to be pretty solid and a good reminder what a beast Blender is. I wish it was longer w/ more "WOW" highlights. Also, credit on a banner below of some sort would be cool. Don't know if that's the norm or not so maybe it wouldn't work due to pacing of certain clips. Good stuff and thanks for making this happen from the creators to the editor!

  10. Good and effective, all in all. Some pieces are really astounding and top notch, like, imho, the SSS crab and several particle effects.
    If, in the end, you meant to convey the idea tha Blender is a good and mature set of tools for vg and video shorts, you hit the target.

  11. In every Blender showreel there are always YafaRay renders in. It has happened other years as well. It would be great if that little piece of software is credited as well.

  12. At least one render is done in YafaRay, it is the old house at 1.00.
    Other years have happened the same, there were YafaRay renders in the
    compilation but YafaRay was credited nowhere. You can take the narrow
    approach and accept only stuff rendered with Blender/Cycles, or you can
    take a more open approach and not only accept work rendered with other
    open engines, but also credit in some way those other tools Blender
    artists use in their open source pipelines, such as YafaRay, Luxrender,
    Luminance 3D, the GIMP, MyPaint, etc. It is a way to show respect and
    gratitude to developers of these tools, and in the same way to honor the
    two-way beneficial symbiosys these tools have with Blender.

  13. Good, shows a bit of what Blender can do, but it's not as good as the 2011 reel. I don't think that it was produced over a long enough time; the editor's own account suggests a last minute rush when this should be a studious production with plenty of time for more thought to go into it. A four minute reel would be better, then some of the fragments used would be a bit more than fragments, and the whole thing would hang together better. In future years I hope a lot more time is given to the Blender show-reel for Siggraph, Blender deserves that.

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