Color Insert

Scrappy adventuress Sintel and the baby dragon Scales are the main characters of the Blender Open Movie Project’s latest offering, Sintel.

Two scenes from Sintel. Scales the baby dragon cries out, and Sintel confronts a full-grown dragon in the climax of the movie.

Big Buck Bunny is the second short movie from the Blender Open Movie Project. It’s a cute and furry tale of malice and revenge that represented a giant leap forward for Blender’s particle hair functionality.

These scenes are from the open source movie Elephants Dream, the result of the Blender Foundation’s Orange Project. It was intended to showcase Blender’s power as an animation tool and also to spur the development of needed production functionality.

left: 15 Minutes of Glory by Kamil Kuklo (Mookie) takes advantage of particle fur and subsurface scattering to create a realistic mouse character.

right: Toudou+’s Minotaur uses particles and textures to create a fantasy beast.

Top: An alligator relaxes in bed with a book in Julia Korbut’s whimsical render.

Bottom: A still from Reynante Martinez’s dreamlike short animation Slumber.

These characters, created by Zoltan Miklosi, demonstrate some of the incredible power and flexibility Blender provides for realistic character modeling.

Top: Akira Hiki’s images both show the unmistakable influence of the Japanese anime style. Bottom left: By Yuichi Miura. Bottom right: By Akutsu Tomohiro. Two more examples of anime-styled character renders from Japanese Blender users. Akutsu’s image here is an excellent example of toon-style shading.

This collection of characters is from the feature-length animated film Plumiferos.

Top: By Yuichi Miura. Bottom: By Eric Terrier.

Top: By Mauro Bonecchi. Bottom: Super WuMan, from a concept and design by Sacha Goedegebure (Sago), was modeled and animated by Andy Dolphin (AndyD). These further demonstrate the variety of stylistic options available and how textures and materials can help make an image more realistic or cartoony.

By Sacha Goedegebure (Sago). Sacha went on to direct Big Buck Bunny.

Two examples of highly realistic portraiture. Top: Lucas Falcão’s Ruby. Bottom: Scott Wilkinson’s Ex Nihilo.

Images from David Revoy’s animated short The Little Fairy. David went on to be the concept artist for Sintel and to release his own Blender Open Movie Workshop training video on creating 2D artwork, called Chaos and Evolutions.

Robert J. Tiess’s striking and varied images display a range of techniques and effects possible with Blender.

Top left: By Robert J. Tiess. Top right: By Derek Marsh. bottom: These images are from a short titled Suburban Plight by Colin Levy that makes use of motion-tracking software and Blender’s compositing functionality to incorporate animated CG images into live-action video footage. Colin went on to direct Sintel.