Some of you know I’m an animation buff (you may have seen my own little mini short I posted). A neat short called Big Buck Bunny was released by the Blender Foundation. Blender is an open source 3D package. Their site appears to be down now due to heavy traffic, but you can view it right here.

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

They did a really nice job of telling an entertaining story while showing off what Blender can do. They stated the following goals for the film:

* Developing tools … for editing and rendering hair, fur or grass
* Improve character animation tools for cartoonish motion and deformation
* Test Blender with giant outdoor environments, with large grassy fields and many trees with leaves
* Further validate Blender as a professional animation creation suite

And secondary:

* Create a great and good looking animation short, licensed freely as open content
* Provide content for other artists to learn from or to re-use, including documentation and tutorials
* And of course: Have lots of fun!

I think they did a fine job. I’ve got experience with Hash Animation:Master and Softimage XSI. I have been thinking about doing some things with the strip - like a poster of Asimov’s inner workings - in 3D for fun. I think I’m going to download Blender and give it a try. I’ll post anything I come up with (although it may be awhile).

Speaking of film, if you follow my twitter you may have seen me mention a Marooned trailer for the strip. My good buddy Steve Ogden of Croaker’s Gorge is doing the voice over, which I’m real excited about. I hope to get started on it this weekend.