Blender Sighting: Double Fine’s Amnesia Forthnight 2017
yorch writes:
I have to admit to a weird mix of Excitement and Schadenfreude when I bumped into Blender while watching Double Fine’s Amesia Forthnight 2017 videos. I was excited to see a creator that I admire: Pendelton Ward (of Adventure Time fame) Using Blender to create game assets in one of the Game Prototypes from Double Fine’s internal Game Jam, and literally the previous scene featured another artist complaining about Maya crashing repeatedly while trying to work on other Assets for the game.
Good Blender PR if you ask me.
Here’s the link of the moment:
Double Fine is a game studio in San Francisco that makes, such as Psychonauts, Brutal Legend and Broken Age.
“Amnesia Fortnight” is the name of their internal game jam, in which they stop production on all projects for two weeks, and have artists, programmers and just about everyone in the company pitch a game idea, they and people on the internet can vote on which ideas they one to see made into a prototype game, and for those two weeks, they commit to work on those projects selected that way. They have a crew documenting the whole process and post it in their YouTube channel in the form of an episodic documentary, which is very interesting.
It was while watching one of those episodes that I bumped into Blender. Pendelton Ward, the creator of the Cartoon Network show “Adventure Time” seems to be a friend of the studio and dropped by to contribute to the game jam projects, and he was creating assets using Blender. To me that was almost too cool.
Not only was he using Blender, he knows how to use Blender. Which means: he USES Blender. Too cool indeed.
Very true. He seemed pretty comfortable with it.
Check latest wavegarden video @3:46 . Was surprised to see blender there, but that’s cool
https://vimeo.com/215316114
Its also a super fake shot. Its essentially just a “random complicated science-y program” placeholder.
On a separate, and positive, note:
Working video production I know that most post agencies now incorporate Blender into their workflow in one form or another.
Personally in my agency Blender is part of the primary workflow because its a quick, efficient and cheap way to do 3D graphics on the average level for ad production from video to visualization or supplement gfx elements.
I had this a thousand times:
“Hey i need a plate spaghetti that spells out “IoT” and a hearth for a print ad that needs to get done today but i cant find a stock image.”
Blender comes in incredibly handy when it comes to getting results quickly for no $ if you have someone that is competent with it.
Additionally since its free, its very easy to introduce into your pipeline and disperse it across an oragnization like mine with multiple local studios and also get external vendors to play ball with file conversion and the like.
In conclusion Blender just gets the shit done that needs doing. Its a multitool swiss army knife with actuating handle and leather grip. Its an incredible workhorse that never tires.
Sure, if you want to go the full monty with ILM-level post-FX you probably want a specialized tool, but then you arent a marketing agency but a FX production house with licenses for Houdini, Nuke and shit anyways and have production schedules and budgets that allow you to hire specialists that know how to use those precision tools.
Blender’s place is the small to medium sized ad agencies that need to get stuff done on time and have incredibly quick project turnarounds and are held together with lint, glue and the goodwill of the people that work in them.
I don’t think it’s a random “techy program” shot: they are clearly modelling waves in the program. I assume these were later printed out on an industrial-sized 3d printer and shot out of the wave cannon for customers to surf on.