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Atlanta, GA
Jason van Gumster mostly makes stuff up. He writes, animates, and occasionally teaches, all using open source tools. He's run a small, independent animation studio, wrote Blender For Dummies and GIMP Bible, and continues to blurt out his experiences during a [sometimes] weekly podcast, the Open Source Creative Podcast. Adventures (and lies) at @monsterjavaguns.
Authored Comments
This specific open movie may not have the "ooh, wow" feature development that previous open movies had (Blender's compositor came from Elephants Dream, Big Buck Bunny refined animation tools as well as hair/fur, Tears of Steel brought a lot of development to the motion tracker, Sintel was a field test for the 2.5 refactor... and the Cycles renderer itself is a direct result of lessons learned from that production), but what we did get was still a big deal. And, like with previous projects, the things learned by the developers during the project are likely to show up in future features/upgrades.
Bear in mind that the blog post is the account of just one of the developers. Also note that for that budget, there were twice as many artists as there were developers. And the biggest improvements from a open movies come in more subtle things like workflow speed-ups and resolving somewhat mundane (but very important) day-to-day inefficiencies that developers might not otherwise know (or believe) exist.