Next Gen available on Netflix – a feature film made with Blender

This are the words from the head of the studio (Tangent Animation):

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I can’t talk too much about the movie prior to its release, but I can confirm a few things on the technical and production side.

As people surmised, this is indeed 100% Blender for the core work, including Cycles for all rendering, supplemented with other software in a few areas, specifically:

Substance Painter and Photoshop were used for a good chunk of the surfacing and texturing work, with Blender paint tools used for the balance
Houdini and Fume FX were used to generate VDB and Alembic data for import and render in Cycles. Stefan Werner and Luca Rood (who did a fantastic job on improving the cloth sim in Blender that was used heavily in NextGen) worked on adding proper support for VDB voxel data, and improving the Alembic support, including importation and exposing attribute data for use in Cycles material networks
On the development side:

Stefan also did some incredible work on volumetric rendering efficiency, adding the Intel Embree core to Cycles, and generally improving the Cycles renderer for user on NextGen. Render times were extremely reasonable and manageable, even with full 3D blur and in-camera DOF used throughout the film
We added a number of other features to Blender to benefit the film, such as support for Cryptomattes (we render everything in camera, so Cryptomattes are a godsend in compositing), improved animation features, and a variety of other features in various areas of Blender
Tangent itself has never been a Maya studio, though a previous incarnation of the studio used Maya. I was one of the first animators to work on Maya at the R&D phase back in 1994-1998, and I’ve utilized Maya as the core piece in 5 different pipelines in various studios, so to switch to Blender is a big deal for us. The ability to redirect spending from commercial software to custom development is huge for our projects.

We will be working with the Blender Institute on re-incorporating our changes into Blender where possible, as we believe that it’s important for the community at large, and we welcome others to improve on the work we’ve done so that we can benefit from those improvements on our upcoming films.

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They did a completely new implementation of OpenVDB, and it will be merged in 2.8 at some point soon, they also developed the Cryptomatte implementation, that will be in 2.8 also, UDIM support and a bunch more of things.

As you can see, yes, they used 3dsmax for FumeFX, wich are not all the effects 🙂

When we say (at least me) that it´s a Blender movie, it´s because the main app has been Blender and the render engine has been cycles, for everything including smokes, now, part of the simulation were done in Max for FumeFX and inside of Houdini.

Hope this clarifies how was the distribution of work, probably in the Blender conference we will have a conference about this, or at least we will be able to talk to them in person 🙂

Cheers!

I worked on this. Most of my shots were done in Houdini. With a few using Fume. Houdini was a major player here with VDB’s and allowed us to reduce the file sizes from Fume by about 70%-90%. But that’s more a Fume issue and a Houdini blessing. But in general, if we could read in the volumes we were able to get some file reduction out of them. I can tell you one thing, the Tangent team worked their butt’s off on their implementation of Blender and were some of the nicest people.