Sintel - Open Movie by Blender Foundation

Before I got into web development I was involved in several open source blender projects, usually as a modeler (someone who creates the 3d objects, then passes them on to people who color animate and process them). I have used both maya3d (the oracle of the 3d modeling, powerful, industry grade software with a cost prohibiting casual experimentation) and blender, in addition to several other programs in limited amount. Blender is everything that is right about the open source community. The feature list is very comparable to commercial applications (which usually run > $500) [link] The community(s) are great, super helpful, nice, and diverse. [link] [link] [link] (and many more, in other languages) But one of the most important, and as far as I know, unique things about blender and the community are the open movie projects. The Blender Foundation establishes clear and detailed roadmaps for features (something many open source projects struggle for). Then they take a small group of some of the best artists and programmers from the community, and pay them to create a open source project using the current goals in the roadmap. The most recent was Project Durian, which created the short CG film "Sintel" with a focus on developing blenders renderer to do high res (4k) renders, and the animation system to allow for crowds and complex animations. They also developed some sfx like fire and explosions. At the end, not only was the film released as creative commons, but all the files f