“Blender, a Classic Underdog Story, Is the World's Most Widely Used 3D

The art of open source Open source powers every part of the creative arts. Jim Thacker explores how Blender is conquering animation and movie effects. lender has been used to create It may not be the market leader – animations for national commercial tools, particularly those television channels and developed by Autodesk, are still used for Bcommercials for Coca-Cola, the majority of professional animation, Pizza Hut and BMW. It creates slick visual effects and game development marketing images for brands ranging from projects – in the West, at least. But it is Puma to Philippe Starck. It has even been capable of great work. used on Oscar-nominated movies. And Over the next four pages, we’ll meet best of all, it’s open- source software. “Blender, a classic underdog Blender is a classic underdog story. story, is the world’s most Originally the in-house 3D toolset of a small widely used 3D software.” Dutch animation firm, it has survived early financial hardships and some of the companies using Blender for even the collapse of its original distributor to commercial projects, from illustrations win widespread popular acclaim. With over for cereal boxes to the visual effects four million downloads each year, it is now by for Red Dwarf. We’ll explore how the far the world’s most widely used 3D software. software powers an international But more importantly for the purposes network of animation studios on every of this article, it’s software that commands continent except Antarctica. And we’ll even the respect of professional artists. Once try to answer the question: ‘If Blender is so dismissed as a tool for hobbyists, Blender is great, why doesn’t it get used on more now praised by some of the world’s largest Hollywood movies?’ animation studios. Even five years ago, the But before we do that, it’s time for a news that another new feature had been brief history lesson… added to the application would routinely be greeted on industry A complete 3D animation pipeline forums with the response, in a box, Blender is an ideal tool for CG commercials, like Character ‘Yes, but… it’s Blender’. Mill’s long-running series of ads for Today, the response is Bridgestone tyres. more likely to be: ‘I wish my software did that.’ 44 LXF204 November 2015 www.linuxformat.com Blender 2008’s Big Buck Bunny was the Blender Institute’s breakout short. The assets – also open-source – got reused in everything from kids’ books to ads for Google’s Nexus S phone. hroughout its history, Blender has Faced with the choice between seeing short Big Buck Bunny. Its cast of animal been inextricably linked to one man: seven years of work go down the drain or characters proved irresistible to marketers, TDutch programmer, producer and all- going open-source, Roosendaal chose open with images from the movie popping up in round maverick Ton Roosendaal. It was he source. A crowdfunding campaign quickly everything from pamphlets for the Boy who co-founded NeoGeo, the animation raised the €100,000 needed to buy back the Scouts of America to ads for Google phones. studio where, in 1995, Blender would begin code base, and on 13 October 2002, Blender Subsequent open movies would help life as the company’s in-house 3D toolset. was released under a GPL licence. tame Blender’s idiosyncratic user interface Originally, Blender seemed destined to Now chairman of the fledgling Blender and develop a new suite of tools designed for become a far more conventional product: Foundation, Roosendaal began to accelerate live-action visual effects work. By 2014, the Not a Number, the company that Roosendaal the development of the software through a Institute was ready for its most ambitious launched in 1998 to market the software series of ‘open movies’ – crowdfunded project yet: a complete feature-length open publicly, originally planned to produce a free animated shorts used as a platform from movie, codenamed ‘Project Gooseberry’. version of the tool for creating online content, which to develop the new tools necessary Sadly, Gooseberry failed to reach its and paid versions for everything else. for serious production work. The movies €3.5 million funding target, eventually being But things didn’t quite work out that way. themselves are released under a Creative scaled back into the surreal animated short Even at the time, the 3D software market was Commons licence, as are all of the CG assets Cosmos Laundromat – First Cycle, released saturated with established competitors, used to create them. earlier this year. But it still became the most including early versions of Autodesk’s now- By 2007, Roosendaal had established a successful crowdfunded animation project in ubiquitous Maya and 3ds Max. Early sales of permanent studio, the Blender Institute, to history, while the Institute’s proposed list of Blender were disappointing, and in 2002, Not oversee the work. The next year, the Institute partner companies