Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar • Hacker News Board

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#81

Post by WhatThisGuySaid » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:48 PM UTC

raxxorraxor wrote: post #68

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…

I think people are specifically referring to the movie not looking technically impressive, not that Blender isn't capable of technically impressive renders at all.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#82

Post by eurekin » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 12:53 PM UTC

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.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#83

Post by mppm » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:07 PM UTC

I am honestly surprised by this. Congrats to the makers and to the Blender community, of course, but to me Flow looked more like a feature-film-length demo reel. And not even the most impressive demo reel, visually speaking. Compared to all the other animation films out there... I don't think it would rank even in the top 100 for me.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#84

Post by sbarre » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

mppm wrote: post #83

I am honestly surprised by this. Congrats to the makers and to the Blender community, of course, but to me Flow looked more like a feature-film-length demo reel. And not even the most impressive demo reel, visually speaking. Compared to all the other animation films out there... I don't think it would rank even in the top 100 for me.

What would be your defining criteria for "best animated film" ?

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#85

Post by sbarre » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

ad-astra wrote: post #61

hamaluik wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That is possibly the most original README I've seen in a long time.

I will admit it's a bit.. obfuscated, though?

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#86

Post by mppm » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:14 PM UTC

sbarre wrote: post #84

mppm wrote: post #83

I am honestly surprised by this. Congrats to the makers and to the Blender community, of course, but to me Flow looked more like a feature-film-length demo reel. And not even the most impressive demo reel, visually speaking. Compared to all the other animation films out there... I don't think it would rank even in the top 100 for me.

What would be your defining criteria for "best animated film" ?

The overall package -- plot, characters, visual style. There are so many movies that nail all three, but Flow is weak in every category, IMO.

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#87

Post by sbarre » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:15 PM UTC

bdangubic wrote: post #48

guelo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, my actual 10 year old was quickly bored and lost interest.

same - 11-year old. movie buff too.

It's almost like different people have different tastes or something.. ;-)

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#88

Post by pier25 » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:38 PM UTC

pilaf wrote: post #41

pier25 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren't Blender working on a more efficient cycles renderer?

You're probably referring to Cycles X [1], which if I'm not mistaken has already been released. It will never be on-par with Eevee's performance though as they are fundamentally different approaches to rendering: Cycles is a physically-based path-tracing engine, while Eevee uses rasterization through OpenGL. 1: https://code.blender.org/2021/04/cycles-x/

You're right.

I think I confused it with the Eevee Next project released last year.

https://code.blender.org/2024/07/eevee-next-generation-in-bl...

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#89

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:38 PM UTC

raxxorraxor wrote: post #68

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…

[deleted]

Re: Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

#90

Post by diggan » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

sznio wrote: post #63

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.

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

Once you feel like that isn't enough anymore, you can also start dividing each frame into a grid of N cells and distribute that :) As long as the rendering is deterministic, you'd just join the cells into a complete frame on the coordinator.