Hey,
I’m wanting to make a short CGI film (maybe 3 minutes or so). I’m wanting to incorporate full 3D animated characters, good effects, and just basically a good-looking short. I want to do this because I want to learn more about Blender and animation. Is there anywhere that has any information about Blender CGI films? Can anyone help me please? Thanks!
www.blender.org - the Blender Foundation has produced two completely CGI shorts, Elephants Dream, and Big Buck Bunny. There are books on Blender available from your local bookstore, or the Blender e-shop, or online. There are video tutorials on DVD available for sale from cmiVFX, Blender, and individuals and on-line. Have fun!
Check youtube. There’s some neat ones on youtube. CGI films are tons of little parts put together. Make sure you don’t try to do something you know will be near impossible: the reason Veggietales uses veggies/fruit is because the people who made it wearn’t good at animating @ the start, and extremities can be a pain to animate. 
Storyboard it before you start doing the scenes in blender, having that kind of structure before you start will make the process go a lot smoother. Even if it’s simple sketches on napkins, you’ll then have a goal to work towards instead os plopping on your chair and saying “Man, I don’t know what I’m going to do!”.
Check out the book by D Rolan Hess “Animating with blender” - pretty much a start to finish guide on making a short CG film. great place to start.good luck
Thanks! A quick question though. In the short I want it to be as real as possible and as close to the real world as possible. I want to use real CG humans in it, but this will probably get to hard for me. Do you guys have any way to simplify the animation process with actual human CG characters in Blender, or is it just really hard? Thanks!
Realism is something that can take a great deal of skill, experience, and patience to achieve, especially when your subject is human. If this is your first production you would probably get better results aiming for a stylized/cartoonish look.
As far as shortcuts, www.makehuman.org will save you a lot of time if you dont mind using a generic character mesh.
This book, Inspired 3D Short Film Production, was pretty awesome for me, still working on the short. It’s not blender specific, but goes into a nice detail on all aspects of the pipeline, like writing, stroyboarding, concepting, animating, lighting, rendering and even selling and submitting to festivals.
Thanks Pad!
Realism is something that can take a great deal of skill, experience, and patience to achieve, especially when your subject is human. If this is your first production you would probably get better results aiming for a stylized/cartoonish look.
As far as shortcuts, www.makehuman.org will save you a lot of time if you dont mind using a generic character mesh.
O ok, yea I played around with MakeHuman today, and In about two hours, I clothed a character I made and rendered her! This is the kind of “realness” I want, but I understand that I would be probably too hard for me. Anyway, I’ll go ahead and show you the render just because.
Note: This should probably go in the “Gallery” forum, sorry!
(I’ll put the render in my nest post)
Note: I am still working on the color between the head and the neck, sorry!
Hope you like what you see! 
Excuse me for this, but that question made me chuckle.
It reminds of a producer who (after I submitted a quote for some pre-prod on a 3D TV series) asked me
“Is there any way we can do this in an original way so that it’s really cheap to make, but still looks really good?”
I had to hold my sarcastic tongue from saying something like:
“Genius!! Nobody’s ever thought of that before!! Cheap, fast and good!! Brilliant!!”
In short, animation is an art. Any art worth doing takes knowledge, time and effort.
Yes, you can make a short film with Blender (many have), but don’t be in a hurry, or you’ll end up with something nobody wants to watch.
All the best.
Yea, I know. You make a good point! I have just always been a big fan of realilistic CGI and have always wanted to make my own, but I’ll keep practicing and maybe later I can make a huge billion-dollar movie! LOL
