Dear Blender users,
It’s my first time in this forum. I came up with an idea about a concept starring some cartoon, semi-realistic, as well as highly realistic characters created by ourselves, traveling through Blender’s evolution, similarly to how Scrat the squirrel traveled in time in the short film “No Time For Nuts” (it was initialy going to be “Blender’s History Through Mickey Mouse” , but due to the strict copyrights the character has, I decided to cange the concept). I came up with this concept from the fact that I’ve also played with some of the old versions of this software and even Ton Roosendaal, Blender’s creator, still loves them all and preserves some of them, and another reason to make this short is to make sure that all of the old versions can run without problems (a Blender user, had already fixed an issue with Blender 1.0 for Irix two years ago, as part of the classic doughnut modeling tutorial challenge in older Blender versions, which you can find on YouTube), so if there are problems with other versions too, we’ll need to ensure they run in order to preserve Blender’s history and some of the users that are also programmers in this forum, could fix them before we try to make anything.
However, who would like to be the head of this project?
How the short could be made.
- Each user will animate only a few selected shots/small portion of an animated segment (less than 30 seconds), by creating literally everything inside one version of Blender (no plug-ins or other software will be involved). Some people might want to use a Virtual Machine or an Emulator, in order to run versions for other platforms (Amiga, Irix) or use an old computer if they prefer. I’ll think of what portion I will animate by then. Each user will create in an entire segment complete with models, rigs, etc. separately from other members, but that does not mean that nobody could help each other with the shots. But if a user might have no time to complete a segment or will be very busy for some time, this could be the only case during which another person could get his/her hands to the unfinished files of the previous user by downloading and using the same version of the software. But the directing, script and storyboards of the short, will be done with the collaboration of the entire project’s team
- Because not all people here used Blender’s previous releases in the past, we need to ensure how to pull of the animations properly and that might require some practice by learning how it used to work and how it changed (in terms of rigging for example).
- The upload video files of each shot will have 1920x1080 resolution and will be an .mp4 file, 24fps and motion blur (if supported in the version that will be used for each specific work), before combining them together and even after (when making them an entire segment).
- It won’t have narration, but it will be just text on screen. There will also be credits at the end of the short. We’ll need to make sure as to how to direct this project properly.
- After completion and the upload of the video, each user could upload all of the 3D models with their rigs and the prop objects in blendswap (but not the animation shots) under the CC0 license, as fanart, in a single .zip file, so that other Blender users could also play with them. We’ll see what we can do with the .trace files, because they are not supported.
- And remember to save often, because in older versions you’ll never know when the software might crash.
May 14 2023, will be the release date/deadline of this project, so all of the members of this project can perfect their animated scenes in time. I’m planning to make the music choices, but we also need someone to do the video editing with his/her favourite video editor (it could also be Blender’s video editing system) and upload the video on YouTube and another to make the thumbnail.
The links will be posted below