Update: Next Gen, a feature animation made using Blender as the main package, is now available to stream on Netflix.
Tangent Animation has released a trailer for Next Gen 2018, a feature animation made using Blender as the main package. According to an article on Blender Artists the core work of the film was entirely created in blended, including the use of Cycles for rendering. Other software was also used including Substance Painter, Photoshop, plus Houdini and FumeFX to generate VDB data. You can see the trailer on YouTube.
Nice ! it looks very good.
I’m happy that they push Blender this way, and apparently one of the Tangent founders helped create Maya in the Alias days, so his expertise is very valuable.
Yes it is, and a lot of users of blender are old max and maya users that decided to make the migration, you can find this story all around the Blender community 🙂
The film is also available on Netflix. Watched and was quite impressed.
But, we don’t have the dedicated programmer in our studio like Tangent.
You don´t need it if you don´t do movies XD
We don´t have a dedicated programmer either, but we have new features practically every week using Blender daily builds 🙂
The development is constantly active and you have new things always, you can follow Blender Today live streaming in youtube each monday.
https://www.youtube.com/blendertoday
You can check the last one from yesterday.
Cheers!
Cool film! I will check it out soon! And congrats to all Blender community and artists involved on the movie.
Now…. seeing all FX people involved I was kind of curious what they used and if everyone “convert to blender” knowing the limitations in particles/FX in the software. Talked with them, and all FX related was 3dsmax, with a bit of Houdini. Not to take out merit to Blender, but when someone says everything done in…. Its always funny.
This are the words from the head of the studio (Tangent Animation):
—————————————————————————
—————————————————————————
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.
—————————————————————————
—————————————————————————
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!
But even companies do that. Maxon on the release of R19 advertised the good things about that release, but there was a ton of Houdini FX in it. 🙂
It’s pretty cool how Blender is evolving. I’ll give another try next year.
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.
I´m sure about that 🙂
People in Tangent and other Blender studios are really passionate about the software they use, specially because they know their efforts will benefit them and everyone in the long run, and they will receive benefits from others, they won´t be paying for a software that no onw knows where it´s headed, and they can make it whatever they want with it, it´s awesome 🙂
Tons of 3dsmax too. FumeFX, TP, PFlow, Krakatoa, ….
Maybe also worth a mention is that they haven’t used Vanilla Blender here. It’s a modified Blender 2.78 version with a modified Cycles renderer. Unfortunately there is not much info how heavily modified …
Some of the improvements are already in master 2.79.6 daily builds, and others will be included in 2.8.
It´s not so heavily modified, you can also ask them their build and they will probably share it with you, they did it in the past.
One of the cool things is that practically all of their developments will be included in master at some point soon, like UDIM, OpenVDB support, Cryptomatte, and you can already see other improvements inside Cycles.
If you check for the developments being done by Lukas Stockner, those are their improvements, he is the main developer behind improvements being done at Tangent Animation 🙂
Cheers!
Yeah, modified or not, cool done movie. And nice to know that those modifications goes into Blender too. I just thought i share this info, since it is not mentioned in the article 😉
Yes, it´s good info 🙂
I’m really enjoying the film so far (and I rarely watch cg anim films these days). Driving software innovation forward with collaboration on major projects like this is a really appealing approach. Thumbs up!