Читать книгу Blender For Dummies - Jason van Gumster - Страница 14

One of the cool things about the programmers who write Blender is that many of them also use the program regularly. They’re writing code not just because they’re told to do it, but because they want to improve Blender for their own purposes. Many of Blender’s developers started as artists who wanted to make Blender do something it hadn’t been able to do before. Part of the programmers’ motivation has to do with Blender’s open source nature, but quite a bit also has to do with the fact Blender was originally an in-house production tool, built for artists, based on their direct input, and often written by the artists themselves.

Seeking to get even more of this direct artist feedback to developers, the Blender Foundation launched “Project Orange” in 2005. The project’s purpose was to create an animated short movie using open source tools, primarily Blender. A team of six members of the community were assembled in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, to produce the movie. Roughly seven months later, Elephants Dream premiered and was released to the public as the first open movie. This means that not only was it created using open source tools, but all the production files — 3D models, scenes, character rigs, and so on — were also released under a permissive and open Creative Commons Attribution license. These files are valuable tools for discovering how an animated film is put together, and anyone can reuse them in their own personal or commercial work. Furthermore, if you don’t like Elephants Dream, you’re free to change it to your liking! How many movies give you that luxury? You can see the film and all the production files for yourself at the project’s website, www.elephantsdream.org.

Due to the success of the Orange project, Ton established the Blender Institute in 2007 for the expressed purpose of having a permanent space to create open movie and game projects, as well as provide the service of training people in Blender. Since then, the Blender Institute has churned out open projects (most codenamed with a type of fruit) every couple of years. Like with Elephants Dream, both the final product and the production files for each project are released under a permissive Creative Commons license. More recently, the Blender Institute has spun off a separate entity, the Blender Animation Studio, a Blender-based animation studio with the goal of producing and releasing a feature-length animated film. Table 1-1 summarizes each of the Blender Institute’s open projects.

TABLE 1-1 Open Projects from the Blender Institute

Year	Fruit	Title	Details
2005	Orange	Elephants Dream (elephantsdream.org)	Animated Short Film (improved animation, basic hair, node-based compositing)
2008	Peach	Big Buck Bunny (bigbuckbunny.org)	Animated Short Film (enhanced particles, large scene optimization, improved rendering, more animation and rigging tools)
2008	Apricot	Yo Frankie! (yofrankie.org)	Video Game (asset creation pipeline, real-time viewport, updates to the Blender Game Engine)
2010	Durian	Sintel (sintel.org)	Animated Short Film (battle-test Blender 2.5, detailed sculpting, large environments)
2012	Mango	Tears of Steel (tearsofsteel.org)	Live Action Short Film (visual effects tools, motion tracking, Cycles rendering)
2013	N/A	Caminandes 2: Gran Dillama (caminandes.com)	Animated Short Film (cartoony animation with a minor focus on furry characters)
2015	Gooseberry	Cosmos Laundromat (cosmoslaundromat.org)	Animated Short Film (large-scale internationally collaborative productions with Blender Cloud)
2015	N/A	Glass Half (cloud.blender.org/p/glass-half)	Animated Short Film (cartoony animation with non-photorealistic real-time rendering)
2016	N/A	Caminandes 3: Llamigos (caminandes.com)	Animated Short Film (cartoony characters with a secondary focus on VR rendering)
2018	N/A	Hero (cloud.blender.org/p/hero)	Animated Short Film (2D and 2.5D animation using Grease Pencil)
2018	N/A	The Daily Dweebs (cloud.blender.org/p/dailydweebs)	Animated Short Film (fast turnaround cartoony animation)
2019	N/A	Spring (cloud.blender.org/p/spring)	Animated Short Film (battle-test Blender 2.80, Eevee viewport)