It was a strong year for Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations, and an underdog triumphed. At the 97th annual Academy Awards at Ovation Hollywood in Los Angeles last night, Flow beat competition from Pixar’s Inside Out 2, DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot and Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
Gints Zilbalodis tale about a cat in a flooded world missed out on the Oscar for Best International Feature Film but still became Latvia’s first Oscar win. And it was surely also the first Oscar winner to be made entirely in the free 3D modelling software Blender, cementing the open-source program’s place among the best animation software.
Flow was one of our highlights of Annecy 2024, and it still seems incredible that it was made by a small team using Blender alone. It was rendered in EEVEE, Blender’s realtime render engine.
Gints thanked Blender when accepting the award. Speaking to press afterwards, he said: "Any kid now has tools that are used to make now Academy Award-winning films, so I think we’re going to see all kinds of exciting films being made from kids who might not have had a chance to do this before.
Rendered in EEVEE? Really? Wow! Considering you get so much more optical fidelity with Cycles it’s really astonishing they’ve used EEVEE.
FYI EEVEE now supports ray tracing so lighting can be much better than before with much less hassle. cycles is obviously better for pbr but EEVEE can easily be used for more stylized renders, and probably be preferred.
The fact that all the textures look painted explain why eevee was used. There are frames in this movie that look like literal oil paintings.
The creator favoured speedy feedback on everything. And it’s not like you can’t make things look gorgeous in EEVEE, why go for fidelity when you can make things look nice.