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.
That is where i want to get to that is excellent
I’ve been saying for years that the next Blender movie should feature ‘real’ characters like this. This is something which Hollywood will never dare do, because developing popular beautiful/handsome pure CGI characters could damage the entire ‘star’ culture that drives their industry. So while they’re stuck with CGI effects and cartoon characters… imagine Blender Foundation creates a feature length movie with four or five staggeringly ‘real’ characters, set in amazingly real environments. Now that would really make some waves. We often see examples of these characters/environments on BlenderNation, especially using Cycles or Eevee. Blender Foundation could do a lot better than repetitive children’s cartoon characters with silly over-sized eyeballs, or ancient 2D hand-drawn-look cartoons.
I think Hollywood is very aware of the precarious nature of the far side of the “uncanny valley” and while technology is edging closer to photorealistic characters that can move completely naturally, we’re not quite there.
This, more than protecting a talent base, is likely the reason we are not seeing fully digital characters just yet.
Next Gen for instance was awesome, and I’m really looking forward to seeing Spring. I’m very happy to see Blender progressing in mainstream stylised animations for now.