I watched “Flow” yesterday (on Amazon) and I think it is very good. Here is the trailer:
And here is an interview with the director (who actually had many hats):
If you are on the sideline about using Blender (like I am) this is an interesting introduction, especially since all rendering was done in EEVEE, which is quite fast.
It’s encouraging to see that independents can produce something that gets noticed.
It’s a well-established principal in the industry that you don’t mix highly stylized characters with photorealistic backgrounds. Also, the characters lack any visual appeal at all; they’re just kinda lame.
It also struck me right away as rather odd when I watch it…
But IMO, this might not have been an issue if not for this:
So I have to agree, while of course the artist is free to express their vision, the contrast they have created does not appeal.
Thank you for sharing your opinions. I actually rather liked it because it didn’t try to mimic Pixar, Disney, or Marvel. I also liked the story and the characterization of the animals. But then again I’m more of a cat person than a dog person; too many dogs were I live.
My wife was kind enough to provide me with a list of Oscar-nominated animated films; this is one of them. It was nice to see the list not being dominated by Hollywood productions.
EDIT: Rereading the comments, I’m not aware of that principle and I don’t think the backgrounds were overly realistic. Sometimes it’s good to just sit back and enjoy a movie… I don’t particular care about the “industry” as it seems to stymie creative output.
From the same list, I started watching “The Wild Robot” from Dreamworks, which probably was created according to industry priciples, but I found it unwatchable due to a lack of story and mediocre voice acting, especially the voice of the robot.
Just FYI for Iclone users think about switching to Blender.
This is NOT an accurate representation of the default features of Blender as they used many third party commercial addons
(,most of which I have bought over the years)
including two fluid simulation addons
(cell fluids-$25 and flip fluids-$75 USD).
Also they used a vegetation addon called “geo scatter”
for all of that vast greenery
and a third party rain generator
and I am 100 precent certain they used an atmospheric addon for those beautiful cloudy/sunny skies.
My point here is that to get even this mid quality
cinematic
you are looking at hundreds of dollars worth of addons needed and they don’t all get updated at the same time when a new version of default blender is released
so it becomes quite the chore staying current to the point where we are at version 4.4?
but I effectively stopped updating at 3.6 just to avoid the headache.
(but as full disclosure,I am on indefinite hiatus from 3D in favor of 2D Animation and graphic novels/comics)
Understand that these are one time costs and the addons are typically updated free for life or until the dev
quits or dies.
Thanks for the heads up. Well, with RL, I am already quite used to spending money and what you mention sounds reasonable although staying up-to-date may be a chore, indeed.
But, the water looked really good, for example, and it is not something we are ever bound to have in iClone.
Success with your 2D endavours BTW, I’ll stick with 3D for now… 
Thanks for the heads up. Well, with RL, I am already quite used to spending money and what you mention sounds reasonable although staying up-to-date may be a chore, indeed.
Indeed Default Blender with about $350 worth of certain pro addons puts you effectively at about 80 percent on the level of Autodesk Maya.
except there are no Blender Cloth,hair addons that can match Maya’s native Ncloth or Xgen hair system.
The good new is that each Blender version
Installs in its own segregated directory
so it is easy to run multiple versions of Blender without conflicts( sort of) 
I actually have Blender 4.1 installed along with 3.6 because a few of my favorite addons that ,I own, stopped supporting 3.x
But then again, that has it’s own perils
because if I save a project in 4.1 just to use certain 4.x only addons
Then I try to open it inversion 3.6
because other vital 3.6 version addons have not been updated for 4.x I will get warnings and data loss errors. 
Success with your 2D endeavours BTW, I’ll stick with 3D for now.
Thanks Job!
I officially become a pensioner
in 11 months not sure when (or if )I will ever get back into 3D/VFX as I am enjoying
making this 2D series for my two little grandsons.
And frankly the online 2D animation communities seem more focused on creating and showcasing actual vibrant finished works with talking characters & stories
Unlike the Blender community which seems to produce mostly Nerdy Mcnerd feature tech demos of the latest geo-node set ups etc.(boring) 
You do realize that fluid simulations are computationally intensive and require a lot of setting up and trial and error. More so than for example cloth simulations or bullet physics. I have had such simulations run 24h a day for several days at a time (just to crash after three or fours days) even when the simulation was GPU based.
While I like fluid simulations, I pretty much stopped doing them because, even if you get something that kind of works, there is too little interest in such things from YouTube audiences (with the possible exception of a few “Nerdy McNerds”, as @AutoDidact might put it) to make it worth the effort.
At least that has been my experience.
Facts Brother!!
I bought the mighty Flip Fluids addon
addon (and of course install the many free updates) 3 years ago.
