Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar • Hacker News Board

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#121

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 4:34 PM UTC

zo1 wrote: post #110

jsheard wrote: post #12

Not only was it made with Blender, the final renders were done with Blenders semi-realtime Eevee engine rather than its max-fidelity Cycles engine. That reduced the compute required by orders of magnitude - the director said a render farm wasn't necessary because his local workstation could produce final-quality 4K frames in 0.5-10 seconds. "Proper" production renderers like Cycles do look better of course, but havin…

I just had a look at the trailer, and I'm trying not to poo on it's parade, but this thing looks... disappointing - worse than most in-game cut-scenes these days. It doesn't even feel "Artistic", and I'm definitely not a snob for "hyper realistic" types of looks. The distant and "landscape" views look very nice, and in stark contrast to the game-like and amateur rendering of close up scenes with the animals. They don…

The look is scruffy.

The story is not, and the visuals are sufficient to tell the story.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#122

Post by jancsika » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

leonidasv wrote: post #26

jsheard wrote: post #12

Not only was it made with Blender, the final renders were done with Blenders semi-realtime Eevee engine rather than its max-fidelity Cycles engine. That reduced the compute required by orders of magnitude - the director said a render farm wasn't necessary because his local workstation could produce final-quality 4K frames in 0.5-10 seconds. "Proper" production renderers like Cycles do look better of course, but havin…

Now I'm curious how the film would look if it was rendered in Cycles, there are some lighting aspects that really feel "off". Perhaps now that the film is acclaimed they could release a remaster done in Cycles.

It could be revelatory.

Like the first time I played Super Mario Bros. on an LED screen. Finally I could see each pixel clearly, exactly the way the original artist didn't intend!

Edit: in all seriousness, this makes me wonder: has anyone ever re-orchestrated Beethoven's Fifth? Say, in the orchestration style of Ravel or Strauss? Someone must have done this, even as a joke, and I'd love to hear it. (I know about the "Fifth of Beethoven" disco tune which is great, but that's not what I'm asking about.)

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#123

Post by ad-astra » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

remify wrote: post #114

sbarre wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is possibly the most original README I've seen in a long time. I will admit it's a bit.. obfuscated, though?

Second title should have been named the Book of Job IMO

Sure why not, updated.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#124

Post by sepositus » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 4:41 PM UTC

zo1 wrote: post #110

jsheard wrote: post #12

Not only was it made with Blender, the final renders were done with Blenders semi-realtime Eevee engine rather than its max-fidelity Cycles engine. That reduced the compute required by orders of magnitude - the director said a render farm wasn't necessary because his local workstation could produce final-quality 4K frames in 0.5-10 seconds. "Proper" production renderers like Cycles do look better of course, but havin…

I just had a look at the trailer, and I'm trying not to poo on it's parade, but this thing looks... disappointing - worse than most in-game cut-scenes these days. It doesn't even feel "Artistic", and I'm definitely not a snob for "hyper realistic" types of looks. The distant and "landscape" views look very nice, and in stark contrast to the game-like and amateur rendering of close up scenes with the animals. They don…

With the amount of utter trash that modern Hollywood puts out, combined with the Oscars always feeling like a "pat on the back for rich snobs," I am just genuinely happy to see something like this win anything at all.

Seems like a fluke, though.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#125

Post by ad-astra » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 4:45 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #85

ad-astra wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made my own distributed render orchestrator that supports Cycles + custom plugins. It uses Modal’s cloud compute APIs to spawn jobs on up to 20x containers with an L40S GPU (like 80% as fast as a 4090 with tons more VRAM) each. It ain’t cheap but it’s absurdly fast, and much easier in terms of cash flow than outright buying the equivalent GPUs. https://github.com/stoicsuffering/distributed-blender-render...

That is possibly the most original README I've seen in a long time. I will admit it's a bit.. obfuscated, though?

Thanks for checking it out! And yeah, I’m not expecting it to gain much traction, just having fun with it.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#126

Post by Joel_Mckay » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 4:54 PM UTC

eurekin wrote: post #82

jsheard wrote: post #12

Not only was it made with Blender, the final renders were done with Blenders semi-realtime Eevee engine rather than its max-fidelity Cycles engine. That reduced the compute required by orders of magnitude - the director said a render farm wasn't necessary because his local workstation could produce final-quality 4K frames in 0.5-10 seconds. "Proper" production renderers like Cycles do look better of course, but havin…

Cycle's renders are beautiful, but 10 minutes per frame can be a hard sell... I wonder, if anybody tried rendering in cycles to output eevee's primitves. I remember that was one of the tricks that architecture rendering community used - just paint with lights in places that a full blown global rendering/path tracing would do.

That is a common assumption, but there are ways to get your PC to do better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=a0GW8Na5CIE

Blender has a lot of other problems, but CUDA/Optix support is there for reasonable hardware =3

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#127

Post by harlanji » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

Well earned. Best overall movie since Napoleon Dynamite.

I happened into the Hacker Dojo (in Mountain View) the other night after traveling in from Central Valley for the weekend and about 8 of us watched the movie glued to our seats and discussed it for another couple hours. My first thought was "this looks like Blender" when I saw the cat, and we did talk about some that resolution and information density as one layer of the movie. I had no background on the movie, had never heard of it, just happened in by chance. Massive serendipity felt tho, on a side note. Kudos to the team who did the film.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#128

Post by Rendello » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #35

legitster wrote: post #23

I did not find Flow to be a technically impressive movie. The animation was very imperfect. The rendering (especially shadows and textures) were off. The whole movie looked like a video game cut scene. But oh boy, what an amazing cutscene to watch. I'm worried that the story the media is putting forward is that this was an innovative and cutting edge movie - based only on a superficial appreciation of the (stunning)…

A takeaway may be that cutting-edge rendering doesn't really matter for cartoon-stylized films, especially for kid viewers

A lot of the cartoons I watched as a kid had excellent animation, and a lot was very primitive 3D rendering that looks horrible in comparison. As a kid, I didn't even notice!

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#129

Post by CSSer » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:00 PM UTC

deng wrote: post #92

leonidasv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I'm curious how the film would look if it was rendered in Cycles, there are some lighting aspects that really feel "off". Perhaps now that the film is acclaimed they could release a remaster done in Cycles.

First off, switching to Cycles is probably quite a bit of work. While the renderers are supposed to be interchangeable, since AFAIK Cycles supports more features than Evee, options that previously did not matter with Evee rendering now have to be set for Cycles. Also, having seen the film, I found the "unrealistic", cartoonish look very much to be a creative choice. Evee can produce much more "realistic" renders than…

This is arguably true for all director’s cuts and remasters ever released.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#130

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 5:02 PM UTC

deng wrote: post #92

leonidasv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I'm curious how the film would look if it was rendered in Cycles, there are some lighting aspects that really feel "off". Perhaps now that the film is acclaimed they could release a remaster done in Cycles.

First off, switching to Cycles is probably quite a bit of work. While the renderers are supposed to be interchangeable, since AFAIK Cycles supports more features than Evee, options that previously did not matter with Evee rendering now have to be set for Cycles. Also, having seen the film, I found the "unrealistic", cartoonish look very much to be a creative choice. Evee can produce much more "realistic" renders than…

What's odd in Flow is the contrast between the near-realistic non-animal rendering, and the non-realistic animal rendering. It didn't bother me much - it was clearly an aesthetic choice - but I know people who were bothered by the contrast.