Euphoria Module: a short 3D animation created using open source software

Euphoria Module is a short animated film made using Open Source tools (with the exception of some third-party resources: music, a few sounds, a few textures).

• Blender : modeling, animation, rendering, compositing, editing video and sound;
• MakeHuman : generating a model of a girl who was later “brought” in Blender;
• Audacity : create and process multiple sound effects;
• GIMP : everything related to 2D (quite a bit in my case).

Everything is rendered using the Cycles engine integrated into Blender. Most of the frames were counted on a single computer. Initially, I had one video card based on GeForce GTX 770, and later I bought a used GTX 670 in addition. The difference in performance between them is only 10-12%. For rendering, you can combine different video cards, it is very convenient and economical (of course, not without nuances).


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In addition to video cards, I tried to use any processors that I could use, but they were very hard to lose in performance. For example, even a very good i5-4670 (Haswell, 4 cores, 3.6 GHz in turbo mode under maximum load) loses one GTX 770 4-5 times. The figures are approximate, it all depends on the nature of the scene.

When video cards are busy computing, the interface of the entire system begins to slow down. In this case, the video adapter built into the processor is useful, in the i5-4670 it is the HD 4600. It coped with tasks at a quite tolerable level.



Blender is good. The secondary functions (compositing, video editing) could be better, but even in their current form they provide acceptable basic features. Simulation of physical effects also needs to be improved. But modeling, animating and creating materials for Cycles was a great pleasure. It is worth noting that I appreciate everything from the point of view of the creator of a low-budget short film, for other tasks everything may differ.



Blender is also developing very fast. Every few months there is a new version with significant improvements. Most bugs are promptly fixed. A couple of times there was a situation when I created a bug report, corrected it for a few weeks, and I could download the latest build with the fix before the next final version was released.



According to my calculations, the total render time was about 1 year for the GTX770 plus 6 months for the GTX 670. For the scene with clouds, we had to rent additional resources, which saved a couple of months.

An important point: everything was rendered in 1920x1080 resolution. The 4K version uploaded to YouTube is upscale, a video with artificially increased resolution. Youtube compresses everything so mercilessly that even in 1080p small details disappear. 4K resolution there is about the same in quality with a well-encoded 1080p.



Soon there will be a small video with the analysis of the picture into pieces.

Posted on May 6, 2015
And here is the picture:

Addition: answers to questions

- I would like to ask the author to describe the difficulties that have arisen, how to solve them.
There were not so many technical difficulties:

• It was difficult to achieve an acceptable fluid simulation. It was solved by repeated twisting of various parameters. After each change, I had to wait for a long time to “bake” the simulation. There is no universal solution, it all depends on the specific scene. I look forward to improvements in this area.
• It did not work out correctly to make a full-fledged grass animation without glitches. Perhaps a combination of factors played a role, since in theory the grass from Grass Essentials should be animated normally. Not yet figured out the exact cause. It was decided to barely noticeable animation.

- Tell us what you, having experience, would have done differently in the project.
With experience, I would well think whether to use Cycles sample of 2013 (and I started then) for closed spaces with small light sources. For the path tracing method, this is the problem area. Gradually, the situation is improving.

Perhaps I would still stop at Cycles, but then I would start the selection of rendering parameters by twisting all the bounces to 0, and then gradually increasing it by evaluating the picture. My problem was that I investigated the effect of the number of reflections on the render time using primitive scenes, because of this I calmly set out 4-5 bounces of all types on complex scenes. It killed a lot of time.

Addition about the plot

Some viewers resent the lack of plot and complain about the appearance of some illusions. The plot: someone loves a rich feeling, but one day something went wrong.