Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 145 posts

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#71

Post by Liquix »

kevinventullo wrote: post #43
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

I think Nintendo figured this out years ago. Their games are not graphically cutting-edge, but they still sell like crazy.

nintendo has distilled their own flavor of "disney magic". their flagship games are polished beyond belief, the art direction is a careful choice. they hit the borderlands bullseye over and over - not particularly cutting edge to a gfx professional but unique, cohesive, and beloved.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#72

Post by NicuCalcea »

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.

Why do you expect everyone to come away with the same message? Watching it, I thought about friendship, growth, climate change, death. Other people will see something else in it.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#75

Post by seba_dos1 »

watt wrote: post #59
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)…

Recently I reminisced about Blender foundations first(?) effort, Tears of Steel, with the script like "Look, Celia, we have to follow our passions; you have your robotics and I just want to be awesome in space!" - "Why don’t you just admit that you’re freaked out by my robot hand?!" It's not about the textures and shadows.

"Tears of Steel" was the fourth Blender Open Movie project. The first one was 2006's "Elephants Dream", then "Big Buck Bunny" and "Sintel".

From the more recent ones I highly recommend "Sprite Fright".

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#76

Post by HelloNurse »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #67
stvltvs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Animation quality has always been a question of budget and motivation: the shortcuts (still or partially still images, reuse of cels and whole sequences, lower frame rate and systematically repeated frames, less effort at designing intermediate poses and timing them well, badly drawn interpolations between key frames...) are always the same and always available, with modest impact from technological advances (e.g. badly drawn interpolation done by a neural network or by an IK simulation instead of an inexpensive, overworked and unskilled artist).

Crap quality is typical of cheap TV productions, e.g. Hanna-Barbera and some anime in the seventies and eighties.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#77

Post by Neywiny »

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.

Haven't watched yet but that was my gut reaction. When the engine first got stable released I tried it and was impressed at how quickly it got to a 90% solution, but the now complicated lighting scenarios that it couldn't handle took me back to cycles.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#78

Post by deskr »

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)…

The shaky camera is a deal breaker for me. Doesn't matter if it's animated or not, TV series or film. Shaky camera is an instant switch off for me.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#79

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

HelloNurse wrote: post #76
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Animation quality has always been a question of budget and motivation: the shortcuts (still or partially still images, reuse of cels and whole sequences, lower frame rate and systematically repeated frames, less effort at designing intermediate poses and timing them well, badly drawn interpolations between key frames...) are always the same and always available, with modest impact from technological advances (e.g. ba…

Spielberg did a great job on Animaniacs, so it is possible to do well.

Many modern cartoons are 3D-rendered, and I feel a bit "uncanny-valley" about them. That may be, because I was raised on the classics.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#80

Post by ErneX »

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.

Environmental is another form of storytelling. Not everything needs to be explained in detail.
Post reply on HN