"Glass Half" - a new Blender Foundation open movie

Announcing a new open movie project for the Blender Cloud: Glass Half!

Over the next 3 months the Blender Foundation will produce a new 3 minute cartoon short with a simple story, snappy animation and rendered in a non photo-realistic style. The focus will be on short form storytelling, good design and clear animation.

More info here:
https://cloud.blender.org/bi/glass-half/#5627bb21f0e7220061109c83


— EDIT —
…and here’s the movie…

I love the premise of the story! :slight_smile: I understand this needs to be discussed, but what would it mean for Blender development? Will Blender developers remain in A-dam like for the Gooseberry project? Also, would the BEER-guys be involved?

I´m pretty sure all of those question will be answered by “TBD”, but that´s fine, have to try :wink:

To be honest, the development goals are modest. There will be developers on staff, but the main focus of this project will be about story, design and animation. I’m hoping to generate some assets and tutorials for the cloud which can be easily re-used by the community to make new shorts.
Also, there’s the new flexi-rig, which will largely be created using existing tools, but may require some extra development.

Currently the project has a first draft script, a very rough animatic and some concept art. I’ve also done some initial tests with the flexirig, but nothing worth publishing yet. But rest assured, once this gains momentum the progress will be very fast; I like to do projects quickly and then move on.

That´s cool. Best of luck to you guys. Looking forward to seeing the finished product.

I thought they were working on Gooseberry

They’re almost done with Gooseberry (they’re at the point where the final shots are being rendered out). This will come more or less immediately after Gooseberry.

I can see some good appeal in this project, I can also see that doing small projects like this are a good way to keep content flowing to cloud subscribers (so as to fund both the future open movies and the development work that accompanies them).

Everybody here hope that it brings a better blender, but as the OP said, only a few devs will be on-board. Big features are not to be done during a movie, Gooseberry certified this. Polishing is hard when the artists are used to the limitations and workarounds many years of experience brought. So, maybe it will fix some bugs and bring some project-specific tools, but not much more. I hope I’ll be proved wrong on this.

For the movie side, if people paying are happy, it’s good, but let’s say it work like that further. With 10€/month, a subscriber paid at least 120€ for a 10min movie (not counting the 15€ month). For this movie, it will be 30€ for 3 minutes. When you know most people using Blender have money difficulties, it’s really expensive. The positive side is that you get some trainings and some assets (all commercially usable without opening your whole project?), but it’s something you do some month, not a life long. I know it’s complicated to get money for an open-source project and I want it to live long, but aren’t there better solutions? Or can the BF use some cloud money for development not related to the movies?

I think they said that there will only be a few devs. working on features needed for the movie (with the rest working on larger projects such as outlined in Blender’s roadmap). Most of the larger projects get done in branches anyway so it won’t directly impact the artists at the Institute.

With Freen on board, people should be confident this will be an awesome short.
This is one of my favorite animations from him in 2008.

This looks interesting, I loved the caminandes project, Which was a similar short term one so I hope this one turns out just as well.

could be interesting , will wait for first results to subscribe again. :slight_smile:

yeah well… keep taking the pills Ace.

Another flexi-rig is always welcome. They’re a great resource for people who want to animate but haven’t got the skill to build their own character. And really great to hear you’re going to be using non-photoreal rendering - it’ll be great to see Blender put through its paces with that.

When you say snappy animation, are you talking like pose-heavy Kaeloo-ish snappy?

Good luck with this in any case! Can’t wait to see it. :slight_smile:

I really like that and I am looking forward to it, because it is a different approach compared to the other open movies. There is a chance that there will be further improvements for the animation workflow. I already liked the “small” features that were introduced in Gooseberry.

Thanks for the positive responses!
Indeed this one is more in the neighbourhood of Caminandes than Cosmos Laundromat; a smaller production mainly using existing tools that aims to provide useful tutorials and assets while once again demonstrating that it is possible to make an entertaining short film on a low budget using Blender. Also, the style will be unlike any previous BF open movie, mainly due to the NPR approach. Hopefully cloud subscribers will find it worthwhile, I’m certainly going to do my best to justify their support.

Certainly seems interesting! I can’t wait to see the finished result and the stuff you share.
Thank you.

I have no problem personally with more projects on a Caminandes scale. As long as poor old Hjalti doesn’t turn up to Blender Conf 2016 looking like he hasn’t slept in a week again…

What kind of tutorials and assets are you aiming to provide to the Cloud, beyond the flexi-rig? I’d be interested in seeing material on how you approached and executed the NPR look, like a blow-by-blow of the various materials and compositor set-ups we can find amongst the assets.

It would also be great to see more Blender films leaping off the internet and hitting the animation festival circuit too. Any chance of that happening with this one?

Yeah, that was never meant to happen. I was supposed to be there, but there was a scheduling clash. For this one we have 3 animators: Hjalti, Sarah and me.

That’ll definitely be covered. Andy has shown a lot of interest in this part of the project, so perhaps it will come from him, but these things will need to be worked out. First we need to settle on the design, then figure out how to execute it.

I hope so. Depends on how well it turns out. This is my first go at directing (not counting the things I’ve done by myself). But, yeah I definitely want to make something that’s worthy of festival inclusion. This is why I’ve dedicated a lot of time to story development.

Speaking of which, better get back to the script re-write…

Two amateur art critics meet in a gallery and argue passionately about the pieces they see, causing chaos for everyone else, until finally they find a piece on which they can agree…
…which turns out not to be part of the exhibition at all.

Hi Beorn,

Do you know who is going to develop the toon flex-rig ?

Julien