Elephants Dream

On May 18th, 2006 a team of six people released a beautiful animation under a creative commons license titled ‘Elephants Dream‘. By May 29th, over 500,000 visitors had downloaded the animation. Over the months that followed remixes of the animation began to appear online. A ‘making of’ video was released by the creators of ‘Elephants Dream’ and is worth a look.

‘Elephants Dream’ is the result of almost a year of work, a project initiated and coordinated by the Blender Foundation. Six people from the Blender user/development community were selected to come over to Amsterdam to work together on an animated short movie, utilizing Open Source tools only.

The Elephant’s Dream web site features:

• High Definition and standard downloads of the animation
• Background information about the project
• Soundtrack and high resolution image downloads

The animation was created using open source software called Blender.

Blender is [the] open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Budding 3D animators, modelers, and texture designers have a unique opportunity: to purchase a DVD containing the original movie, as well as all of the source materials and original files. The DVD also includes the original script and story boards.

J.W.’s “The Daily Drawing”

This evening I came across a really neat set of videos on YouTube.com that were posted from TheDailyDrawing.com. The videos were of a very talented artist, who goes by the handle “J.W.”, sketching Nintendo characters Mario and Samus. I really enjoyed getting to see how these sketches were done from start to finish. J.W. has posted multiple videos demonstrating sketches as well as 3D modeling using Pixologic’s Zbrush.