I watched the astounding short animated film by Alex Roman featured in the Blender news yesterday and really it is so inspiring… so first let me say wow wow wow!

But I wouldn’t have written here about it, thinking it’s not exactly Blender related, if a friend (yes, max user) didn’t tell me “hey, you should give up that Blender, look what people are doing today in Max”

Well!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

OK, I’m not going to say “this could be done in Blender” as I am in no way capable of proving it by doing something similar… (well I’ll just blame it on being a busy mom right now :P)

But I would like to give some encouragement to all Blender users that might feel a bit blue while looking at the film and point out that a great many of the qualities of that work are not software related.

This is a really talented and experienced artist and the things that make the film so amazing are great direction – spectacular camera movement; interesting storyboard well set against the beautiful musical background; extensive use of depth of field effects; great detailing of the geometry; really good and detailed texturing; remarkable subjects – the architecture featured are celebrated works by Tadao Ando, Louis Kahn, Satoshi Okada, Rafael Moneo, Santiago Calatrava and are all sculptural pieces with superb spaces and materials. He also spent a lot of time doing this. Someone said one year but looking at his portfolio on CG Society I think what he did was work the different parts of the film over a longer period of time as separate projects and then put everything together and make this movie. So a great amount of work involved, all by himself.

Yes it is made with Max and Vray and the quality of the images is amazing, so when people see this they are saying Wow Vray is the best! It’s the same in photography: how terrible is for a good photographer to hear from someone “wow you take great pictures, no wonder, you have such a good camera”!

Now about Vray. There is some rising enthusiasm about the Blender Vray connection. This uses the Vray plug-in for Maya and an exporter for Blender. I tried the demo version a little bit and it does seem to work, but before buying the Maya plug-in I will wait a bit longer until Blender 2.5 is released and see what happens then. On the Vray site there is a mention about a Blender plug-in being in the works, by the same developer, Andrey M. Izrantsev . The thing is: to use the existing plug-in with textured objects you have to UV map those objects first and I don’t like this. It might be all right if you have a special project with lots of time at your disposal but for normal workflow especially in architects world where projects are meant to be rendered “yesterday” and lots of changes appear on the way, you can’t waste time UV mapping a plain wall or floor that works ok with simple tiled mapping, and redoing it every time the client changes the layout a bit. The same applies to Yafray and Luxrender and that’s why at this point I’m trying to learn all I can about the internal Blender renderer… In other aspects I think the plugin works well and it’s very promising, and if the future release will allow me to use a material library for frequently used stuff I will certainly buy it!

I resisted the temptation to illustrate this post with some of the beautiful images in The Third & The Seventh movie, so please go watch and enjoy the film on Vimeo if you haven’t done so yet!

Edited to add: I wanted just to put a link to the video but my mentor said, quote: “people are expecting an embedded video, it’s too established on blogs now for you to ignore it” 😛

Anyway, the HD embedding was disabled so here’s the link to the vimeo page because you’ll want to watch it hd: Vimeo