Blender Institute Podcast #029 - Annecy

I have a comment about PBR. It seems that none of you had a very close look at them yet and you don't seem to understand the advantages of it so far. Please give me a minute to praise it :)

You hear and read a lot that with PBR you get more realistic results. That's somehow true, but lacks the most important information. You can achieve the exact same visual results without it. But the advantage of PBR is that you don't have to modify or adjust the materials for changing lighting conditions, because they will just work. The materials will be consistent among each other and everything will look accurate for every kind of lighting condition.

You can have e.g. a brick wall and very shiny porcelain or glass in a very dark scene. Now, it is possible to take exactly the same objects and just change the lighting to be very bright without the need to change the materials. Without PBR you would usually need to adjust many materials due to the changed lighting. The shiny materials are often sensitive to lighting changes and usually the materials are not anymore consistent among each other and just don't look believable at first.

When it comes to lighting, PBR appears like black magic to me, because something that was extremely difficult previously is now a lot simpler. I can imagine that in a production, it can save a lot of time for the lighting, because you don't have to touch the materials anymore if you don't want.

Just to clarify: I haven't used it for volumetrics or hairs so far. That's why I don't know whether PBR can be used for those as well.

There is no more stats about Blender Cloud, I mean the number of subscribers and the money income. The last screenshot can be found at the Cosmos Laundromat blog, but it is very outdated of course. Are you planning to bring a Cloud Stats page back? Anyway, how is the state of the Cloud? How many subscribers, income, visits, etc do you have? Any plans on Company/Team membership?

PS: That Hjalti's ending xD

for what hjalti was mentioning, usually companies, start working on one film, while an other one is in production and the other one is in writing, and you can love the three of them, so you won't trash it, and maybe if you go to a festival, you show the three things you got going on, and you get someone interested in the one that's in writing process and they want to help you produce this and so that one goes ahead... as a matter of fact, pixar is producing 3 movies every two years, and if they take an average of 7 years from idea to final movie, then they are doing a lot of movies at the same time.

listening to this conversation about all the feature films and things happening with blender, two things come to mind, first, encourage them to "advertise" through you, and also there should be some kind of record of what has been done and what is currently in production so people can send reels for jobs, or just keep track of the productions =)

it was finding dory guys....

Nice to hear your festival experiencan .

If you are still at Annecy, you should go see some screenings. Download the mobile app, and you can make the reservations there, or at least see the times and locations. Interesting features today are at lest Monkey king, Snow fight and Capture the flag. Audio and subtitle information is also informed on every screening and almost all has english audio VA or subtitles VSA.