The amount of spam that slips in articles here is disturbing, and we can’t manage all of the articles anymore… the project closed in 2008 anyway! If you like to communicate about this project, please visit the Open Projects forum on http://www.blender.org/forum/

Thanks,

-Ton-

The Noordbrabants Museum, one of the main modern art museums in southern Netherlands, opened recently an exhibit “Fantasy Factory”, where BBB has a permanent display. This morning, the Dutch national news paper Volkskrant posted a positive review on this exhibit, ending with some words about BBB. Freely translated:

“From paper cutting to fast 3D-film”

“Radically different than for example the model-handicraft from van Kaayk, is Big Buck Bunny from the Netherlands computer graphics teacher Sacha Goedegebure, a comedy about a fat rabbit taking revenge on three irritating rodents. The film - in the fastest imaginable 3D computer animation - almost seems like being produced by Blue Sky studios, the producer of Ice Age 1-2-3, so natural and precise as the rabbit hairs wave in the wind.
Gosh, that we can do this too, you then think a while. And understandable that the eyes of the kids hanging in the beanbags of the theatre are glued on this Dutch rabbit humour.”

Ain’t this a fun review! :) Kudos to all who made BBB of course, it’s certainly not just a Dutch film… but we knew that!

-Ton-

Big Buck Bunny is the winner of two awards:

- The MovieSquad Audience Award (kids of 8-12 voted in the HAFF school program)
- The HAFF Audience Award (festival visitors voted, with over 40 nominations)

Festival news page

Congrats to the entire team, and of course to everyone who has supported BBB!

-Ton-

To start with the most prestigious one:

Netherlands Film Festival, official selection in main program

Utrecht, sept 24 - oct 3, 2008
http://www.filmfestival.nl

• Three theatre screenings of BBB
• Sept 30: nominations for awards announced (we can become nominated in short film category)
• Oct 1: BBB screening + speaking as part of the “Re-vision, the new media effect” program
• Private screenings in international program for distributors, TV stations and studios.
• Oct 3: The grand Gala evening. Well, I’ll be going there anyway for fun!

Klik! Amsterdam animation festival

Amsterdam, 12-14 september 2008
http://www.klikamsterdam.nl/

• Saturday 13, 20.20h: BBB screening + presentation

IBC, International Broadcasting Conference

Amsterdam, 12-16 september
http://www.ibc.org

• You’ll probably see BBB on many tradeshow booths showing off HD technology!

Nederlandse Stripdagen (Dutch Comic days)

Houten, 27-28 september, 2008
http://www.stripdagen.nl

• Saturday 27, 10.00h: BBB screening + presentation

PICNIC’08 (cross media conference)

Amsterdam, 24-26 September 2008
http://www.picnicnetwork.org

• Friday 26, 10.00h: Presentation as part of Celebrating Collaborative Creativity

Cinekid, international film festival for the youth

Amsterdam, 18-26 october 2008
http://www.cinekid.nl/

• Tuesday 21, 16.00h: BBB screening and presentation/interview

Blender Conference

Amsterdam, 24-26 october 2008
http://www.blender.org

• Three days of talks, roundtables and workshops about Blender
• Friday evening: BBB screening as part of festival

Stifo@Sandberg Conference

Amsterdam, october 31 2008
http://www.all-media.info/page.php?id=65 (official announcement still pending)

• Speaker in the program “Moving Movie Industry”

Holland Animation Film Festival

Utrecht, 5-9 november 2008
http://haff.awn.com/

• BBB selected in official competition
• masterclass by BBB animator William Reynish (to be confirmed)

Thanks to our good friend & animation consultant & trainer Arno Kroner we had a great afternoon at the Disney Animation studios; the original place were animation got about invented (well, perfected :)!
There was a screening arranged in the main viewing room, and quickly after 12 PM the room quickly filled with about 70-80 people. After showing BBB (people laughed!) we did a 40 minute making-of presentation, especially showing Blender animation & compositing and the cool fact a single .blend file could manage and collect all the data for an entire movie shot.
After the presentation we went for lunch and a tour around the premises. Unfortunately the studios were forbidden for us… would have loved to pick the brains of developers about Bolt’s forest rendering methods. But, I did see the office of John Lassiter!

Sunday August 10th: Siggraph Sandbox demos

The weekend before siggraph, there were several pre-conference events. The “Sandbox” is a couple of seminars devoted to 3d games development. As the closing event, sunday 6-8.30 PM, we were scheduled to demo Blender, while the audience wandered around getting food and drinks. Our “Yofrankie” demo attracted quite some attention, mostly because of the fact it was all running inside of a 3D tool - something we blenderheads are used to already for a decade, but it keeps giving surprised reactions (’why didn’t anyone think of it before’).

