the film and all the production files for yourself at the project’s website, www.elephantsdream.org.
Due to the success of the Orange project, Ton established the Blender Institute in 2007 for the expressed purpose of having a permanent space to create open movie and game projects, as well as provide the service of training people in Blender. Since then, the Blender Institute has churned out open projects (most codenamed with a type of fruit) every couple of years. Like with Elephants Dream, both the final product and the production files for each project are released under a permissive Creative Commons license. More recently, the Blender Institute has spun off a separate entity, the Blender Animation Studio, a Blender-based animation studio with the goal of producing and releasing a feature-length animated film. Table 1-1 summarizes each of the Blender Institute’s open projects.
TABLE 1-1 Open Projects from the Blender Institute
| Year | Fruit | Title | Details |
| 2005 | Orange |
Elephants Dream
(elephantsdream.org)
|
Animated Short Film (improved animation, basic hair, node-based compositing) |
| 2008 | Peach |
Big Buck Bunny
(bigbuckbunny.org)
|
Animated Short Film (enhanced particles, large scene optimization, improved rendering, more animation and rigging tools) |
| 2008 | Apricot |
Yo Frankie!
(yofrankie.org)
|
Video Game (asset creation pipeline, real-time viewport, updates to the Blender Game Engine) |
| 2010 | Durian |
Sintel
(sintel.org)
|
Animated Short Film (battle-test Blender 2.5, detailed sculpting, large environments) |
| 2012 | Mango |
Tears of Steel
(tearsofsteel.org)
|
Live Action Short Film (visual effects tools, motion tracking, Cycles rendering) |
| 2013 | N/A |
Caminandes 2: Gran Dillama
(caminandes.com)
|
Animated Short Film (cartoony animation with a minor focus on furry characters) |
| 2015 | Gooseberry |
Cosmos Laundromat
(cosmoslaundromat.org)
|
Animated Short Film (large-scale internationally collaborative productions with Blender Cloud) |
| 2015 | N/A |
Glass Half
(cloud.blender.org/p/glass-half)
|
Animated Short Film (cartoony animation with non-photorealistic real-time rendering) |
| 2016 | N/A |
Caminandes 3: Llamigos
(caminandes.com)
|
Animated Short Film (cartoony characters with a secondary focus on VR rendering) |
| 2018 | N/A |
Hero (cloud.blender.org/p/hero)
|
Animated Short Film (2D and 2.5D animation using Grease Pencil) |
| 2018 | N/A |
The Daily Dweebs (cloud.blender.org/p/dailydweebs)
|
Animated Short Film (fast turnaround cartoony animation) |
| 2019 | N/A |
Spring (cloud.blender.org/p/spring)
|
Animated Short Film (battle-test Blender 2.80, Eevee viewport) |
JOINING THE COMMUNITY
Congratulations! As a Blender user, you’re a part of our community. You’re joining a diverse group that spans all age ranges, ethnicities, professional backgrounds, and parts of the globe. We are a passionate bunch: proud of this little 3D program and more than willing to help others enjoy using it as much as we do. Have a look at Chapter 21 for a list of community resources that are invaluable, not only for discovering the intricacies of using Blender, but also for improving yourself as an artist.
You can find innumerable opportunities for critique, training, discussion, and even collaboration with other artists, some of whom might also be Blender developers. I’ve made quite a few good friends and colleagues through the Blender community, both through the various community websites as well as by attending events like the annual Blender Conference. I go by the name “Fweeb” on these sites and I look forward to seeing you around!
Figure 1-2 shows rendered images from a bunch of the open projects.
FIGURE 1-2: Open projects from the Blender Institute help drive Blender development (Blender Foundation, www.blender.org).
With the completion of each of these projects, the functionality and stability of Blender significantly increased. Much of the content of this book wouldn’t even exist without these projects. For example, Chapter 14 starts with using Blender’s particle system to achieve exciting effects along with hair and fur. All the content in Chapter 18 is focused on the Compositor, a way of combining and enhancing still images and animations. In fact, nearly all of Part 3 is devoted to features that were enhanced