Elephant's Dream - the world's first completely open source 3D animated movie - was released online for free today under a Creative Commons license. It's a tremendous artistic achievement. The film's story is a little esoteric in nature and won't appeal to everyone (it reminds me a little of Chris Landreth's surreal 3D film The End), but it's absolutely beautiful. Elephant's Dream was made to showcase the potential of Blender as a production tool and it's done that in spades.

The best part of the Orange Project is that all of the digital assets and production files have also been released under a Creative Commons license so anyone can study, remake and remix the film or portions of it has much as they want. I haven't had time to go through all of the production files yet, but I've already seen a few assets that we'll probably use in Bear Town.

You can download the movie and all of it's production assets for free here.

Speaking of Blender and Bear Town, the first of the 3D virtual sets are coming together. I'm hoping that I'll be able to post some quick test renders in the next week or two.

- - - -

21/05/06 Update: Wikinews has a nice interview with Blender lead developer and Elephant's Dream producer Ton Roosendaal.

Posted by Andrew at 3:13 PM | Permalink

---