The art of open source
Open source powers every part of the creative arts. Jim Thacker explores how Blender is conquering animation and movie effects.
“Blender, a classic underdog story, is the world’s most widely used 3D software.”
Blender has been used to create animations for national television channels and commercials for Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut and BMW. It creates slick marketing images for brands ranging from Puma to Philippe Starck. It has even been used on Oscar-nominated movies. And best of all, it’s opensource software.
Blender is a classic underdog story. Originally the in-house 3D toolset of a small Dutch animation firm, it has survived early financial hardships and even the collapse of its original distributor to win widespread popular acclaim. With over four million downloads each year, it is now by far the world’s most widely used 3D software.
But more importantly for the purposes of this article, it’s software that commands the respect of professional artists. Once dismissed as a tool for hobbyists, Blender is now praised by some of the world’s largest animation studios. Even five years ago, the news that another new feature had been added to the application would routinely be greeted on industry forums with the response, ‘Yes, but… it’s Blender’. Today, the response is more likely to be: ‘I wish my software did that.’
It may not be the market leader – commercial tools, particularly those developed by Autodesk, are still used for the majority of professional animation, visual effects and game development projects – in the West, at least. But it is capable of great work.
Over the next five pages, we’ll meet some of the companies using Blender for commercial projects, from illustrations for cereal boxes to the visual effects for RedDwarf. We’ll explore how the software powers an international network of animation studios on every continent except Antarctica. And we’ll even try to answer the question: ‘If Blender is so great, why doesn’t it get used on more Hollywood movies?’
But before we do that, it’s time for a brief history lesson…
Throughout its history, Blender has been inextricably linked to one man: Dutch programmer, producer and allround maverick Ton Roosendaal. It was he who co-founded NeoGeo, the animation studio where, in 1995, Blender would begin life as the company’s in-house 3D toolset.
Originally, Blender seemed destined to become a far more conventional product: Not a Number, the company that Roosendaal launched in 1998 to market the software publicly, originally planned to produce a free version of the tool for creating online content, and paid versions for everything else.
But things didn’t quite work out that way. Even at the time, the 3D software market was saturated with established competitors, including early versions of Autodesk’s nowubiquitous Maya and 3dsMax. Early sales of Blender were disappointing, and in 2002, Not a Number’s investors decided to pull the plug.
Faced with the choice between seeing seven years of work go down the drain or going open-source, Roosendaal chose open source. A crowdfunding campaign quickly raised the €100,000 needed to buy back the code base, and on 13 October 2002, Blender was released under a GPL licence.
Now chairman of the fledgling Blender Foundation, Roosendaal began to accelerate the development of the software through a series of ‘open movies’ – crowdfunded animated shorts used as a platform from which to develop the new tools necessary for serious production work. The movies themselves are released under a Creative Commons licence, as are all of the CG assets used to create them.
By 2007, Roosendaal had established a permanent studio, the Blender Institute, to oversee the work. The next year, the Institute had its first real breakout hit, the comedy short BigBuckBunny. Its cast of animal characters proved irresistible to marketers, with images from the movie popping up in everything from pamphlets for the Boy Scouts of America to ads for Google phones.
Subsequent open movies would help tame Blender’s idiosyncratic user interface and develop a new suite of tools designed for live-action visual effects work. By 2014, the Institute was ready for its most ambitious project yet: a complete feature-length open movie, codenamed ‘Project Gooseberry’.
Sadly, Gooseberry failed to reach its €3.5 million funding target, eventually being scaled back into the surreal animated short Cosmos Laundromat–First Cycle, released earlier this year. But it still became the most successful crowdfunded animation project in history, while the Institute’s proposed list of partner companies demonstrated something else very important: that there was now a
complete international network of studios using Blender on commercial productions.
One of those studios is London’s Gecko Animation ( www.geckoanimation.com), whose work ranges from visuals for Puma to visual effects for the RedDwarf comedy series.
“I trained in Maya when I worked for other companies,” says studio co-founder Jonathan Lax. “But over time, I became more and more interested in open source. Larger programs don’t tend to help you if you’re working on lots of different parts of a production, which a small team has to.”
Whereas commercial software tends to be more tightly focused on specialist tasks,
Blender provides a complete studio setup in a box, including tools for sculpting and animating 3D models, rendering the finished animation, and even integrating it into liveaction footage or editing video.
“Blender is extremely versatile,” says Lax. “Because the program does so much, and integrates it so well, you can work on many different areas of a production at once.”
It doesn’t hurt that Blender is free. But that isn’t the main reason to use it, stresses Lax. “When you’re starting out, it’s very handy to have software you don’t need a licence for. But it’s a misconception that there’s no money in open-source development. I’ve paid more for Blender through donations to the Blender Foundation than I have for any piece of commercial software.”
Beating commercial tools
One of the reasons for those donations is to ensure that bugs are fixed in a timely fashion – another key benefit of Blender, according to James Neale, founder of Sydney’s Character Mill ( http://charactermill.com), a five-person studio working on projects ranging from animated TV commercials to illustrations.
“Blender developers are generally users of their own tools, so it’s easy for them to understand our requests for fixes,” he says. “If I ever encounter a bug or need a workaround, I can reach out to the community and get a response within 15-20 minutes.”
Like Lax, Neale used commercial software in the past, but says that when it came to customer support, the needs of larger studios crowded out those of smaller users. “We’ve found the Blender community to be much more responsive to our needs than commercial software vendors,” he says. “In 10 years of using proprietary 3D software, we never received usable support from either software vendor or reseller – except on problems with registering our licences.”