Monday August 11th: Birds of a Feather meetings

All afternoon, from 2 to 6.30 PM, we had a 80 seat conference room filled with people interested in Blender’s progress. As scheduled there were three sessions:

• Blender Foundation Community meeting: as usual, an overview of past year’s activities and plans for next year. Thanks to the Apricot team I had a great Blender GE “powerpoint slide” presentation (download here, 38 MB). The obvious question was about Blender 2.50 scheduling, which was actually already announced on the previous siggraph! Well… Siggraph 2009 will learn us more! :)
  Among the visitors were people from NASA, Lockheed and IMAX!
• Apricot project and Blender GE meeting: to our surprise the room flooded for this talk, ending with a dozen people sitting on the floor even. Interest in this revived part of Blender is tremendous!
• Art showcase and Peach team ‘making of’: several people took the opportunity to show their work, varying from a Wii remote controlling Blender to showing animation and artwork. The last hour the BBB team did a making-of talk.

Tuesday August 12- thursday 14: HP Booth demos, tradeshow

We had one of the four demo systems at the HP for Blender demos. There were two high quality printers on the booth, which we could use to showcase color-calibrated artwork printing. Even though there was no big sign with our name we attracted plenty of visitors with our demos. Not to mention BBB looked awesome on their display and prints!

The trade show itself was huge again, probably a bit larger than past 2 years. Several 3d software companies were not present though (Houdini, Hash, Quest3d, Massive …), Lightwave had a not-so-well-visited booth in a corner, Apple didn’t show up. Maya/3DMax clearly dominate the show, with XSI being the #1 competitor (and amazing demos of their new “ICE” node system). I visited ATI to get info about the status of their drivers (short answer: they advise to buy Radeon if you only want to play games, for quality you need the FireGL series). It was interesting to see how rendering on GPUs becomes more interesting; AMD+ATI merged (they didn’t reveil any plan, but hinted at something integrated next year) and how Nvidia+Mental Images showed a new shader language (one of their main devs is Jan Walter, former Blender coder!).

Tuesday August 12: Lunch at Dreamwork

Unfortunately the screening room got booked by a dreamworks exec, but we still had a great lunch time with Anthony Zierhut (storyboards Shrek4) and Sebastien Chort (lighting artist KF Panda). The tour over the premises was just awesome. It’s built very spacious with lush gardens, ping pong tables, game room and a giant restaurant with everything freely available (I want those ice cream machines!). Dreamworks definitely takes care very well for their people. Of course we tried to pick their brains as much as possible about what and how they do it there.

Wednesday August 13, Animation Festival “Making of BBB Panel”.

One more highlight: in a hall with 900 seats we did a 90 minute making-of show. Again it was very cool to see how we could show - on a laptop! - large parts of the creation process.
After the presentation a lot of people contacted us, including studios who want to switch now (especially interested in mixed pipelines of Maya or 3Dmax with Blender). And we were contacted by producers with big bags of money who want to have movies… eek!

Wednesday August 13, Screening and presentation at Rhythm & Hues

As last of the studio tours, we were invited by Blender fan and R&H compositing artist Sean Kennedy and toured around by Scot Byrd. This screening and Q&A went very much into detail, there was a lot of interest in our project by the artists. We also got a real tour in the studios and offices themselves, with demo of their in-house animation/compositing tools. They are clearly fighting with space there, people sitting row at row in large rooms, using every available inch as office space. Nevertheless, great quality work there!

Thursday August 14, closing party

After the horrible closing reception in the Dogers stadium (yes, they spent all our money on gruesome fat food and tickets for a baseball game) we went back to Figueroa, our favorite hangout. After closing time Bassam and me suddenly found ourselves on a private party in a loft featuring no-one less than Ken Perlin, Jos Stam and Jim Blinn! I had a great time chatting with Maya chief-scientist Jos (yep in dutch!).
Still waiting for pictures of the party… stay tuned!

-Ton-

• Disney Feature Animation (friday)
• Dreamworks Animation (tuesday)
• Rhythm & Hues studios (wednesday)

This on top of our schedule already:

• Sunday: Siggraph Sandbox demos, 6-8 PM
• Monday, three BOFs 2-6 PM
• Tuesday-Thursday: demos on HP booth
• Wednesday 8.30 PM: BBB screening and ‘making of’ Panel

Four of the Peach crew artists will help me out for these 7 days, so here’s you chance to meet with Sacha, Nathan, William and Andy. It’s going to be great! Expect lots of pictures and a report here in a week

-Ton-

(Late news: BBB is in official selection for the prestigious Netherlands Film Festival. Whee!)

http://blender-mirror.kino3d.org/peach/

Note that you can get here the original 4 x 16 bits OpenExr files too, straight from the renderfarm. Console-savy people will want to use wget -r (recursive) to get all of the exr in a directory.

