Sintel – 3D animation short from Blender Foundation

Many people still don’t believe that free/open source 3D softwares could create amazing and successful 3D animations. They will have to reconsider this opinion after watching many short films made with the open source 3D creation suite Blender. Big Buck Bunny was a great example, the 3D short by the Blender Institute received many awards in 2008. However, the Blender Foundation has just completed a more awesome film, Sintel.

The initial funding for the short came from 1,000s of donations via the internet community and once more proves that this model can work to help in the independent animation film business. There are all things you will expect with a budget of only $550k, from fast action scenes, fires, landscapes to complicated facial features.

The state of the art 3D short showcases Blender’s capabilities, stimulate its development, and encourage young artists to participate in the creative process by licensing the raw material and the final product under Creative Commons.

For the entire creation pipeline in the studio, we will only use free/open source software. For 3D graphics, compositing and video editing we’ll obviously use Blender. For imaging and drawing we expect to use GIMP and Inkscape a lot.

The 15 minute short Sintel tells a story of a young girl on a long adventure to save her best friend, a baby dragon. Although its purpose is to show that Blender can produce amazing animation worthy of any professional studio rather than the plot, developers really did an excellent job to write a touching story that left me wanting more when it ended.