Durian pre-sale campaign started
on July 30th, 2009, by Ton
Similarly to how we’ve realized projects Orange, Peach and Apricot, we organize a donation campaign to collect funding for Durian.
You can help us to realize this film by purchasing the DVD edition of Durian in advance!
We’ve also decided to go for a triple disk DVD this time, which will have at least:
- The movie (approx 6-8 min) in best DVD quality widescreen format (disks in both NTSC and PAL).
- The HD version of the movie (.avi and/or .mov).
- The third disk with a lot of video tutorials by the artists and developers.
- All .blend files, models, textures, and so on… the material used to create the movie.
- The original script, breakdown, storyboards.
- Documentation and other tutorials by the team members about all technical aspects the movie; like how to re-use assets, animate characters, or add new shots.
- And of course all the extras we can’t predict yet, like commentary tracks, a making-of documentary, outtakes, and so on.
Get your credit!
If you purchase and pay the DVD by september 15th latest, you can get your name mentioned on the official movie credit scroll! To make sure the crediting works fine, we will remind everyone via email a month before the movie goes to premiere.
As you can notice on the campaign “money meter”, we target at a pre-sale of 2000 this time. Very ambitious, but the targets for this project are ambitious too. Order now!
General donations are welcome too, check the Sponsor Prospectus for offerings, or use the Donate button there.
Thanks for the support!
The Durian Team
July 30th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Three disks?!!? Yay! All the extras look really cool! And of coarse the movie looks great too!
Keep it up Durian team!
(that “money meter” is just way cool!)
July 30th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
YEAH!
I just ordered mine. Yeah!!
July 30th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Hooray! My sponsoring is on it’s way!
July 30th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Just ordered mine! Been waiting for the pre-sale to start!! Can’t wait for 2.5. All the progress so far has been awesome!!!
July 30th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Ordered mine! 🙂
July 30th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Just ordered the DVD!
I believe in the Durian Team.
July 30th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Just ordered mine 🙂
July 30th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
3 DVDs, sounds great!
Hope you get the amount of sponsoring needed.
July 30th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Placed my order, best of luck to you all.
July 30th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
I’d like to donate without buying anything
July 30th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Yehaa, greeaat! im looking forward to see some more progress!
Btw. if you want to follow another cool blender project, you should check out TUBE. tube.freefac.org –
July 30th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
oh, and I believe this is the first published drawing(s) made for the durian project, right? Pretty cool.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
I just pre-ordered mine as well, yet a small but happy contribution to what promises to change the course of computer graphics worldwide!
July 30th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
Yeah, just ordered mine too! This will be great!
July 31st, 2009 at 1:09 am
Awesome! This time I even ordered early enough to be in the credits. 🙂
July 31st, 2009 at 1:58 am
Brilliant, I’ll be sure to order mine.
I have one question though, will the team be using Blender 2.5 dev or the stable 2.49x release? I’m just wondering how any improvements to particles, hi-poly scenes and stuff are going to be integrated into 2.5 and/or 2.49x at the same time?
July 31st, 2009 at 2:19 am
Socceroos:
They will work in 2.5. All development for this project will be done in a branch of 2.5 and merged back. The 2.49X series is currently bugfix only.
July 31st, 2009 at 2:30 am
Daniel:
Thanks for the quick response! That is indeed great news.
Having artists use the 2.5 code base in a production environment is the very best way to get it stable and help accelerate its development.
Can’t wait!
July 31st, 2009 at 2:40 am
Ordered from Japan now!
July 31st, 2009 at 3:11 am
Will the NTSC version actually be rendered in NTSC from the start, or will it be a PAL > NTSC conversion like the NTSC BBB DVD was?
July 31st, 2009 at 6:54 am
Ordered!! It’s great to be involved in yet another (third) project. After this, I think we will have progressed to the point where a 40 minute movie would be feasible. That would be a major turning point for blender, just like ED was. ED was so inspiring!!!! dibs on spanish (mexico) subtitles if there’s gonna be talking!!!
July 31st, 2009 at 7:31 am
Just ordered my copy! Last time I ordered too late to get my name in the credits. This time I was more prepared! Good luck to all the artists and devs. I look forward to it!
