Why you should make movies in blender

Every artists one day one to bring there imaginations to infront of an audience, weather its on a small smart phone screen, a 100 inch tv or on a large screen in theatre, today everyone has tech leatrally in the palm of there hands to do anything, unfortunately not every piece of tech or software is built the same. especially when it comes to making movies.

when ever one program is good at something, you can be assured it sucks in some other way, for example maya is great for animation but sucks at simulations, houdini is great for simulations but sucks for modeling, 3ds max is great for modeling but sucks at sculpting.

its like every application you peak up, you are always leaving something behind, so you end up having to install, houdini, maya, 3ds max, substance painter, photoshop among many, to be able to make a project, obviously this is ridiculously expensive consindering that every application mentioned is an expensive subscription and on top of that you have to add editing programs like premier pro to edit your movie, render engine licences like vray, arnold and more.

these costs and experience required to use these applications has become a big huddle in making movies, but am here to tell you that there is a small program out there, about 200mbs, its open source, requires no subscription, do credit card, no signup all you need is the shear will to learn, and of cause am talking about blender.

i have tried every 3d program from 3ds max, maya, cinema 4d, houdini and everytime i always go back to blender, and today am hear to tell you that its the program you should be using to make movies in.

everything you need to make a movie is available in blender, from vfx, set extensions, camera matching, object tracking, explosions, destructions, special effects and more, so there is a good reason to start making movies in blender and infact alot of people have tried, and its not just animated movies, am talking live action movies, am sure you have seen some blender movies like tears, Dynamo dream, sky watch and alot more.

what makes movies hard to make irespective of the program you are using are the things that go in movie, things like objects, trees, cars, people, basically everything that goes into world building, every object has to either be made from scratch or aquired from a library of assets.

take an example of landscapes, when ever a scene has to take place outside, you need a sky, and a well built environment, while it would be great to make these environments on your own, its simply too much work especially since they are not going to be the main stage of your movie, tools like true terrain, gaea, world creator have been used for edges by different artists to craft amazing worlds, and because of there procedural nature, they allow a level of customization that makes your creations feel authentic to your vision.

because blender tries to be a jack of all trades, it ends up being a master of none, this is not a limitation its a feature, blender gives you a starting point for everything that lets you build other tools to make it even better, like the case of creating beautiful skies, it comes with support for hdri images and a physical procedural sky, this is enough for most renders but when you want more detail, there several ways to build upon the sky texture in blender, to get better results, forexample the new volume shaders make it supper easy to add clouds, volumetric fog and shadow and dust, it you want even more detail in the sky addons like pure sky pro can be a great extension to blender giving you detail and control on pur with unreal engine or other programs

while it may seem strange when you see the growing number of blender addons out there, the diversity and range of capability, usefulness and value that these addons is greatly appreciated by the community, almost every blender artists is now somewhat an addon developer ensuring that every thing you can think of blender has it, say you want to make character clothing inside blender the simply cloth pro brings some of the functionality you see in marvelous designer into blender without these kind of dare devils, functionality like this would take ages to get to blender gate kept by big cooperation’s like adobe, autodesk and others alike.

Because the blender foundation is a registered company with an address, they are not as daring as individual artists, things like Auto Painter Ai which is an addon for generating 3d models right inside blender would never be made by the foundation because they wont touch anything with Ai in its name because of the backlash they would receive, but Ai is a monster we have to leave with and either we adapt or die, the addon auto painter makes texture painting just remarkably easy it gives you a completely painted model in just a few seconds, you can work on that to make it better or use it as is because it looks great, imagine how much time this can save you.

there are also addons like the Ai library that lets you generate 3d characters that are fully textured and ready to rig and animate, that we would not have if there was no addon community, add to that Autodepth Ai another Ai addon that can generate detailed meshes to use in your scene, say you need a background shop that has some depth detail so that it does not just look like a flat image in the background, but more like the shop its self is there with self shadowing and exists withing the 3d space, so if you want to use effects like volumetric fog. they would actually work. these and other addons like this would never be made by the foundation and for the right reasons, we the community have the freedom to be messy and carefree they don’t.

this is just to scratch the surface of what blender can do for film makers, its a constant work in progress and what is being worked on can be anything, you are not just waiting on what the blender foundation dims important to work on, so occasionality we get something amazing supprise, a tool you may not have thought you needed, until you see it like lens sim this adddon has been making waves in the community because of how realistic it makes the bokeh effects and lenses in blender look, i bet most of you din’t see anything wrong with the default bokeh until you saw the lens sim video.

thats how amazing blender is, every problem is being solved in real time, blender may not be as powerful as houdini when it comes to simulations but if you want something equivalent addons like Rbdlab will not disappoint, its perfect for bringing simulations in blender on par with what houdini can do, its not going to be 100% equal to houdini but it will do the job, and for alot of blender artists thats exactly what they need.

Most Industry standard programs are there to solves industry standard problem, but as indie movie makers and artists we face different problems, i don’t need a program that can simulate millions of characters as a crowd, all i need is a few hundreds that my computer can manage and for that the population addon is just enough, i dont need to setup crowd agents with complicated behaviours, all i need is a crowd that behaves in an expected way, with various animations, unique characters and more.

i dont need a complicated traffic system, that can respond to every changing thing in the city, customizable to the last pexel, when no one will even notice, so i use addons like traffic that has everything setup for me, all the cars are there, roads, animations i just need to play back and everything works.

blender is truely for everyday creators, and if you don’t have a team to solve all the problems you will run into when making your movie, blender is the right choice, because it was created for small teams and individuals like you and me.

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