Sintel DVDs have shipped with film, commentaries, and Blender tutorials

Well, even though it’s much longer than initially planned, the film is still very short just under 15 minutes. I don’t want to give away spoilers, though you may have heard them by now. But the film is moving to a far greater degree than the artsy and solid Elephants Dream or the cartoon humor of Big Buck Bunny. Not yet “high art”, perhaps, but entertaining and connecting. The characters are much more attractive than in the previous films. It seems to me that the Blender Institute is successfully learning how to produce better films.

I really enjoyed it, and I had to right away watch it several times to be grateful for the detail. Of course, the technical know-how of the modeling and animation is the real value of the show, and there is some amazing stuff here. Perhaps most on display is the particle-based hair modeling, which looks really good. I understand that it’s still not fairly where the developers want it to be, but as a viewer, I found it fairly impressive even as it is.

If I noticed anything that was unsatisfactory, it was probably the water effects. At a couple of points in the film, there is water in a urn, and the shape is wrong, as if the thickness and the optical properties of the water were wrong. But it’s a very minor subject, considering the number of things they got right.

There’s also just a lot in this film. Due to the use of mosaics with lots of different 3D environments, this short film has an awful lot of distinct settings, which must have required a lot of modeling.
The first two disks contain the movie and special features in NTSC and PAL formats, in that order; the third disk is a DVD-ROM with “Extras,” especially tutorials; and the fourth contains the actual Blender file data used to create the film