As a follow-up to the successful project Orange's "Elephants Dream", the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a couple of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam on completing a short 3D animation movie.
The creative concept of "Peach" will be completely different as for "Orange". This time it'll be funny and furry! Really!
(Read more)
Last time it was really a waste to tear down the temporary Orange studio... It actually would have worked very well to have our own facilities for projects. And not only for open movies, but also for game projects, or as a space to have coders working for a while, or for interns, for workshops or training.
To host the Peach project, a dedicated studio has been rented in Amsterdam, which actually will become the permanent seat of "the Blender Institute".
(read more)
As a second open project, the Blender Foundation and Crystal Space community are going to cooperate on organizing an Open Game. This will become possible thanks to the support by the NLGD Conference, the "Nederlandse Game Dagen", the annual conference for the Netherlands game industry.
This project will have as a main target to validate open source for creating professional quality 3d games, with Blender being used as creation and protyping tool and Crystal Space as engine and delivery platform.
An announcement with more details is being worked on still. Full project details will be presented and discussed during the Crystal Space conference, july 14-15th 2007.
www.crystalspace3d.org/main/Conference2007
(Read more about Apricot)
''Elephants Dream'' was the first "open source movie" produced with 3D modeling tool Blender. The film is  available under a  Creative Commons Attribution license and received mixed reactions.

The Blender Foundation, which maintains the open source 3D tool Blender, has announced two new projects, codenamed ''Peach'' and ''Apricot''. ''Project Peach'' will be a new open source movie, following in the footsteps of last year's Elephants Dream project (which was initially codenamed ''Orange''). ''Apricot,'' on the other hand, will use Blender in conjunction with open source 3D framework Crystal Space to create an open game, thereby showcasing both technologies.

The Blender Foundation published the plans on its website on Sunday. In order to support these and future projects, it will also set up a permanent studio called the "Blender Institute", where software developers and artists can work together in a single location. 

The ''Peach'' movie project will be headed by Sacha "Sago" Goedegebure from the Netherlands and Lyubomir Kovachev from Bulgaria. Goedegebure is well known in the Blender community for the  "Man in Man" animation, which won the  2006 Suzanne Award for Character Animation. Where the theme of ''Elephants Dream'' was dark and industrial, ''Peach'' will be "funny and furry", according to the project announcement. The project is to be completed within 6 months, beginning October 1.

Blender's open game project is still at an earlier planning stage, and details will be announced at the  Crystal Space Conference in July. According to the published plans, the project will also be completed within 6-8 months, and it will have a budget of more than 50,000 Euros.