In the latest log Julien and Andy mention some of the hurdles they encountered during production. In the blog post Francesco says “not enough creative energy left”. It doesn’t really sound like a technical problem. I’m not going to speculate further. I’m happy we still get to see all the work done so far. It’s infinitely better than letting everything go to waste. And it looks really good ! which makes the decision all the more bitter. Anyway !
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Sometimes a project just doesn’t work out… Whether it’s a game, a personal project, a feature film or a small studio project.
I’m sure a lot of people worked hard to make it happen, and are disappointed it didn’t. But there will be another project, another goal, and another time to do something cool. And certainly the lessons learned from this one will be of value then.
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From the tone of notice they sent out I got an impression that it might be personal conflicts of some sort rather than technical. Too bad but it happens to most every organization that some projects just don’t work out, often for non-technical reasons.
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Very very sad to hear this news today. I was really excited seeing where this was going and enthused to see such a bold and ambitious stylistic departure too.
My first thought when I saw this was perhaps the focus and resources needed to finalise Blender 4.2 LTS was just understandably taking up the bulk of everyone’s time and resources. That in all of this Project Gold was just getting more and more sidelined.
Perhaps seeing as what a big release 4.2 LTS is hopefully going to be this just turned out not to be the ideal time to be producing a very ambitious and experimental open movie. But this is just total speculation on my part obviously.
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Do you remember which episode that was? I couldn’t find it.
https://www.youtube.com/live/48NiWisMppA?si=dUGqOm9Rl8wxApTh
Brecht and Dalai talk about brush assets project quite extensively
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Thanks for the link.
You initially stated that:
I am unsure where you got the texture painting improvements from. It was clearly not one of the initial goals. Also during the Blender Conference presentation by Brecht and Sergey, I didn’t get the impression that this was one of the targets.
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Around when project started studio (I think Julien and Simon) met with developers where they discussed shortcomings of texture painting system. I can’t dig through issues on gitea now, but was mentioned there that they wanted some improvements for the film that included lot of stylized art, and that current texture painting was usable only for ID mapping and masking.
This is sad news, “giving up” on a project after a years work is not nice and I am sure it was a difficult decision.
To add to the speculation I would say maybe there is a lack of “direction”. In the sense of “lets make a great movie together” but no rigid plan or person who lays the law down in charge -director (dictator). From what I have gathered the problems seem to be more personal-artistic direction than technical, the wips were looking great.
I have a feeling that if Blender could contract one of the devs from gimp or krita for texture painting…………… I know it could be a bad idea.
Another long term wish is for gimp or kriter to paint on 3d canvas (unwrapped obviosly), or even better MyPaint their brushes are great. That would hit substance where it hurts!
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I’ve read about how much difficulties Disney studio had when redendering ocean in Moana. Not only physics but lights too.
Maybe Blender can take insights
“Most notably it includes large amounts of geometry created through instancing as well as complex volumetric light transport.There are many other challenges which are frequently encountered in production rendering and which are not represented in this scene (examples include motion blur and a large number of light sources to name just two). Still, we hope that this will be a useful dataset for developing, testing and benchmarking new rendering algorithms.”
The Design and Evolution of Disney’s Hyperion Renderer
https://www.disneyanimation.com/publications/the-design-and-evolution-of-disneys-hyperion-renderer/
Sorted Deferred Shading for Production Path Tracing
https://www.disneyanimation.com/publications/sorted-deferred-shading-for-production-path-tracing/
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It is written on thumbnail of this video.
- Gradients are broken up with texture and brush strokes
On studio blog, description of project is mentioning Grease Pencil.
The goals of the project are to push Blender in the production of 2D/3D animation, ambitious effects and stylised rendering workflows - using the ongoing developments on Geometry Nodes, Grease Pencil and Cycles.
Grease Pencil brushes management should benefit from asset shelf.
It is experimental like Sculpt Texture Paint.
Grease Pencil tools advancement was frozen by GP3 refactor.
That does not make sense to try to improve rendering and compositing to deliver a painterly look and let artists struggle to paint in the software.
In production log video, you can see them struggling with Kuwahara filter when dimensions of rendered image is changed.
They could not base all their expectations on compositing and procedural textures.
Painting is always a little bit needed for corrections.
So, that was a legitimate hope. That developers will end up to get to this conclusion.
I did not follow the production. They probably had to switch to Blender 4, to keep up-to-date with Viewport Compositor development and node tools.
But that implies adaptation to new principled shader and new animation tools changes, too.
Artists did not have tsome of basic tools needed. The advanced ones were far to be ready. And the other ones they knew and used could have radically changed.