Blender also plays increasingly nicely with the other tools that studios need for commercial graphics work. Most of the main render engines, used to convert raw 3D data into finished 2D images, now support the software – including, as of earlier this year, Pixar’s Academy-Award-winning RenderMan.
In fact, support for Blender in some thirdparty tools is better than that for commercial software, since the fact that the source code is freely available makes it easier to do the necessary development work.
Neale uses the popular Unity game engine to create interactive applications, and points out that it can read Blender’s scene files directly, rather than requiring data to be exported in an intermediate file format. “You just save the .blend file into the Unity folder structure and use it as an asset,” he says.
“The Blender community is much more responsive than commercial vendors.”
“That wouldn’t work with 3dsMax or Maya scene files.”
So if Blender is so good, why aren’t more studios using it? Of the five Oscar nominees for 2015’s Best Animated Feature, only one – independent Irish animation SongoftheSea – is known to have used Blender, whereas
Autodesk can claim that its software played a ‘significant role’ in the remaining four.
There’s a caveat hidden in that phrase “is known to have used”, which we’ll come back to later. But in general, the studios using
Blender as their primary production tool are smaller than those using commercial or proprietary software – typically 20 people or fewer, in contrast to the hundreds of artists who work on big Hollywood movies.
One reason for this, says James Neale, is the lack of suitable staff. Many of the artists that Character Mill hires are only familiar with commercial software, and have to be taught how to use Blender.
“The main limitation is finding competent people who use Blender regularly,” he says. “Each time we take on someone new, there’s a training period, and if it’s a tight deadline, we need someone who can hit the ground running. Sometimes there are jobs we can’t take on because we can’t staff them.”
Overcoming prejudice
The Blender Network, the social network for Blender pros that the Blender Foundation launched in 2012, now makes it far easier to recruit artists internationally, but Neale says the software needs to be taught more widely in schools and universities. “There are so many Maya artists out there because all the schools teach it,” he says. “And because there’s a pool of artists, the big studios continue to use it. It’s chicken and egg.”
While the Blender Foundation is now addressing this issue with its Blender 101 initiative, which aims to develop a version of
Blender configured for teaching 3D to highschool students, another stumbling block may be harder to overcome: the lingering belief that use of ‘free’ tools is unprofessional. “There’s always a stigma attached to using open-source software,” says Jonathan Lax. “I base everything on the strength of the output [but] larger clients have expressed concerns when I say what software I’m using.”
According to Ton Roosendaal, this problem is compounded by the fact that many artists in Asia and South America – where the largest studios using open-source tools in production are currently located – have switched to Blender from cracked copies of commercial software. “They switch from being an illegal user to being a legal user, but they don’t change the habit of not requiring support, and of feeling a bit ashamed of using free software,” he says.
That reluctance to speak publicly makes it harder to get a true picture of how widely Blender is being used in production. One thing we were often told while researching this article is that many artists at large games and visual effects studios do use the software, they just don’t tend to talk about it.
However, that may finally be changing. This year, Pixar announced that Blender is one of the small number of off-the-shelf 3D applications that it officially supports for use within the studio, and namechecked the software in its press release for the latest version of RenderMan.
And as Roosendaal points out, the fact that large studios were traditionally more willing to talk about commercial 3D tools doesn’t mean that they use them as their primary means of production. “People have some kind of romantic fantasy that big
studios use desktop software to make films, and suddenly they might start using Blender,” he says. “But that’s not true. They hardly use [commercial] software either. They have their own in-house tools.
“Studios like Pixar are awesome, but they are the tip of the pyramid,” he adds. “Below that, there are millions of people doing stuff with 3D, and those people need tools, too.”
Where next for Blender?
The coming year looks likely to be another significant one for Blender. Rather than continuing the recent cycle of smaller threemonthly updates, the Blender Foundation proposes taking a year out to focus on major development projects aimed at readying the software to tackle even larger productions.
It is, admits Roosendaal, a huge challenge for a non-profit organisation that currently supports fewer than 10 full-time developers, particularly given the increasing complexity of the work. “Many of these improvements are just not possible in a normal volunteerdriven open-source project,” he says. “You have to get the professionals on board. And the only way to do that is to reach out to studios and make them stakeholders in taking care of parts of the future development of Blender.”
Ultimately, Roosendaal’s goal is still to make a feature-length open movie, both as an ultimate proof of Blender’s capabilities and a means of further fostering that professional user community.
“If we can get a decent budget – say $12‑15 million – to make a good-quality animated feature film, we can adopt some Krita or Gimp developers [as well as hiring] more Blender developers,” he says. “Once you have a feature film plus a 100% open-source pipeline, you get something very interesting indeed. You could even set up a facility to train technical artists who could go on to work in other studios.”
It’s a lot to ask. But, on the evidence of what Blender has achieved over the past 20 years, you wouldn’t want to bet against it. LXF
Useful resources
www.blender.org The official Blender website hosts software downloads and news of new features
www.blendernation.com Daily news from the Blender community, plus a smattering of free video tutorials
www.blenderartists.org Hang out or ask for advice from other artists in one of the best-known Blender forums
www.blendswap.com Free assets of all shapes and sizes for Blender users: from models to tech resources.
https://cgcookiemarkets.com A newer online marketplace than Blend Swap, aimed at sharing commercial assets
www.blendernetwork.org The Blender Foundation’s official directory and social network for Blender professionals.