Virtual Blender Community CG Studio

Virtual Blender CG Community Studio

I was thinking that it would be nice if the Blender community set up a virtual 3d CG Studio type of web content area that operated like a real studio, but only in the context of a real cg studio. It could have various cg studio departments styled content setup like a real cg studio. The Blender users could also build a virtual cg studio team and job specifications for members by creating gallery forums that allow Blender artist to post their demo reels. Then the community could take polls and select the best work for the job of say “Lead Modeler” or “Lead Animator”, Art Director, etc.

The rest of the community could upload models to a community asset library that would allow chosen studio team members to perform their jobs collectively on a group project. The Blender community crew could even upload their files to the community forums so that everybody could get in on the development process. Project assistance could come from any member. Blends could be altered by any member and finalized by a Blender CG Community team member. In the end a real studio production could be completed and showcased on the Blender.org website.

The community members could also act as department heads in offering advice to crucial studio production task. Even checking composition and tweaking render files in the community CG Studio Asset database.

The community member whose suggestions and file adjustments are accepted by the community and the Studio team could become “sub” studio team members and their member names could display this title.

I say that we do this here at Elysiun. Does that sound cool? We could set a 3d community precedent with a feature like this. With the move to Xoops and all coming it just might work.

This Virtual Blender CG Community Studio would also let the community address real-world cg production pipeline issues. It would allow Ton and the other coders to focus on “live” cg production code task like coders do at cg studios like ILM.

In essence, a new Blender user could learn how to work in a cg studio just by participating in the activities of the Blender Virtual CG Community Studio.

This experience would also help Blender artist become good prospects for real cg studio jobs.

Blender at its core operates like a cg studio “in-house” 3d app. Wouldn’t it be cool to create a real virtual cg studio for our "in-house 3d app of choice Blender?

What do you think? I’m just fishing for new and exciting ideas for the Blender community for 2005.

Blend on!

Ya know… I think that’s a great idea. I would be very interested to see how this would work out. :smiley:

This is a great idea, and the only problem I see is that it would be a humongous undertaking. If there isn’t alot of interest and people who are (really) willing to help, it could die like so many other great ideas. Good Luck!

/d_M

If we keep our Blender Community CG productions simple and small like 30 sec TV commercial spots I think that we could handle these Blender CG productions collectively. We could work modularly so that task get done in groups and add all completed work together. We could use simple props but use more complex fx or animation.

If we keep our productions short and present visuals and topics that can appeal to the world outside of CG communities, we could be a hit with the general media.

This means not working like Weta. Hehehe. It’s means working with what we have but being as cool as possible. It means just getting some good community produced stuff out there with all of our names in the credits.

Kinda like a group of people making the worlds biggest hotdog for publicity and fun. Hehehe.

All of our production goals could based around promoting Blender.

We could use one simple Mascot character to host spots that involve the inclusion of a multitude of community selected Blender community models, etc. I think we could still strive for excellence and create a pro product collectively. We could composite cg with live action clips to make things go faster.

Anything is possible.

The Blender community could even discuss scripts and story lines.

All of the prep discussions and asset gathering phases could have a time limit for arriving at a selected project area topic. The community and Art Director forum Moderators could finalize the deal.

The Moderators could even set limits for production phases for modeling, animation, etc.

I think whatever Blender community takes this up will get lot’s of community support.

I would be happy to say something like, “check out that street sign in the Blender CG Studio Commercial, I modeled it!”

I mentioned the Xoops move that this forum is making because it’s so perfect for this kind of community project. CMS websites work for corporations in helping them to build major projects successfully. This process could work for us as a Blender Community Studio if we just let it.

If we pull it off we could end up as first page news on Blender.org.

We can make this project as easy as we want to but cooler than we ever dreamed possible.

We are different that other 3d communites, we share our files all the time for the better of the whole Blender community. Why can’t we do it for a small Blender production with no real pressure other than what we bring to the task?

What am I talking about, we would make freaking CG history if we pulled off something good.

Blend on!

I think it’s a great idea. Start off really small, otherwise we may run into trouble early on. Meaning that project and asset management could become troublesome areas.

It might go like this, you have the project leader who breaks down the project with department heads, who then assign the work to individuals. Now there’s content management. Say you have 20 modelers, 8 doing environments, 6 doings characters or actors (non-organic) and 6 doings props. How do you keep the various modelers from modifying completed or in-progress pieces? Some programmers might be familiar with things like SourceSafe, which lets them view what others have done but the can’t modify it, or Alienbrain (i haven’t used this but it sounds like it does the same thing except for digital creative assets).

Discipline might be another one. Perhaps there are several animators working on a scene, and 2 have full-time jobs not including daily tasks like cooking, laundry, personal time, etc (that’s if they don’t have a spouse or family). What kind of schedule can these types of people be on? Are they given less important tasks because they can’t devote hours each day to a community project? That kind of step might make some bitter and not want to help anymore. Sure there are plenty of people to use but what if that particular person is very talented but has limited time?
I’d say that managing the whole project for one or even several project leads would be a near-full-time job depending on the length and complexity of the project.

This brings up another questionable area such as:
Places like Pixar, Weta, Digtial Domain and ILM are known to develop their own tools or software for certain tasks, now, say there’s a certain project that hits a wall in one area due to a lacking or lack of a tool for it? Then what? Is it going to be hoped that someone in the community has a commercial app that can handle the task? If not, is someone expected to purchase one? I doubt it, but what’s the solution? Find a workaround? Assigns a team of community programmers the job of developing it?
Full-on projects might create stress areas in the community, making the “fun project” seem like a real job they’re not getting compensated for.