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In my eyes there is a massive difference between having something as a development goal and requiring some improvements. There have been plenty of smaller improvements thanks to those open movie projects which were not a development goal.
When it comes to texture painting improvements, it is well known that this needs a lot of improvements. And thankfully brush assets are an official development target for 2024, which are a starting point for improvements in this area in general.
Sure, I understand there was the hope, but it was not mentioned as development target. That’s a massive difference.
Well, I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to speculate too much even if we obviously like to know all the little details 
. To me the movie seem pretty clear in terms of art direction and story. But it also look like there was many challenges to overcome, like the water simulations, stylized rendering, complex underwater sets, the character getting broken into shards, all of which that is likely to accumulate. At some point we are probably talking about how to do stylized broken character interacting with stylized simulated water…
I’m pretty sure given the talents in the team they are able to solve all that, but it’s also understandable that it takes a lot of time and at this stage there is still a lot of unknown… The character broken into pieces looks promising, but how that will work with clothes ? is it ok if the character feels hollow ?
It looks like there is a lot of stuff to discover still. And basically that’s what pre-production / visual development is about. So basically they would probably need to stay in visual-dev / pre-prod for at least another year, to eventually be able to start production with a predictable budget and result. But maybe that was not planned and they don’t want to invest more on the project. Especially since it might be unclear of how much time is really needed to answer the remaining technically-artistically questions… which also informs how much work there is to actually make the production.
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Voila.
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Yes I know, but our minds do wander!
Not quite, that is more an automatic update of the image while you paint in 2d, I dream of a 3d view and interaction in krita or Kriter’s tools and brushes in blender paint mode.
I know it is a dream.
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The Brush Engine was mocked up back when they changed the interface to separate Brushes into Tools. They had envisioned a brush engine that would mimic what Krita and MyPaint have with some kind of preview of the brush stroke while adjusting parameters. Yes, we are overdue for the brush engine upgrade in Blender, but Texture Paint is far from unusable for those that actually use it. If someone comes from a 2d painter and tries to paint in Blender, they are going to gravitate toward Grease Pencil because it appears to work similarly to Krita.
I do think that one feature that could make things easier is to bring back the toggle from 2.66 era for turning on and off Projection Paint so that the brush width could then be scene specific in viewport when you want it to be. Ndee had a really great attempt at improvements with BPainter addon, but that looks dead now.
If someone wants nicer brush tips, they need to know about using Image Sequence as brush mask/brush texture and playing the timeline to swap them as you dab.
Sorry for the off topic, mod remove if it is irrelevant.
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Can’t say I’m overly surprised that it was scrapped considering how many things were needed to make its high ambitions come to life. If I recall, the project would need:
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Water and physics simulations for stuff such as hair. Definitely not happening any time soon.
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NPR workflow for Cycles and/or Eevee. Still in early planning stages and haven’t really been built yet.
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Better lighting. Some of it already implemented, but not fully complete across the board.
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Better texture painting. Again, not happening any time soon, even if it is in the planning stage.
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Improvements to sculpting, which were a leftover from Project Heist. Only now getting any attention from the devs.
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Geometry Nodes and Tools, a lot of which to be fair are working and working fairly well.
Basically the most demanding parts of the project were not even being worked on by the programmers and besides GN, rendering, and lighting the entire vision would have been compromised. If Project Gold had begun production now and the devs actually started working on these missing development goals like they are in the early stages of, then maybe it could have worked. However, what’s done is done.
Sad that it got cancelled, but it was probably for the best. Sometimes things just don’t work out and an honest effort was done this time to be ambitious. After all, the community wanted to see more ambitious projects be taken on by the studio, but that also means higher risk of failure. I’m sure the team learned some important lessons for future project goals from this.
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i think the problem here wasn’t that much a lack of fanciness or that it is boring to program but more that the whole brush and painting project is a hard design task. do they have a concept everyone agrees on in the meantime?
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Yes, I completely agree with you.
It is especially not something that can be pulled off as a side thing during an open movie, keeping in mind it wasn’t an official development goal.
Those tasks need to have a sufficient basis before the preproduction even starts. Otherwise they are highly likely to be doomed.
Oh that is unexpected. This is the first official open movie project that was stopped during production, wasn’t it?
I’ll check the video later but for me it is totally okay to also stop projects that don’t seem to go in the intended direction any more. Better to just call it a learning experience before it takes up more time and energy despite not knowing if it will be finished at all.
Ultimately even failures are always an important step in a creative process. Every failure is a step towards a better next product. And sometimes even more important in the long run.
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