And to be completely honest, beyond a few tech demo tests I have not yet rendered an animation with a full res fluid simulation in Blender.
only to post the video in some Blender forum
and be ignored by 98 percent of the members
and the other two percent asking about
the models in the scene or have I tried some new experimental geo-node effect that looks like fluid sims etc.
I mean, your milage may vary, but at My jaded age its all starting to seem a bit pointless
as I am not going to work for a
VFX/animation/game studio.
and from a narrative , story telling perspective I am getting more personal Dopamine gratification from my kid friendly cartoons and commentary cartoons I am posting on youtube.
but I digress.
For some time now I no longer publish on YouTube. I used to be obsessed and then disappointed with the number of views I got. Instead, I put things on Vimeo, which has a better quality overall. In my productions, I would only use an effect if it supportds the story; I’m not interested in showing off.
I agree with Autodidact that discussions in the 3D forums are often too focussed on technicalities and not really about story-telling and film-making.
Well, for me it’s not really a matter of showing off but rather to see what can be done “at home”, call it a tech demo, if you like.
As I have explained before, I don’t have any stories to tell in animated form, so I do tech demos. (Well, Hollywood has a hard time coming up with decent stories so why should I be able to. Yeah, I could use AI to come with a story for me but I wouldn’t feel right about that somehow.)
This is my largest-scale fluid simulation (real life scale) so far:
And this is my most “successful” fluid simulation in terms of views:
Both took quite some time to simulate and render (on an RTX3090).
With regard to video platforms:
I used to have a paid Vimeo account a number of years ago. But, while I can accept that I don’t make any money with my animation clips, I did not want to pay for the privilege of posting them as well. So I switched to YouTube; besides, there are more potential viewers on YT than on Vimeo.
Yeah, but with your grandsons you kind of have a captive audience, so any additional views on YT are a bonus.
Like @animagic I will probably stick with 3D, basically for two reasons:
That being said, I also want to keep this strictly a hobby (which is also why it doesn’t really bother me that my YT channel is not monetized), so no working for VFX companies or freelancing on Fiverr.
This 43 second Blender EEVEE Video is based in the “grimdark “Warhammer40K video game universe.
At around 23 thousand views it is the my most viewed Video on my channel
I got the characters models from sketch fab and rigged them with the powerful Autorig Pro addon for Blender
the warhammer 40K fandom(fanatics TBH) is desperate for any animation with these space marines
my second most viewed video (7.9K) is another Warhammer40K Lore video that is both Blender
and an AI generated speaker.
I could have chased views and been stuck doing nothing but warhammer40K animations but if you become too popular on YT and get monetized the owners of the 40K franchise will start filing complaints against your channel for trademark
infringement so I did not bother with anymore.
These days I average about 100 views on my cartoon animated stuff on YT kids but its easier to make and more rewarding for me.
And the online 2D animation community is just more focused on the finished stories not debating technobabble like the blender communities.
Just to be clear, I was talking about fluid simulations (and that they get few views); a few other videos of mine got more than 10K views each.
I try not to use or piggyback on other people’s IP, or do “comment-style” content. Besides, not being into games, comic books, or pop culture in general, I know virtually nothing about these IPs anyway.
Yeah, the Wild Robot storyline hardly brought anything new to the Outsider Lady [=robot]/Fish Out of Water on a Quest to Save Community conceit. And it had illogical plot holes big enough to drive a Mac truck through. (Robot brings a truce between predators and prey long enough to get through the entire winter. What was anybody EATING? Robot is reprogrammed by the evil empire but they unaccountably turn SWEET at the end.) It was a big bore. But the star of the show was the artsy stylization of 3D backgrounds, something people around here have been advocating for years. It was quite a fall from grace for Chris Sanders, who made the greatest Disney flick of all time: Lilo and Stitch. That one had heart, integrity, maturity, and a great sense of humor.
This is correct, I get hardly any views on Vimeo, but I don’t really persue them anymore. I use it mainly as a place to store streamers for film festivals. I find it gratifyng to get accepted at a festival and see my film shown before a live audience. More personal that way.
I never got a huge number of views on YT, except for one:
Which makes one think, why bother… 
The thruth is, I find satisfaction in just making my movies, learning things along the way, and then see what happens.
Minor correction:
This is actually my second most viewed video
not the one I mentioned earlier
“To have friends, you must first be found to be friendly”, God. “Flow” represents the value of friendship excellently, but that’s what I think. Hurry up and finish production because, I have Great Grand Children (GGC) who will both enjoy and the evaluate the love, actions and true friendships found in “Flow”, and I know how my GGC’s rate love, . Not in quality of the images, but in the quality of the friendships,.
Well. “Flow” beat out Pixar at the oscars
That’s good, thanks for posting! I didn’t watch the Oscars, I sort of forgot about them… 