Live data from Hacker News

Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

reuters.com

141–145 of 145 posts

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#141

It shows, Blender has come a long way, but FLOW doesn't look technically incredible. On the otherhand, I just rewatched Shrek recently, and complex graphics isn't everything.

Blender comes with two renderers: Cycles for production rendering, and Eevee for near-real time preview. This movie was rendered with the latter. Like any 3D package, you can also install other renderers. So any perceived deficit in picture quality here is more to do with budget than some limitation of Blender.

Yeah, the real time stuff is pretty solid in blender but for very high image quality / realistic prerendering, blender is still missing a lot of the professional/proprietaries tools that gives the last 10% of polish in big budget productions (photorealism). The community has done a great job in last 10 years but there's still a lot of technical tools locked behind something like max/maya ecosystems professional paywall that most people eventually transitions to for "serious" industry work because pipelines are hard to change. At least that's the state a few years ago.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#142
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What isn’t there to get? it’s a dead simple concept

How? I feel like I'm being trolled. None of it makes sense. There's an unexplained great flood, unexplained human ruins, weird whale-like creatures, some kind of being sucked up into heaven thing that happens to the stork-like bird. I've seen people online trying to put it into a sensible plot but it's so heavy on made up symbolism that to me it's bullshit.

Your brain is just on one end of a spectrum that doesn't really respond to the same things as some other people's brains. There are plenty of people who are moved by things that have nothing to do with plot, and would never say something like "made up symbolism". Images, sounds, and symbols evoke mental connections and feelings in many people. A painting has no plot, an abstract painting is made up symbols. Many people find incredible depth and beauty in these things. Some people find that David Lynch's work is the most impressive tapping of human dream like subconscious ever achieved, and others absolutely do not understand it at all.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#143

For me, Flow's greatest strength was the complete lack of voiceovers, almost like a silent film. No overbearing narrator coercing you. Flow allows you to feel on your own terms without interference. With most media since the dawn of Hollywood, the internet and now AI, we are accustomed to being told exactly what is happening. Think about how 'laugh tracks' tell you to laugh. The search for an answer or meaning of som…

Almost reminiscentof Hitchcock only using intertitles sparingly, instead letting the images convey the story.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#144
post #110
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…

I watched Flow in the theater. On the big screen, the less-polished look definitely comes across as an artistic choice, enhancing the otherworldly quality of the world and scenes it depicts. Combined with the great animation of the animals and the audio, you leave the theater in wonder. I suspect the visual roughness becomes more jarring in a less immersive environment.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#145
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also disappointed by inside out 2. I thought it followed the story beats of the first one a bit too closely. Flow was the better film.

This is my point though. Inside Out 2 suffered from high expectations. If Pixar never existed and Inside Out 2 came from an unknown studio it would have blown you away.

Eh not for me. It was just meh, nothing to do with expectations, which were already low from my side.
Post reply on HN