Wow.
If you’ve never looked into Blender, then you should do so. At first glance, it’s an open-source alternative for 3d Studio Max. A very good one.
But then, what lies beneath is far more than that.
I haven’t used Blender that much, just for the odd tutorial and some small-time blobs of goo. But every time, it’s become apparent that Blender is mostly about community. That kind of high-idealogy that some think only exists in the mind. You know, the essence of the open-source movement, if it can be called that.
Ain’t sure just how true that last paragraph is, I could be totally wrong about it. But that’s my keyhole view, my perception, of what Blender is about.
That’s side-effect anyway. The real purpose of this post is to point you to an innovation. Creation of something special.
Elephant’s Dream is a movie made out of open-source development tools, mostly Blender.
It’s amazing. They ported in a team of people from around the world (two from Australia .. whooot!) to create this piece of history/art/..
Now. I haven’t watched the film yet .. so I guess all of the above is my own hype. I get excited when seeing people putting their own imaginations to work.
There’s a fair bit of traffic at the moment. I found the blog from Slashdot this morning, so obviously they have been slash-dotted. When I can actually download the movie, I’ll watch and post up thoughts.
Edit
It wasn’t just one time with the slashdotting .. at least once more, for the specific reason of the new Blender update.
Interestingly enough, the slashdot article has nothing to do with elephant’s dream (the movie). It’s some bad (or almost bad) press on Wikipedia. I noticed another bad piece last week. Seems that the curve has finally swung on another of the big success stories of the Naughties (the other being Google, not that there were only two success stories, but that those two have now swung into the non-going-upwards-on-some-kind-of-graph phase).
I guess we’ll see what happens.
One last point. Blender, the development tool, has benefited hugely from the making of this film. I know myself, that the little projects i’ve made have always grown when I started using them more and more. It’s good to see this happening outside of my own experience. So kudo’s to the Blender team.
Cheers,