demonstrated something a Number’s investors decided to pull the plug. had its first real breakout hit, the comedy else very important: that there was now a More key tools for open-source animation Even the Blender Institute doesn’t just use LibreOffice (libreoffice.org) Blender in its animations. Here are the other The ubiquitous office suite gets used on the open-source tools used to create its ‘open Institute’s movies for a range of tasks, with movies’. We’ll be looking at some of them in LibreOffice Draw often used to assemble more detail in future articles in this series. storyboards for print or to distribute as PDFs. Krita (krita.org) Flamenco (flamenco.io) The Institute’s main tool for concept art and Developed for use on the Institute’s latest short storyboarding, Krita had its own resurgence. Its and still in beta, this render manager distributes successful recent Kickstarter funding campaign animation jobs across the network of computers aims to make it “faster than Photoshop”. used to render them. Not sexy, but vital. Gimp (gimp.org) Attract (cloud.blender.org) Although it hasn’t seen a major update for three Also developed for Cosmos Laundromat, shot- years, Gimp is still a reliable workhorse for management tool Attract does another heavy- An unused concept image for the general image-editing tasks, such as creating lifting job: tracking who is doing what on the Institute’s short Cosmos Laundromat, the 2D texture maps used in animation or production. Not out yet, but will become part created in Krita by David Revoy. adjusting rendered stills. of the Blender Cloud. www.techradar.com/pro November 2015 LXF204 45 Blender Each Blender Most of movie acts as the Blender a platform for Institute’s adding new movies have features to the been animated software. 2015’s shorts. 2012’s surreal Cosmos Tears of Steel Laundromat proved that the threw project- software could management also tackle tools into the live-action mix as well. visual effects. complete international network of studios Lax. “When you’re starting out, it’s very handy “We’ve found the Blender community to be using Blender on commercial productions. to have software you don’t need a licence for. much more responsive to our needs than One of those studios is London’s Gecko But it’s a misconception that there’s no commercial software vendors,” he says. “In 10 Animation (www.geckoanimation.com), money in open-source development. I’ve paid years of using proprietary 3D software, we whose work ranges from visuals for Puma to more for Blender through donations to the never received usable support from either visual effects for the Red Dwarf comedy series. Blender Foundation than I have for any piece software vendor or reseller – except on “I trained in Maya when I worked for other of commercial software.” problems with registering our licences.” companies,” says studio co-founder Jonathan Blender also plays increasingly nicely Lax. “But over time, I became more and more Beating commercial tools with the other tools that studios need for interested in open source. Larger programs One of the reasons for those donations is to commercial graphics work. Most of the main don’t tend to help you if you’re working on ensure that bugs are fixed in a timely fashion – render engines, used to convert raw 3D data lots of different parts of a production, which another key benefit of Blender, according to into finished 2D images, now support the a small team has to.” James Neale, founder of Sydney’s Character software – including, as of earlier this year, Whereas commercial software tends to Mill (http://charactermill.com), a five-person Pixar’s Academy-Award-winning RenderMan. be more tightly focused on specialist tasks, studio working on projects ranging from In fact, support for Blender in some third- Blender provides a complete studio setup in animated TV commercials to illustrations. party tools is better than that for commercial a box, including tools for sculpting and “Blender developers are generally users software, since the fact that the source code animating 3D models, rendering the finished of their own tools, so it’s easy for them to is freely available makes it easier to do the animation, and even integrating it into live- understand our requests for fixes,” he says. “If necessary development work. action footage or editing video. I ever encounter a bug or need a workaround, Neale uses the popular Unity game engine “Blender is extremely versatile,” says Lax. I can reach out to the community and get a to create interactive applications, and points “Because the program does so much, and response within 15-20 minutes.” out that it can read Blender’s scene files integrates it so well, you can work on many Like Lax, Neale used commercial software directly, rather than requiring data to be different areas of a production at once.” in the past, but says that when it came to exported in an intermediate file format.

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