Thanks Kino!

Download the article here.

How 1 week in Singapore can change one’s ideas, goals and direction in life…

It was June 15 I took a 12 hour flight to Singapore, to attend CGOverdrive 2008 as keynote speaker and representer of BBB and Blender. And I can say that my first trip to Asia is one that will be hard to forget.

Stepping out of the plane started with a nice smack-in-the-face temperature, something that didn’t seem to get less during the late hours. The evening of that first day me and 2 other speakers were invited to a lovely welcomes diner with people from 3dsense media school (supporters of cgoverdrive) and other people from the organisation. It was a surprise to hear how much they thought of Blender and BBB, and it inspired me to finish up my keynote that night.

The next day I arrived early enough at the expo hall to get myself and my laptop plugged in, but unfortunately after even 3 hours of struggling we couldn’t get my monitor to work correctly on the big screen. Some issue with Linux, Nvidia and a cable that’s too long… I dunno. Even Andy, who arrived a day later in Singapore, couldn’t get things to work the last hour. But to the rescue came audience member Victor Yap, Blender user and organisor of Blender Birds of a Feather at Siggraph Asia 2008. When I was announced we were still busy transfering and checking my files on his laptop. Not the best start for a first keynote, but it worked.

My keynote talk was about the world of open source and open content, with Blender, the Blender Institute and BBB as my main examples. Showing BBB definitely gave it a good start. During the Q&A it became clear that alot of people had a hard time understanding that everthing was done in Blender (a free program?!), plus the open content aspect. Hopefully with my keynote I was able to give a nice introduction.

The attention I got after my keynote was something that surprised me the most. Visitors asking for autographs and asking to be on photo with me… hey, I’m not complaining.

The last day of CGOverdrive ended with a ’making of BBB’ from me and Andy; a ‘Blender sandwich’, how the presenter called it. This time having a more relaxed preparation (as in Andy did all the preparation), we had no problem filling the complete 2 hours. It was like bringing back old memories with Andy, something I enjoyed thoroughly. We ended the Q&A by giving away a few BBB dvd’s, just by having the audience members answer a few simple questions (last one was a toughy though; they had to pronounce my last name correctly).

The same evening and the day after me and Andy experienced Singapore in an unforgettably way. All this thanks to Victor and his family, who showed us around and treated us with a warm-hearted Singapore hospitality. And what to say about Singapore? Everything is amazing; the food, the buildings, the people, the way people with different background and religion live together… and don’t get me started about the women there.

The evening poor Andy had to leave, I was invited to a diner party with the 3dsense team (some of the people being from 3dsense China). A small but great group of people, with a strong passion for what they’re doing. That evening wasn’t too bad either…. okay, it was awesome.

The day I had to leave I visited Raffles Design Institute. Teacher and Blender user Jorge Otero invited me over to show BBB to a small group of students. Seeing I’m from schools with the same kind of creative background, I was very keen to take a quick look at the place. A short but fun experience.

..

.

Before I end this neverending blogpost, I would like to say something about the day before I left. Sen and Justin from 3dsense invited me to take a look at their small school (a few classrooms in a shopping mall), and after that the place they’ll be moving to very soon (2nd floor of a very nice building). There’s still alot of work to do, but it’s clear the place is going to look great.

And the reason I mention all this? If everything goes as planned I’ll be joining the 3dsense team beginning of August. Sen offered me a job as lecturer, and to join a small group of passionate people with great goals and plans, is something I just cannot say no to. Mention worthy is that they also have plans to work more with open source and, of course, Blender.

Thank you 3dsense, cgoverdrive organisation and speakers, Victor and family, Jorge, and not to forget Andy for a great time. Singapore is awesome, and I can’t wait to get back.

Love y’all,

Sacha

Although it’s a closed format still, Blu-ray is most likely going to be the HDTV film disc format of the next decade. So, even when it was only for archiving reasons, it’s important to have BBB on this format available as well. Not to mention that the HD version of BBB is simply breathtaking to watch.

As bonus, apart from the extras copied from the video dvd, Imagion agreed to add Elephants Dream on the disc as well!

-Ton-