I’m not saying that this is the way it will be but it could get there, fast. The company I work for has comissioned two companies to redesign and rebuild our website. Due to unclear goals and direction early on (in my opinion) it has gotten more tedious to figure out what functions mgmt would like and how they should be implemented. We have people who want something different and some who claim our customers are totally resistant to change and will throw fits about a more complex website. I think it’s rubbish and when you’re spending 100,000 USD on a website it should be exactly what you want, which is not what it’s going to end up being.

I just thought of this, if you want some good opinions on how movie productions get screwed up, read the article in Cinefex #100. It’s part one of a two part article. Basically, it’s about how just because you can use fx doesn’t mean you should and how it shouldn’t be A) the focal point of the production and B) the clean up crew for sloppy filmmaking. Interesting reading.

-G

Its a great dream. But I’m going to go out on a limb here: It won’t work.

Now, prove me wrong.

Great points Gendo.

But I was thinking along the line of an open source web community driven project. Usually web community projects don’t have many restrictions or commitments. I proposed that the Blender community runs cg asset collection drives first then picks assets that they judge as suitable for a small cg 30 sec spot. Then Moderating members with titles and functions and expertise in one area of cg skill moderate the communities’ collective cg production activities. The community works together to tweak assets and edit assets out into a final cg production. This way no one person would be pressured with a given task. Everyone gets help from others in the community to work out production problems.

If we look in our own Blender project forums here we could see that we have members who are able to create good cg even for cg hobby projects.

We could share the files and share the production task. Say some models are great looking but are not designed well for RVK/Armature character animation. Then those of us who know how to rework good mesh topology get to work collectively. The same process would happen for animation and final rendering and editing. All along we could upload are changes to the same project target files and the Lead animator or modeler forum “Moderator” could have the final word on what ends up in the project. These Moderators could even make changes to the project files as they are the ones who are the “experts” in this area of the project.

I have had Blender pros help me on my own character rigging projects and more when I offered up the file for them to check out. This took days and weeks off of my work.

We could set time limits on each phase of a project with a “stoplight” type of system. A green light in a web project section area and a message could tell us what phase is starting next so that we could download and upload the file we wish to tweak.

We could have an upload entry form where we submit “Changelogs” that describe or alterations to the files. Before long we would have a completed Blender Community CG production near completion. Before we know it we would be done.

There are people with lots of experience at CG studio work who could add better structure to this idea. It would be good for those types to have a forum so that they could plan out the best way to approach the project as we upload prospective work and reels to the cg community project web page areas.

A project like this may be just the thing that Ton and the other coders can use to see how the Blender community works and to study our production needs for animation.

Blend on!

I see, well it sounds like it could work. I have an empty 4GB drive on my ftp that could be used for temporary storage if needed.

-G

As I said before CMS like Xoops are perfect for this kind of web community forum based project. Any success that we have with this project could lead to better web based cg studio CMS design. The Xoops team would be greatly aided as would cg studios that could use Xoops as an internal company project management system.

Xoops is an open source cms and a very good project. We may do more than complete a Blender community based cg project with this one. We may develop better ways to develop cg in the process.

Blend on!

What would be really cool is if the virtual studio worked on real life projects. Say adverticements for non-profit organisations and charities, Web adverts for opensource applications and the like, and freelance jobs for variouse mod communities on the internet. Stuff like that would go a long way when team members start applying for jobs. Further more, its a nice way to support those who give there time to help others.

Another idea would be 5 min shorts for non-profit television.

I don’t know if it should be an elysiun thing though… Everybody who helps run this site does enough for the blender comunity as it is.

Wow. It would be great if the Blender community could work on projects like that as a virtual community cg studio.

You never know. But yeah everyone in the Blender community comes here and there are other great Blender websites. I hope that folks in the Blender community can make something like this happen. It would be so cool for the entire Blender community and open source in general.

Blend on!

isn’t the realfxstudios™, doing just this?

.b

Hmm, I haven’t heard of this one. Do you have a link to the website?

I was thinking that a project like Lived mentioned could give a virtual Blender CG Studio fuel if we got this up and running.

no, but it’s somewhere on here at elysiun where I ran into it…

.b

I was thinking about how we tap into 3d communities on the web to check out the status of the cg industry or what’s new in the 3d software scene. Then I thought about what a change it would be if we tapped into the 3d community to see what 3d project we could jump into that is already in progress. It would be a cool 2hrs or so spent on participating in a Blender community cg project with no real strings attached. And it would be sweet later on when see how our contribution added to the cg project to see out name listed with other project members.

This ccould be possible.

It would be interesting to see what Timothy thinks about a Blender web cg community project like this.

Well if there’s anything I can help with just ask! Even though I suck I’m sure I can clean the virtual trash cans or something. haha

If I get the time and build the servers and get the funding I may be able to start something like this. Don’t count on it, but anything is possible. If I did it the website would have to have some way of paying for itself to cover hosting the projects. I’m not against promoting graphics hardware that we can all use, web hosting services, etc. And the website focus would be promoting Blender and other open source media creation software and OS options. Maybe some funding could come from those areas.

You never know…

Blend on!

yes in theory but not reality. But try it anyway. Start small, - Just try it with a static scene done by 3 people (you as directory and two others). Describe in words what you want the scene to reflect; try using Verse(?) so that multiple people can work on the blend file to add or link to the scene. Scan a hand-drawn sketch and assign objects to person A B and you. Collaborate. Share textures from a texture.blend file, updated in a CVS fashion. Have each person CVS their Name.Blend file that contains their objects and work results, with a Master.Blend file that links in the library files (textures) with PersonA’s blend file and PersonB’s blend file.

Render us a Jpg!!!

Old thread.