Here's a free idea for Google that would make my life better... you know these voice assistant thingys? I would love if they could tell me when things happen instead of having to ask them if something is currently happening. For example, "Hey Google, tell me when XXX announces a concert in town." or "tell me when YYY is on sale" etc.
Having to look these things up all the time really sucks.
Not necessarily on topic but my biggest gripe with voice assistants is that they work like a web search. You can ask what the state of the world is NOW but you can get them to let you know when things happen. I want "Alexa, let me know when XXX is having a concert nearby" or "Alexa, tell me when XX is on sale". That's what I really want.
Tangent Animation is trying to change this! They use almost 100% Blender, have some developers and contribute back to the community. See "Next-Gen" on Netflix for their latest movie.
Disclaimer: Worked for them as a Blender developer on Next-Gen
Are you able to talk about anything you did there? I only get to work on open source in my spare time (and nothing as complex as Blender). What did a normal day look like for you?
"Normal days" changed during the course of the project. In the beginning, it was work on new features for months if necessary, towards the end it were overnight patches for "frame x in shot y looks wrong/crashes/takes forever".
Yes, almost everything is made in blender except for some textures which were painted in Substance Painter and volumetric effects like explosions which were generated in FumeFX and Houdini before being imported, rendered and composited in blender.
That was pretty cool. Thank you! I wish they talked a little more about the difficulties they faced and how they solved them. If I remember correctly Ton Roosendaal once said one of the purposes of the Blender Open Movie project is to showcase the Blender is capable of handling complex large projects. After 4 open movie project it must have matured enough that Tangent Animation was able to solve most of their problems themselves! Awesome!
My kids went wild for Next-Gen, I had no idea it was done in Blender! The graphics are first-class, really impressive stuff. I'm an amateur, but I couldn't tell it apart from other studios such as Pixar.
Cycles (Blender's built in path tracer) with some modifications. (Cryptomattes are now in 2.8, and the Embree patch will be integrated somewhere after.)
"Yes, cycles was used for everything, though our version of cycles was modified (with stefan's embree core, and crypto-mattes which were beyond valuable for compositing). The version of blender we used was the studios own dev version (which I believe was using blender 2.78 as it's base?)"
Having to look these things up all the time really sucks.