Description

This short 3D Movies is based on the fictional worlds established in the Uncommon Paradigm Science Fiction book.

It tells of the establishment of the Alien Worlds Exploration Agency in the future. It unfolds the fictitious events leading to the transition of space travel from being physical-based to consciousness-based.

Workflow

This short science fiction movie is made primarily using open-source programs. One of our aim is to see whether are we able to create a compelling animation using only open-source solutions.

The open-source programs for the production included Blender / Cycles , Natron, Inkscape, Makehuman.

Blender took care of the modelling, compositing and animation.
Cycles renders was used in most (by not all) of the 3D rendered scenes.
MakeHuman was used to create some of the humanoid characters in the animation.
Natron was used mainly for 2D-based compositing. Makehuman was used to create the base human characters.
Inkscape was used to made 2D graphics such as interfaces and GUIs.

Some of the project materials contributed to our Blender 3D Modeling and Visualisation Course-wares.

To speed up the 3D rendering process, GPUs (Graphics Processor Units) were used wherever possible. In another word, those scenes that were created, material-assigned and lighted using Cycles were rendered using GPUs. The graphics card used to render the Blender 3D scenes are desktop-based Nvidia GTX gaming graphics cards. These cards fairly fairly well although one card was damaged during the rendering process. Card Warranty fixed the problem when we got a replacement card. 🙂

Besides the open source programs used, we also used some commercial programs.
Serif Movieplus X5 was used to video editing and compile the entire 3D movies. This proved to be a efficient and easy to use video editor.
Serif Photoplus was used to edit and create 2D images as and when they were required. Although missing the power fo Photoshop, must can still be done using this 2D image editing program.

Hope you enjoy the animation.