July 31st, 2009 at 10:22 am
Ordered 🙂 I have loads of expectations from this project and the coders. Lot of eyeballs will be on this one, I wish good luck to all involved, I am eagerly waiting for the DVD’s 🙂
July 31st, 2009 at 10:47 am
Hey btw. do you have the nr. 2000 buyer prize again this year? (last year, a friend of mine told me, the one who bought BBB copy number 2000 got a free t-shirt and some stuff from the e-shop)
July 31st, 2009 at 10:58 am
i really hope to see lots of improvement in animation area for 2.5. especially some inovative way in IK and FK switching. i’ll pre-oder next month, i hope i’ll have the money by then 🙁
July 31st, 2009 at 11:06 am
Yeah…Ordered…..Payed…… and now? wait … wait… wait…
Please give us more news, photos, stories on your blogs.
July 31st, 2009 at 11:31 am
Ordered.
I’m expecting mostly to learn many new techniques and how-tos from these DVDs. Not only about CG, but also about movie-making in general, and about using Blender in production environment. Please show us your day to day difficulties and how you’ve overcome them.
I also want my name in this one, just for fun.
And the money meter is REALLY GREAT 🙂 it lets everyone measure the notoriety of this project. I really wonder if it will ever reach 2000 sales? I’d say it won’t, but I hope I’m wrong!
July 31st, 2009 at 12:16 pm
@Piiichan:
Really? I’m almost certain they will sell them all.
At least, they’ve already sold 1/8 of the number 🙂
July 31st, 2009 at 12:17 pm
@DPic: I’ve added a PayPal donation button on the Sponsor page!
July 31st, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Almost 200 DVDs paid in less than 24 hours (and a few dozens pending). Not bad!
July 31st, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I’m ordering mine right now, and mailing everyone I know to urge them to get it too! Some of my friends will want to be on the credits but get a Blu-Ray if possible. Is that an option, or is a Blu-Ray version a later concern, after the process, like with BBB? I guess he could donate, then buy Blu-Ray as and when it happens. 😉
All the best to the Durian team!
July 31st, 2009 at 4:54 pm
The Blu-ray of ED & BBB was independently produced by Imagion in Germany, and kindly offered to us for resale. Unfortunately the process of mastering and reproduction of this format is tedious and not commonly available yet. Only few companies do this right now, at quite high expenses. The advantage of DVD is that we can do it simply all in-house, and have a medium nearly everyone can read. Blu-ray still is only available at a quite small percentage of computers.
When we’re getting close to final, I’ll definitely try to get a Blu-ray version arranged too. HD is simply so much better than this stupid PAL or NTSC format… and a dual layer Blu-ray can hold 50 GB, sufficient to put a load of extras on!
http://www.imagion.de/en/news/news-article/article/3/big-buck-bunny-opensource-goes-blu-ray.html
July 31st, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Thanks for considering Blu, Ton. For almost 2 years now, I’ve been buying movies exclusively on Blu-ray and have thoroughly been enjoying the great picture & sound in my home theater.
August 1st, 2009 at 2:34 am
Awesome sauce !!
I’ve bought every official blender DVD(except elephants dream) so far and I don’t plan on stopping that trend in the near future.
August 1st, 2009 at 3:57 am
This campaign could certainly benefit from some evangelism, the counter slowed down significantly after the first day.
August 1st, 2009 at 10:53 am
Odered! Yipiee!
August 1st, 2009 at 5:17 pm
http://digg.com/software/Durian_pre_sale_started_Get_in_the_credits
Dugg!
August 1st, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Appreciate the Digg! However, it should read either ‘newest film project after Big Buck Bunny’ or ‘newest project after Yo Frankie’.
🙂
August 1st, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Someone publish this in the News section of CGtalk. Try your best in explaining and evangelizing 😀
August 2nd, 2009 at 12:09 am
Only 2000? It isn’t over reaching, you guys are underestimating the growth of the community. Ordered mine.
August 2nd, 2009 at 12:51 am
Does the “thermometer” show Money (€ or $) or sold copies?
August 2nd, 2009 at 2:02 am
@toontje: AFAIR, BBB’s target was just 1000… And don’t forget about crisis!^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W 🙂
@panzi: “we target at a *pre-sale of 2000*”, not? 🙂
August 2nd, 2009 at 2:33 am
@Anonymous: Oh, overlooked that.
August 2nd, 2009 at 4:12 am
Thanks to my boss paypal account, i ordered my copy!!!!
Buenos Aires – Argentina!!
August 3rd, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Really looking forward to my DVDs 😀
Why Blu-ray? 6-8 minutes of HD content should be easy to put on a DVD, it’s not the disk that makes it HD.
August 3rd, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Ordered and paid mine. Way to go, Durian team! Et salutations spéciales pour David Revoy qui me doit toujours une bière!
August 3rd, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Ordered too, let this thermometer explode!
