Sun hosts Blender Institute's open movie project for online distribution: Sun Microsystems today announced the online release of the 3D animation film "Big Buck Bunny" rendered using Network.com's Sun Grid compute utility service. The movie is created using open source 3D software suite Blender, available from blender.org as well as Network.com Application Catalog, a collection of online grid-enabled applications that can be used in an on-demand basis with "Click and Run" ease. Additionally, Network.com is one of the web hosting locations for the online release, and the movie can be downloaded from www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download. "The Big Buck Bunny movie project demonstrates that the barriers to entry in the 3D animation world can be lowered tremendously using on-demand computing platforms. Even though the Blender team did not have support of a big studio, they succeeded with the community support, an open source rendering software and an on-demand computing platform," said David Folk, Group Manager of Network.com Marketing, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "With a growing collection of applications, a host of new developer tools and worldwide availability, Network.com is attracting more developers and end-users to use, build and share new services for a wide range of industries." The movie promotes open content creation as it is not only developed using open source software but also distributed under an open license that gives artists free access to the entire studio database of assets and files used to make the movie. "The primary intent of the movie was to stimulate the development of open source 3D software, but the quality of Big Buck Bunny on an artistic level as well as on technical ingenuity is what you would expect from large animation studios," said Ton Roosendaal, producer and Blender Institute director. "We needed over fifty thousand CPU-hours of compute time, and Sun's Network.com grid service provided us a very powerful platform where we could use hundreds of CPUs simultaneously to significantly speed up the movie rendering process without needing to own the compute infrastructure."