3D Movie Created Entirely with Open Source Tools: Big Buck Bunny

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

Blender.org and the Peach open movie project recently released it’s animated short Big Buck Bunny, which you can watch above, and is available under a Creative Commons license…

Big Buck Bunny tells the story of a giant rabbit with a heart bigger than himself. When one sunny day three rodents rudely harass him, something snaps… and the rabbit ain’t no bunny anymore! In the typical cartoon tradition he prepares the nasty rodents a comical revenge.

(c) copyright Blender Foundation | www.bigbuckbunny.org

Besides streaming online, there are multiple resolution and file formats all available for download, from 1920×1080 down to PSP compatible. What makes it even more compelling for those interested in what it takes to make 3D happen, is that the source files (models, artwork etc) are also available at the link for you to play with.

This isn’t the first open source movie however. Almost exactly a year ago, Blender and the Orange open movie project, with some of the same creative team, released Elephants Dream. It’s a very different movie in tone and style, and definitely worth the download as well.

Also in the works is the Apricot project, which is an open source game which takes place in the world of Big Buck Bunny.

Blender’s history from an in-house tool to open source platform is interesting in it’s own right….

Blender was developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo (not to be confused with the Neo-Geo game console) and Not a Number Technologies (NaN). It was primarily authored by Ton Roosendaal, who had previously written a ray tracer called Traces for Amiga in 1989. The name “Blender” was inspired by a song by Yello, from the album Baby.

Roosendaal founded NaN in June 1998 to further develop and distribute the program. The program was initially distributed as shareware until NaN went bankrupt in 2002.

The creditors agreed to release Blender under the terms of the GNU General Public License, for a one-time payment of €100,000 (approximately US$147,000 as of January 2008; approximately equal to the amount in US-dollars at the time). On July 18, 2002, a Blender funding campaign was started by Roosendaal in order to collect donations and on September 7, 2002 it was announced that enough funds had been collected and that the Blender source code would be released. Blender is now an open source program being actively developed under the supervision of the Blender Foundation.

The Blender Foundation initially reserved the right to use dual licensing, so that, in addition to GNU GPL, Blender would have been available also under the “Blender License”, which did not require disclosing source code but required payments to the Blender Foundation. However, this option was never exercised and was suspended indefinitely in 2005. Currently, Blender is solely available under GNU GPL. From wikipedia.org