BBB

Big Buck Bunny is a stunning cgi animated film that was made to show the capabilities of blender, which is a 3D animation freeware (that's right: GPL freeware and it's also available for macs). The Blender Foundation and Blender community initiated the Peach Open Movie Project. They invited a small team (7) of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community (Sacha Goedebure, Andreas Goralczyk, Enrico Valenza, Nathan Vegdahl, William Reynish, Campell Barton and Brecht van Lommel) to work in Amsterdam from October 2007 until April 2008 on completing a short 3D animation movie. They had as main targets:

• Developing tools in Blender 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

The movie "Big Buck Bunny" produced by Ton Roosendaal was released last month. So far, it has been downloaded / streamed 917,000 times in just a couple of weeks. You can download BBB on several formats. I recommend the H.264 Quicktime 1280x720 or larger to appreciate in full detail the grass and fur of the characters... the big furry bunny it's totally worth it and/or equivalent to the big size file... or you can buy the DVDs which include not just the movie in various formats, but also the character's .blend files, textures, models, documentation and video tutorials by the team members about all technical aspects the movie; like how to re-use assets, animate characters, or add new shots, etc. BBB is also available on youTube. But there's more:

"After Orange and Peach, Blender Institute continues with a new open project: Apricot. This time it isn’t a movie but a 3D game! Starting february 1st 2008, a small team of again the best 3D artist and developers will develop a game jointly with the on-line community. The main characters in the game are based on the short 3D animation open movie Peach "Big Buck Bunny". At the end of July 2008 the game will be launched."

ciao