I’m part of a small team working for Zach King, a popular online personality. I thought I’d share the latest video that we did with Universal featuring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard to tease the upcoming trailer for Jurassic World.
I was tasked to recreate the Unix System from Jurassic Park. The software we use for 3D production is Blender. I used the Blender Render engine, namely the viewport to render out the animation. The full original animation:
All the 3D elements were done in Blender. The Youtube window and mouse animation were done in Photoshop and After Effects respectively. The one thing you’ll note that’s different in the final video is the Youtube interface, which we were asked to make look more generic.
Quite happy with how it came out though. While not a 100 accurate reproduction of the system/layout in Jurassic Park, it was close enough that the client initially was concerned about the legality of ripping the Unix System animation from the original movie.
Blender is (very) slowly getting there. A couple years back, it became good enough to do pre-vis for Captain America 2, then someone snuck a Blender-rendered creature into a shot in Warcraft, then we found it was used for some credits illustrations in Wonder Women.
A little here, a little there, a little bit of sneaking it in through the backdoor, Blender is more or less doomed to always have a tiny presence in the larger studios (possibly because of the GPL and the fact that it’s not indisputably the best in any area). Rather, the bright future of Blender lies in its use among small to medium-sized studios that do lower-budget work (ie. not the big blockbusters).
That’s fascinating! I didn’t know that. Maybe in the future someone could create a big budget movie just using or mostly using Blender from start to finish.
Just to clarify, this work isn’t part of the Jurassic World movie. We’re a small team who created this video for Universal to help promote the then coming-soon trailer (now it’s out).
I know that it wasn’t going to be in the movie. There’s still the Industry standard of 3D Max and Maya. When I typed it out, I meant it as a link or part towards the movie.
It is being used more and more even if a majority of its use is for pre concept before brought to the big budget softwares it is getting more popular. Just hope blender don’t get big heads and go stupid by starting a purchase service.
Check out Sean Kennedy’s presentations he’s given at the Blender Conferences. He’s worked for some big studios and used Blender for asset generation (like birds). Now he uses Blender for more and more larger projects.
I’d say the adoption of Blender into bigger studios is inevitable. It seems a lot of small studios are utilizing Blender and that’s because of the cost (or lack thereof) and because it proves to be competent for a lot of uses. And as some of those small studios get bigger and become influential in the field, Blender (with its constant development efforts) will find a more acceptable place in the professional sphere.
Blender won’t be able to completely replace the expensive softwares in the foreseeable future, but I think it’s pretty clear it’s becoming a viable option as a tool for the industry, especially for modeling, simple animation and smoke simulation needs.
And, hey, our viral video has cumulatively exposed nearly 10 million people (through Youtube [link in OP] and Facebook) to work done in Blender whether they know it or not… so I’m sure that can’t hurt. Proud to have contributed to Blender exposure albeit a little, hehe.
Since we’re talking about times when Blender was used in professional works, Blender was also used to create the characters Sebastian and Lu in Unity’s “Adam demo.”
If 2.8 can handle gazillion of polygons, render in real time and have good support of interchange formats, could be positioned in a niche as pre-vis solution for architecture, product development and motion picture.
