I’m sure that a lot of people here are already familiar with this movie. I’m surprised there isn’t more talk on the boards about it, an all blender feature length film, rendered in cycles with theatrical distribution. I thought I’d see more people talking about Tangent Animation and their plans to contribute code to blender and cycles. I’d like to hear others thoughts on this project and what you think it means for blender’s future.
I think this is huge, and should get as many eyes on it as possible, for blender’s (and our) sake. so yes, this get’s me excited and my hopes are higher than ever. also I’m a cloud subscriber trying to make a (small) difference. I also hope that Tanget will open up their remote pipeline, so i can be part of their stuff despite being on the other side of the planet.
Here’s an old thread from six years ago. It’s from 2010 wondering when a feature will be done in blender.
I think the animation looked great, especially for the budget. You can tell by the dog’s startled reactions that professional animators did this. The budget was 8.5 mill. Canadian, roughly 6.3 mill USD. I think this clip looked better than the animation in Hoodwinked 2005, that had a budget of 17.5 million and it sequel, Hoodwinked Too! 2011, which had a budget of 30 million.
Fun fact 1: It was dubbed into English and released on home video as “Birds of Paradise”.
Fun fact 2: Blender Institute’s very own Pablo Vazquez worked on it. Here is my signed copy:
Fun fact 3: It was not very good.
Fun fact 4: Ton, Bassam Kurdali and Andy Goralczyk are all in the credits - but their names are spelled wrong. (Campbell Barton and Joshua Leung are in the credits as well and their names are spelled correctly.)
@quolism: It’s interesting to hear that they did follow through on that 
I had been wondering…
I remember seeing these DVD’s in the supermarket last year and being quite surprised to see that they were selling a dubbed + renamed version of some very familiar renders 
Fun Fact 5: Hopefully I won’t get in trouble for mentioning this here, but I still have copies of some of the rigs used (albeit, these were probably mid-production versions, and were without the textures…) lying around on one of my old machines. Last time I checked, they still work pretty well in modern (2.5+) Blender versions. It’s pretty interesting seeing what Malefico did to get the wings working… there was some crazy stuff going on in there!
Fun Fact 6: It was on one of the Plumiferos rigs (specifically, the feet) that I discovered that it was a bad idea to try converting the Copy Rotation constraint to using quaternions internally when copying the rotations (even with all axes enabled). I had originally tried to do this when doing the Constraints System Refactor (in late June 2007 IIRC – after 2.44 was out, and around the time of 2.45 was being released; the code ended up only getting released for 2.46), and in simple cases it seemed fine… until I saw that doing so would cause lots of random bone rotations that would cause feet to go in crazy directions (just like some of those horror shots you see of injured athletes sometimes)
BriiliantApe, I was already familiar with this film, Plumiferos (Birds of Paradise), the thread I submitted talks about it on page 2 and 3. Plumiferos had production difficulties and was finished by another team using paid software. The next film is Kiribati, blender and v-ray, scheduled for 2017. The thing about Ozzy is it’s all blender/cycles, it got completed and released. Tangent look like they’re gonna be a strong force for blender/cycles development.
Agreed with Pixel Master, I think “Ozzy” is actually the first true feature film made in Blender and the first to show that Blender is ready for such a task (and will especially be so once 2.8 rolls around with the new viewport code). I did read though they used Blackmagic Fusion for the final color-grading, but the movie was about finished by then.
The point being, all Plumiferos proved all those years ago was that at the time, it showed that Blender did not have the tools nor the power to actually do such a project from start to finish (because if I remember correctly, the studio abandoned Blender as a production tool and moved everything over to Maya). Plumiferos as a result wound up as a movie brought to you by Autodesk, not Blender.
Of course Plumiferos dates back to the pre-Bmesh and pre-Cycles era (back when people were becoming concerned about Blender’s relevance in the industry in general).
@pixelmaster they aren’t doing kiribati with vray anymore, they were doing it but they moved it to blender render because of time constraints i believe
Thanks for the info. Looch, I’m curious, will Kiribati be a mix of vray and cycles or all cycles?
no cycles, blender internal render, I think they ditched all the shots that where ond those renderers and moved back to blender render all together with a bit of a change in the looks to a more artistic npr style.
I believe this thread has gone off-topic. I think the original topic was “Ozzy”.
I’m also surprised by the seemingly muted response from the Blender community about what Tangent Animation has done, is doing, and plans to do with Blender (tons of money thrown at Blender for developers and development). I think it’s absolutely what the community says it wants for Blender, but now that it’s here there seems to be a strange lack of response.
I think Tangent Animation should be greatly encouraged. They could change their minds and take another route if they believe no one’s really interested. I don’t know, maybe my expectations are off, or maybe the response is on-going but behind closed doors.
What can we do to show more enthusiasm and encouragement?
It looks worse than toy story 21y ago.
More - it is secret life of pets knock-off. In 2014 they saw that dog movie is in the making. People hate these kind of practices. Encourage it?
Good that they sponsor blender, every bit helps. But geez, guys, you are obsessed with feature films, blender doesnt need to prove anything.
Kind of an unnecessary comment, its not even accurate. Either its been a while since you’ve seen Toy Story with all it’s pixelated texture glory or you don’t really appreciate the technical advancement here (or for that matter how much of work is involved with feature films).
Blender does need to prove itself. It is not really considered a proper production tool, and in many ways it isn’t. In fact, using Blender in a feature-length animated film is pretty impressive given it’s short comings, especially in areas like asset management. The moment we say “Blender doesn’t need to prove itself” we start adding features that stroke our own ego rather than meet industry demands. Really, this attitude is toxic.
I hope 10 people know that they need to prove themselfes and stop stoking their egos. Shawn has spoken.
You know, because there are devs behind blender, they add stuff, not you.
Industry does not need blender, we need it btw.
There was more information in the “making of” video before it was pulled from Vimeo, Tangent is aware of the same weak points that the devs. know about and are willing to help fund the development needed for Blender to overcome them.
We already know that 2.8 plans to bring major improvement to the viewport as well as scene management (Bastien is still working on the asset management side, but is taking a while because it requires a major rework of Blender’s design). Even right now, there’s been another workshop on 2.8 development.
I’m not going to fight with you. Industry acceptance benefits everyone from both a development and monetary standpoint while opening job opportunities for artists. In fact, I’ve stopped using Blender entirely due to a lack of opertunity. And yes, user needs do in-part drive development.
DOes anyone know a working link to the making of?