Idem pour David, t’en serres 5 à tous de la part des sudistes, et au plaisir de t’accueillir à ton retour en se refaisant une soirée polygonale 😉
Yann
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:07 pm
my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with
August 3rd, 2009 at 11:53 pm
Great work guys, I can’t wait!
I wonder, has anyone considered contacting a company like Netflix to see if they would be interested in sponsoring the project in some way? For example; they could purchase some pre-ordered copies, I would say quite a few for their needs, and get their name in the credits as a sponsor. This would benefit both the Durian project in that it would receive funding and exposure to Netflix customers, and Netflix in that they would receive good publicity for being a sponsor and in the end would receive a high quality product that they could in turn rent to their customers based on their current business model.
I think it would be a win win for for groups that may develop into a great relationship for the Blender community. I did some digging around their site and found a link to the companies public relations page:
http://www.netflix.com/MediaCenter?id=1069&lnkctr=cu_pr
I clicked on the link for “Are you looking for information on our media buying and planning?” and was taken to a contact page where there were subjects such as “Event Partnerships” and “Donations.” I am not sure if this is the best route of contact or not but it seemed interesting.
Just something to consider since raising funding is so critical to a successful project like this.
August 4th, 2009 at 6:11 am
I’ll take some of your suggestions and try to apply them.
August 4th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Good idea Matt! I think last time there was a Dutch company who contributet with quad PC’s for BBB? More companies should seriously look into donating into this project. It should be a fraction of their budget for which in turn they’ll get a lot of exposure. Maybe Sony Pictures for being on the Open Source tour should be interested too? Maybe Erwin Coumans (who works at Sony PS3) could find his way through to the right contacts?
Maybe we should contact them big universities like Harvard, Stanford and Cornell. I’ve heard on TV a couple of years ago that their budget (if I remember it well) is 14, 7 and 9 BILLION dollars.
Else the Blender Foundation could also contact the deans of those universities to cook up something for their students to work on Blender so they could get their credits for computer sience, physics etc.
Just a brain storm.
August 4th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
YEAH! ^^
August 5th, 2009 at 12:20 am
@toontje: I think those are some very good ideas! I liked that information about Sony opening up some of their work; I had not seen that before. I think that a partner project between Blender and Sony Image Works could serve both groups quite well in terms of exposure for each and cross project idea “pollination” if you will. There are a lot of companies that could be potential partners. The key being that the partner project had the goals of, creating great content using as much free and open source software as possible, and sharing that work with the community to promote those tools that were used, usually Blender for this series of projects.
It may even be an option to consider of working with an industry leader, like Sony, to create a full length animated feature film. It could be initially released in theaters to make back initial investment dollars, (as there would probably need to be some) and later released in the standard Blender foundation method of sell DVDs to support development and release the content for free on the web for educational purposes. Just a thought, it could really get the word out there if a full move was done in Blender to showcase to the world what we already know it can do.
On the note the University involvement I think there is already some of that going on via Google Summer of Code, but I would agree that more involvement is always good. To expand on that a little bit, maybe not try to just have CS students do work, as Blender is not just about code it is about what you can do with the program. It may be an idea to contact the art and graphics departments of schools and get those students involved with USING Blender to create and getting involved with the community that way. One of the most powerful things about Blender is all the artists in the community who use it and give actual feedback on how to improve it from a user prospective. Also, it would be nice to graduate some students into the graphics industry who have experience with Blender so if the company they end up working for ever says, “Hey we are evaluating adding Blender to our tool kit does anyone know anything about it?” those student will be able to say, “Sure I used it in University for a few projects!” Or even better, “Sure I used it in University for a few projects, and still do!”
These are some great ideas that are getting generated here, but does anyone know how or if they can bring any value to the project? I know that the end product will be open source, but it does not look to me (from the outside) like it has an open development process. It would seem that everyone that is going to have a hand in this project has already been selected. Not that I am saying that is bad, just wondering how any of these ideas can come to life and benefit at least Durian at this point.
By the way, is there a forum somewhere that this conversation should be taking place? Or is this an acceptable format?
August 5th, 2009 at 3:49 am
Indeed we need some forum maybe over at blenderartist to discuss this. Indeed for Durian per se it wouldn’t make a deference i think.
I almost forgot them guys from Toronto University who wanted to make the nodes material system as powerful as “forgot-name-commercial-app”, but it kinda faded away. But what I’m getting at that it lives in the corridors of some universities and it should spread.
I myself have written some authors of research papers in the past. A few actually responded back with great interest. I think that we should try to convince them that Blender is a perfect vehicle to carry and test their research.
