Blender Bob: From Maya Beta Tester to Creating a Feature Length Open Movie

Robert “Blender Bob” Rioux has been on a mission to create a full feature length movie, called Tiki, for quite some time. Initially it was going to be a live action film, but he was inspired by the Blender Animation Studio’s open movie projects (where all of the production assets and tools become free to use after the release) and the infectious creative energy of the Blender community at the Blender Conferences.

A feature film is a monumentally ambitious project for one man, but Bob has a big YouTube audience and a good connection with his viewers and was able to get a large number of volunteers to enlist, with the promise that all proceeds from the film, if successful, would go to the Blender Foundation. 

Kent Trammell knows a thing or two about community created projects, after directing three large CG Cookie community “Collabs”, and was eager to talk to Bob at BCON LA about the experience. Listen to their conversation below or whenever you find your podcasts or read on for a short summary. 

Blender Bob's Unbelievable Backstory

Robert is a true industry veteran. His interest in 3D first began in 1982 when he watched Tron. Subsequently, Jurassic Park in 1993 secured his career direction. At the time, the only way to create renders was on expensive Silicon Graphics (SGI) computers, so he created a company with a friend and won some government funding to purchase an SGI workstation as well as a copy of Softimage. Or rather, he intended to purchase Softimage but ultimately chose Alias PowerAnimator; Maya's ancestor.

After Autodesk acquired Alias in 2005 for $182 million, Bob was so active in providing feedback that the developers might have known him by name! According to Bob, a few features that still exist in Maya were added as a result of his suggestions. 

Ultimately his company did not work out but Bob persisted in the field and eventually landed a job at Square (later renamed Square Enix) to work on the full-CGI movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Even though the job was in his dream location of Hawaii, he quit Square out of frustration with the glacial progress and wasteful process of the production, which he describes as “a total nightmare”. 

A move to LA provided him with a fresh start, and there he worked on effects for film and television at VIFX and, later, Rhythm and Hues. Bob’s IMBD page is quite impressive, and he has worked on over 65 productions including Ghost in the Shell, Star Trek: Insurrection, The Predator, Stranger Things, Men in Black: International, Pacific Rim: Uprising, X-Men: Apocalypse, and Blade.

These days, Bob works at Real by Fake, which is a smaller VFX studio that has worked on an impressive number of films and TV shows as well. 

Along that journey, Bob tried Blender a few times, but it didn’t stick with him until the Blender 2.8 release. The big thing that initially convinced him to switch was Cycles rendering faster, crisper, and more stable than Arnold for the specific shots that he needed. When it came to overlapping transparency for trees and anti-aliasing, Cycles was the clear winner. We may take it for granted, but it really is incredible that Cycles is completely free! 

Tiki: A True Passion Project

Bob created the Kickstarter for Tiki in August of 2023, and it was fully funded by September. As of spring of 2024, all of the assets for the film have been created, including 157 props, 12 characters, and 21 animals. All of the voice recording is complete, which was paid for by the kickstarter and recorded by local artists in Tahiti. The motion capture, recorded by Captain Disillusion’s unpaid intern Alan, is also complete. 

Of course, as with any production, there are many challenges. One such hurdle is hair. Some characters have long, flowing hair that should move with the animation. However, the team used the new geometry nodes hair system, which does not have dynamics out of the box. One of the team members built an add-on to provide simulation for the node-based hair, but it sometimes flickers unexplainably and they’re still working out the kinks.

It’s also their first time using a pipeline that includes Face App, Reality Capture, and iClone together for the motion capture animation, and that took quite a lot of experimenting to get right.

Working with a wide range of skill levels from the community can also be a challenge. Bob gave the folks with less experience easier tasks and helped them improve their work by offering personal critiques and feedback via video, very similar to Kent’s approach in the collabs. Some artists naturally stepped up and wanted to get more involved and were given lead titles for the movie. This way Bob didn't have to manage every single thing himself. 

But that doesn’t mean he’s kicking back and letting others do all the work. A bit of fortune / misfortune is that, due to the recent actors' strike, Bob’s VFX work at the studio Real by Fake dried up and he had a few months of temporary unemployment. He used this time to work on Tiki exclusively. In the interview, he mentioned that he had been working on it from 7:30am to 11:30pm almost every day, weekends included. A feature film is a marathon and not a sprint! 

Bob’s Pipeline Tools

Some of the tools that are used to create Tiki are high tech, like the motion capture apps mentioned previously. Others began as basic as you can get, like Google Sheets for tracking assets. Sometimes, something simple is all you need. 

For file hosting, they’re now using Seafile instead of Dropbox or Google Drive, since there is an open source and free version. Bob initially hosted it on his own server in his basement, but that proved too slow as the team grew. Eventually, Real by Fake allowed him to host file space on their big production servers. 

As the project grew in complexity, Google Sheets was eventually supplanted by Kitsu. Kitsu is a full project management software specifically designed for film and animation. Thankfully Kitsu decided to sponsor the Tiki project and let Bob use all of the features for free, which is pretty incredible. 

For managing the files themselves with version control, Bob is using Prism, which is also sponsoring the project and supplying free licenses. We can all take a lesson from Bob here: It never hurts to ask.

The Future of Tiki

After so many months of continuous work, the volunteer team working on Tiki has been getting a little burned out. While asset modeling and texturing is fairly easy, Animation is much harder. There are far fewer good animators in the community compared to modelers. Even a mocap driven animated film requires an enormous amount of manual animation. Will they be able to see it through to the end? 

Early in the production process, one of the images used to promote Tiki on Kickstarter was generated using AI, and that, in turn, generated skepticism about the project, especially on Twitter. Bob quickly removed the image and replaced it with a real render, but the reputational damage was done and that, understandably, fizzled some of the excitement for the film within the Blender community. Since then, Bob has been posting regular updates on Kickstarter and YouTube to keep interest up and everyone in the loop. 

Bob announced a surprise in his Tiki presentation at BCON LA. The latest development with Tiki is that the VFX company he works for, Real by Fake, is willing to pick up the project and has agreed to provide the resources needed to finish it. Of course, as part of the deal, they will make some profit if the film does well, but there will still be a donation to the Blender Foundation. Also, very importantly, any artists who worked on the project will be paid fairly for their time even though they initially agreed to volunteer. 

We will see in the coming months how the film takes shape. Even after so many recently canceled Blender animation projects, I’m cautiously optimistic that this one will see the light of day and get picked up by some of the major streaming services. Best of luck to Bob and the team, and here’s hoping the CG Cookie crew will get to dissect the heck out of it in a film review!