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Blender/3DS Max Movie Project, Talk at Autodesk Booth/FMX

Bart ·

cb_8300-1.jpgGerman animation studio Die Versilberte Eitelkeit and Arroba Films S.A. de C.V. have recently finished their 8 minute short movie ‘Cosmic Balance‘, based on Francisco Athié’s short novel. Much of the work was done in Blender.

The movie can be seen on the International FMX Conference on Animation, Effects, Realtime and Content in Stuttgart, Germany next week. The team will also be giving a presentation on the ‘making of’ the movie on, get this, the Autodesk tower (Turm B) on Friday 4th of May at 12 o’clock. During this presentation, they will explain how Blender and 3DS Max were used together in this production.

It looks like Die Versilberte Eitelkeit is really putting Blender on the map with some rather cool and high-profile work; check out their demoreel! (right-click, save as).

Falk Buettner writes:

cb_1102-1.jpgBlender was used in the creation of Francisco Athié’s Cosmic Balance. [The movie] was created during 2006 until the beginning of 2007. Blender was used for about 98% of the modelling, mapping and texturing work. The finished models were transfered to 3D Studio MAX via the OBJ format and then animated and rendered with Mental Ray into different layers which finally were composited in Eyeon Fusion. Besides that there is one shot in the movie, which was completely animated and rendered in Blender and then composited in Fusion.

spaceshuttle_03.jpgWe also wrote a couple of Python scripts to automate certain modelling and mapping processes in Blender to speed up production. Blender turned out to be a reasonable production tool and helped us a lot to get the project done.

The movie was produced in HD 1080p. All 3D and compositing work was done in Stuttgart. Final color grading, transfer to film and final sound mixing was done at the Estudios Churubusco Azteca in Mexico City.

Due to the work we did in Cosmic Balance, we won a pitch for a international feature film production, where we will use Blender too.

labor_01.jpgWe will present Cosmic Balance in HD from the 2nd to 4th of May at the FMX in Stuttgart every day at 14 o’clock at the 3Dpowerstore booth. We will also give a talk about the making of “Cosmic Balance” at the Autodesk tower (Turm B) on Friday 4th of May at 12 o’clock, where we will also talk about how we use Blender and 3DS MAX in conjunction.

Background

Die Versilberte Eitelkeit is a Stuttgart/Germany based computer animation studio and was founded in 1998. We are working in the fields of visual effects, 3D animation and motion graphics for broadcast and film.

ruine_13_6.jpgWe started to use Blender in 2004. The reason for our interest in Blender was to save cost in the software acquisition. We compared Blender to other Open Source 3D creation tools and found that it was the most complete and competitive tool in that area. First and foremost we use Blender for modelling and mapping, but also keep an eye on the other features of the software and use those if necessary. Blender plays an important part in our daily production pipeline and helps us to keep the best cost-performance ratio for our clients.

We currently use Blender in the visual effects creation for an Mexican/French/Italian/Spanish feature film production.

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
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