The two open movie projects, Orange and Peach respectively have pionered the world of open movie production. The Orange movie project released Elephants Dream as the worlds first open movie and the same team supported by the Blender foundation now gave us Big Buck Bunny. Both projects are made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.

Traditionally you need to watch the mandatory disclaimers and copyright notices before the action starts. That is; if you are lucky enough that the region code of the dvd matches that of your drive. In short the paranoid industry spends enormous amounts of resources on lawyers and copy protection. Protectiong themselves from who? One might be right to ask.

The open movie projects are a breath of life to the industry and a prove of concept that professional movie production and animation can be accomplished with an open phillosophy utilizing only open source software.

I fired up Google Earth and got the tool working smoothly and quickly learned to navigate with it. Later i tried in in Google sketch up where it seems to be less intuitive to use. But I’m confident i will learn it eventually.

What i was more interested in was to get the tool running in Blender and Second Life. Second Life is not supported by the tool but it seems to be possible through using Space Navigator with a joystick driver – i wonder if i can use it for a flight simulator.

Driver for Space Navigator Space Navigator with SL – SL wiki

So it seems from these resources that the recipe for getting Second Life, windows and space navigator working together will work with Tenebrous settings for the RBC9 driver. I have yet to try that on my PC. But what I’m more interested in is to get it working on my Macbook Pro.

There seems to be a similar solution to the one on windows with the software Controller Mate. I have yet to try that as well but before i will try to find a free driver available for mac. Especially since i expect 3D Connexion to do something about their Second Life support eventually.

Meanwhile i discovered that a beta plugin for blender was released yesterday so I’m downloading that now.

I will keep you updated on my results later.