On a creative level, the film will explore an impressionistic, stylized aesthetic. It will be visual poetry, a new territory for Blender Studio.
Technical targets
Advanced rendering techniques, such as light linking. Already in development!
Simulation Nodes
Geometry Nodes based tools
Extend the viewport compositor and interactive image processing
Art-directable, stylized, non-photorealistic rendering with Cycles
Director
The project is led by director Jericca Cleland, an experienced storyteller and cinematographer with vast industry experience.
She will be joined by production designer Florent Masurel, with whom she collaborated on feature films such as Ballerina and Fireheart.
Release date
The project is in early pre-production stage and will pick up speed after the release of Pet Projects (July). The release of Project Gold is targeted for 2024.
Really excited to see more on this process; stylized rendering in Cycles currently is a massive pain. Hoping for new tools that will make it easier and better
Let’s be honest, they targeted realism in one project and used Eevee, now they target stylized rendering with Cycles, I am starting to doubt they understand their tools
Well, the only advantage eevee as for NPR over cycles is the shader to rgb node and more flexible normals, but it’s still very limited to do NPR stuff.
It’s great that they look into that, starting with the most difficult engine to work with, and maybe what is going to be needed for cycles will be eventually available in eevee ?
This should be cool. I am reminded of the original open movie, Elephants Dream, which was very artistic. After, they decided to go a more vanilla direction, and I always hoped they’d go back to the original arty idea.
According to the concept arts, there are 3 candidates for simulation nodes : ocean simulation, sail simulation / character cloth simulation, hair simulation in the wind or underwater.
But there is no guarantee that will not be old simulations or geometry nodes tricks made for the shot, without new generic solver.
Probably one or two target will be achieved with the rest being tricks.
But yes, there are also particles in concept arts.
When I look at underwater screenshots, I am thinking they want to produce heavy geometry scenes and challenge path guiding.
I hope they will have time to explore.
They will probably face issues with a brute force approach on physics, rendering or compositing.
Mantaflow have bugs. Geometry nodes for small wave simulation is different than ocean simulation.
hair in the wind, hair underwater, wet hair : that is a lot.
The boat have 2 or 3 sails, that should have a coherent interaction.
Light linking can be per view layer, but no support for indirect lighting.
Light grouping being by object and not by collection, it would imply scene copies.
Viewport Compositor does not support multipass, vector blur, defocus, sunbeams, inpaint, double-edge mask, cryptomatte
They will need to be very technical and do complicated tricks.
That is a lot of challenges.
They will probably produce stylized stuff in an unexpected way.
I hope the result will not look cheap.
Very exciting targets. Especially Geonodes tools. I never imagined that as a concept but reading workshop ideas now, I can’t believe I ever lived without them, and still do somehow.
Yeah, I saw the long flowing hair, underwater and first thing I thought was, that’s rather ambitious given total lack of GeoNodes hair/cloth simulation. And that any GeoNodes simulation is only going to just hit a stable release version at all.
Still, going to be interesting to see how it all turns out.
If they can pull their plans off, it’s going to be ground-breaking. Just being able to animate long hair in Blender would send shockwaves through the animation world. I really hope they can actually meet their goals; these tools that don’t exist yet they’ll need for this project are indescribably valuable to animators
Yup, the second character of my project has long hair, hence I really need Blender to sort out the whole hair simulation system. Pretty sure that Blender Bob is going to need it as well for his movie project.
I’m not sure the Blender devs even have a solid design doc sorted out for it yet, but lets hope this new open movie lights a fire under the whole process and gets the decade old simulation system replaced.
If they manage to implement even half of these features it is going to be a pretty successful project. Personally I hope they improve cloth simulations to be more performant and easier to use and NPR for Cycles.
Probably going to be the most ambitious project they have ever produced. Pretty excited!
It is also reminiscent of the early Open Movie Projects, which was to actually push Blender hard enough that it needed major new functionality to make the project possible. I do believe some of the more recent projects were actually quite safe as far as needed development goes (ie. mostly ease of use, workflow, and other minor topics).
If anything, Blender should be pushed even harder than before since there is now a stable fund as opposed to fundraisers. Make it cry and beg for more optimizations so it can handle the scenes for instance.
I agree. The open movies have been a bit too safe lately. A lot of the foundations for the next few years are finally starting to come into fruition (i.e. Cycles X, geometry nodes, viewport compositor, etc.), so it is as good as time as any to push the new tech.
After having dabbled with cloth simulations in Marvelous Designer the last few weeks for the first time it has become quite painful having to work with the current settings and instead resorting to just doing everything cloth related in Sculpt Mode. I think the simulation nodes would be a great opportunity to streamline and improve the effectiveness of cloth in Blender, since the current iteration is so ridiculously slow (couldn’t do a simple sewing test for a pair of gloves on my school PC while Marvelous was running near real time with its simulations).
I’ve been getting more into nodes lately, so this is going to be fun!
I disagree. In my view, it has to be safe.
Going into the project with the requirement of having the requirement to come up with completely new technical solutions is not the way to go. This leads to hacked solutions which work in that particular case.
Simulation nodes are happening anyways and it is nice to push them a bit further with a project like this one. This is not really risky in my view, because it is embedded into a proven development path that has been going on for quite a while.
Really glad they are going for an NPR, stylized approach that focuses on a painterly look, rather than a cartoon one. The concepts look amazing, high hopes for this one!
Well, there goes that hope for full, proper hair simulation with the new hair curves.
Once again, hair all pulled down and back into a ponytail, with a small bang of a ponytail down one side.
Designed perfectly for two bones chains to animate and control, with no loose hairs to cut into the face or a general moving ‘mass’ that one has to try and manage somehow.
Maybe they will at least try cloth simulation, but not holding my breath.
Do other general purpose DCCs actually offer such a thing?
I suppose you could probably pull something out of Houdini in that respect (with enough effort), but then again you can also basically rival MarvelousDesigner or Katana or EmberGen by pulling something out of Houdini, with enough effort (maybe not in terms of workflow or ease of use or iterating quickly, but in terms of effective endresults).
Or at least it would seem so to me as a guy who, in all honesty, hardly ever touched Houdini and de facto never touched any of the other softwares just mentioned. So my highly unqualified remark is really only based upon what you’d see in SideFX’ promotional videos or Houdini-tutorials and such, thus take it with a bucket of salt.
I won’t debate it (full, proper hair simulation with the new hair curves) would have been exciting though.
Sort of. I mean Houdini does talk about hair and cloth and I see some examples of hair grooming and the like, tho I’m not sure how much of a full implementation the dynamics/simulation is. Mind you, dynamics and simulation is what Houdini does, so maybe its pretty good.
Even so, I’m sure that for cloth, most of it is a custom solution or Marvelous Designer is used.
Maya then of course has XGen, Yeti, Ornatrix and likely other inbuilt or 3rd party addons, which may also be an option for other apps like Max and C4D (in the case of Ornatrix). From what I can tell all of these have dynamics/simulation options. From what I could quickly see of Xgen (from a 6 year old video), I’d love some of those features.
