Big Buck Bunny is a very well done short animation video created completely with the open source 3D design and rendering program called Blender. The Blender Foundation, the non-profit organization created to support the software, helped to produce the movie short with a professional production company as an effort to improve the software by pushing it beyond what the hobbyist community could do. In the end they created a great promotion for the software as well as helped to spur various improvements in it's development including the rendering of fur and grass. The video is free to download, but you can also purchase it on DVD or Blue-ray disk. In addition, because it is open source and released under the Creative Commons license, all of the models and music created for the animation are also freely available to developers and designers who would like to experiment with them or use them in their own projects. The next project that the Foundation is working on is a 3D game based on the characters in the movie called Apricot.

Open source projects like these are a real boon to budding digital artists or students since the tools and the materials or content are available for free. Well, almost free. You'll need the high speed bandwidth to download over 7 GB of data file. The finished movie is much smaller depending on what size you download. Plus, you'll need a computer capable of running the 3D software, which by the way, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux platforms.

Here is demo video of the game: