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Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

reuters.com

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Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#61

Post by ad-astra »

hamaluik wrote: post #25
teruakohatu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am out of touch with the latest and greatest Blender features. If best/highest fidelity renders are required, can Blender scale with a render farm? Last I heard that was the advantage of the propriety/in-house alternatives.

Yup! https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/home Is a great community example of this.

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...

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#62

Post by latexr »

guelo wrote: post #52
thatswrong0 wrote: post #49

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.

> stork-like bird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretarybird

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#63

Post by sznio »

teruakohatu wrote: post #24
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 am out of touch with the latest and greatest Blender features. If best/highest fidelity renders are required, can Blender scale with a render farm? Last I heard that was the advantage of the propriety/in-house alternatives.

a stupid-simple approach would be to split up the render betweeen machines by manually starting it on each one and setting different frame ranges to render

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#64

Post by autoexec »

FpUser wrote: post #42

I could not give a flying fuck what it was rendered with , tech level is not impressive. But what a story and presentation. I find Flow beautiful. I, my daughter and my grandson watched it and could not take our eyes away from it.

> I could not give a flying fuck what it was rendered with , tech level is not impressive.

It's pretty impressive to me that something of Flow's quality could be created with free software that's avilable to anyone with an internet connection. There are a lot of highly creative people out in the world without massive amounts of money for expensive hardware/software. It's exciting for the future of animation, and I hope all the news stories talking about Flow being made with Blender will inspire more people to give it a try and see what they can do with it.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#65

Post by tnolet »

guelo wrote: post #52
thatswrong0 wrote: post #49

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.

That's the whole point. That it's not explained and you are left with tantalizing questions. It's ok to not like it. Not everyone likes the same things.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#66

Post by dsign »

guelo wrote: post #46

I am baffled. My family found it boring, senseless and my kids didn't want to finish watching it. My theory is that the lack of talking makes people imagine there is something there when there is nothing. It makes zero sense. The graphics are also not very good.

That's the thing with narrative art. It doesn't click the same way, or at all, with everybody. And there is nothing wrong with that. Art that tries too hard to be appealing to everybody ends up being tepid.

To me, for example, with the bits I've heard about the plot, Flow's story doesn't sound particularly appealing. But I'm over the Moon with the news of how it was made, and the fact that budding movie producers won't have to declare bankruptcy after paying Maxon for software licenses. And because the financial barrier is now slightly lower, it means there will be slightly less scripts-by-committee, and slightly better art for non-mainstream audiences.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#67

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

stvltvs wrote: post #40
brundolf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep, grew up on cartoons like Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats, etc. Looking at them now, they are laughably bad in most respects, but they sparked our imaginations and didn't need to be sophisticated to do it.

But some of the really old (like 1940s) cartoons were very smooth and well-done. I have DVDs of old Tom & Jerry cartoons, and they are excellent.

My experience, is that the ones made in the 1970s and 1980s had crap quality.

I watched this movie, and think it very much deserved the Oscar, but the character rendering was a bit “scruffy.” The environment rendering was great, and it looks like they optimized for movement, in the characters, which was a good choice. Once I spent some time, watching, the rough rendering didn’t matter.

I had a similar experience, watching Avatar. At first, it seemed like a cartoon, but I quickly became immersed, and the fact it was rendered, didn’t matter.

I read, somewhere, that the movie is being re-rendered. I think they may have the money for that, now.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#68

Post by raxxorraxor »

maxglute wrote: post #14

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.

What do people mean with technically impressive? There are Blender renders that look quite incredible though and you just cannot differentiate it from real picture anymore

Example: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58586fa5ebbd1a...

There are probably some flaws here as well, but you need to study the picture in detail. And Flow used the fast renderer of Blender, not the quality one.

Still, it does have a unique style that is much more interesting than many other animated movies. So what is technically impressive, just throwing more compute at it to make it photorealistic?

I think art style will have a larger impact. In a way it is technically impressive as it didn't need a lot of compute power.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#69

Post by Fluorescence »

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.

I kind of hope they don't. I like the humble, democratic, FOSS spirit - it's like Dogme 95 / "Vows of Chastity".

"rules to create films based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, while excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology. It was supposedly created as an attempt to "take back power for the directors as artists" as opposed to the movie studio."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95

I had a negative initial reaction to the animation style but it hooked me in and blew me away. It had virtues far more vital than render quality. In contrast, I bailed on "Inside Out 2" and have no interest retrying. I hope more people are encouraged to create lofi meaningful movies instead of thinking it's the preserve of billion dollar studios and sweat-shop animation factories.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#70

Post by orlp »

teruakohatu wrote: post #24
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 am out of touch with the latest and greatest Blender features. If best/highest fidelity renders are required, can Blender scale with a render farm? Last I heard that was the advantage of the propriety/in-house alternatives.

An 1.5 hour movie at 24 FPS has ~130k frames to render. As long as you have less machines than that the parallelization is essentially free.
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