August 5th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
Gotcha!
August 6th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
I wonder if THIS time a fruity weapon of mass destruction will make it’s premiere 😉
August 7th, 2009 at 7:12 am
Yay, ordered mine. Blender ist allready awesome, soon it will become even better.
August 7th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Ordered mine too.
I hope that this one will have the same quality as the BBB DVD.
August 8th, 2009 at 1:27 am
I’m waiting to buy copy #787 😛 But you can be sure as hell that I’ll buy it. I just want to try to be #787 XD
August 8th, 2009 at 11:04 am
I ordered mine as well,
I’ll be looking forward to all your creative works.
August 9th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Hi all @ Blender!
Great new initiative with Durian! I am looking forward to the result but seeing the ideas and all the artwork of the artists that will execute the project I am very confident on a beautiful movie.
May I throw in a suggestion for the HD movie part?: Could that be on Blue-ray? That would be execelent.
Enjoy the new project and perhaps see you @ Blender conference!
Best regards,
Michiel
August 10th, 2009 at 11:23 am
@Michiel
Michiel: The Blue-ray thing was already asked and answered by Ton on juli 31 up above. Maybe you should his answer there.
August 10th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Your sponsorlink to wavemage is broken (the logo appears, not the website).
And I ordered mine too =D
August 10th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
@Samson
Works for me
August 11th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
@Samson & Anonymous :
Samson was right , Anonymous , but I fix it that’s why all is good for you. Thanks guys for the feedback about the website fix.
August 14th, 2009 at 8:38 am
Very nice guys 🙂
Will order mine asap.
Is the image posted a spoiler for Durian ? Also when we are suppose to get the teaser video/preview of the image.
@ Ton : Sir nice job with blender,. I always try to learn 3d but it goes over my head but now I am interested and downloading some video tus. Thanks for the nice program for linux [specially] .. Why don’t you guys aim for 30min movie ?
Just one more thing, blender seems to favor intel cpu, why you guys are so much bent towards intel ? Anadtech benchmarking shows this http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3619&p=5
The comment ” All of the DDR3 Phenom IIs are actually slower in our Blender test, but it doesn’t matter since the app seems to heavily favor Intel CPUs. ”
A 3d program as good as blender shouldn’t be biased towards a company 🙂 try and make it universally optimized not for a single company 😉
Keep up the good work and best of luck for the prject. Looking forward for getting the DVD 😀
August 14th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Why you guys have used Photoshop to make the mountain image ? 🙁 I thought you guys only use Open Source tools 🙁
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/812/desktop5x.jpg
August 16th, 2009 at 8:08 am
No replies from developers and blender head ?
August 19th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
As interested as I am about getting my credit for purchasing the DVD, (as the main marketing tagline is focused on), it’d be a lot more comforting to know that I’m helping to add a lot more development time and tools to Blender and maybe I’d be more compelled to pre-order, if we can get a glimpse or plans of what’s to be expected of the project. Maybe after we get some pre-production artwork, then maybe most of us would be more willing to pre-order. Until then, keep up the good work and keep us posted. 2.5 is looking to be a fantastic update.
August 20th, 2009 at 9:55 am
@Dark Star:
Sorry, don’t read comments of older posts every day 🙂
The remark from Anandtech is incorrect. Our releases are built without any cpu specific optimizing. On other independent websites people sometimes post intel or amd optimized builds, it’s possible he used not our official releases for the test.
The promotion images have been created by the durian candidates at home, in their own time. When they’re over here, it’ll be strictly gimp, no photoshop!
August 20th, 2009 at 10:04 am
@ Ton and Dark Star –
I don’t think I’m going nutty but I’m pretty sure I answered the Photoshop related comment and Darkstar replied already. Might be something with the spam filter?
At any rate, Gimp was used for the bulk of the work including all of the background painting but due to computer issues I used Photoshop to finish it off.
Cheers,
Ben.
August 20th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Well, I’m not nutty. 🙂 Just answered the very same question on another post… Please keep questions to one post, we try to keep up with it all.
August 21st, 2009 at 7:48 pm
@Ton Thanks for replying 🙂 Everything is cleared 🙂
Best of luck for the project 🙂
August 22nd, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Woot! I just scored copy 787 😀
February 18th, 2010 at 8:22 pm
where i can find durian dvd’s???
March 25th, 2010 at 8:06 pm
At any rate, Gimp was used for the bulk of the work including all of the background painting but due to computer issues I used Photoshop to finish it off.
July 27th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
is it possible to buy it now?