Blender Studio has opened the whole OVERGROWN archive. For one week, every article, every production log and the content gallery are readable without a subscription — animation, rigging, fur, shading, sets, lighting, water, compositing, and a masterclass on painterly shadows sitting in the middle of it.
They are calling it Open Doors Week. Go and read it before it shuts.
What OVERGROWN is
Announced in July, co-directed by Hjalti Hjálmarsson and Rik Schutte. A post-human world — robots, an apocalypse of some description, nature taking the place back — with an unlikely pair at the centre of it.
It is Blender Studio’s first attempt at feature length. That is the part that matters, and it is easy to skim past. The open movies built the studio’s reputation at ten and fifteen minutes a time. A feature is a different job, and everyone who has worked on one knows the specific way a short film’s pipeline dies somewhere around the sixtieth minute: the naming convention that was fine across forty shots, the caching strategy that assumed you could re-sim overnight, the rig nobody wrote down because two people understood it.
Blender Studio’s stated goal is a feature playbook — open tools and open documentation for running a production of this size in Blender. The playbook is the deliverable, and the film is what forces it into existence.
Why the logs are the thing worth reading
A finished frame tells you almost nothing. It is the answer with the working rubbed out.
Production logs are the working. They carry the version that did not hold up, the reason a groom got rebuilt, the point at which somebody decided the water was too expensive and what they did instead. If you have ever tried to reverse engineer a look from a breakdown reel, you know how much is missing from a breakdown reel.
The fur entries are the ones I would open first. Fur is where a small team gets punished hardest, because it is simultaneously a modelling problem, a shading problem and a render-time problem, and solving any one of them badly makes the other two worse. The same thing is true one step over in stylised work, where the fix is usually to stop treating strands as strands and shade the whole groom as one mass. Whatever OVERGROWN landed on, the log will say why — including, with luck, the approach they abandoned.
Water and compositing are the other two I would not skip. Both are places where feature length changes the maths. A hero water sim you can babysit for one shot becomes a scheduling problem across two hundred.
The number underneath all this
Blender Studio funds itself on subscriptions. When OVERGROWN was announced it had 5,980 subscribers and said it needed 7,000 to carry the pitch to the next stage — the film market, buyers, distribution.
Sources do not agree on the deadline. Some coverage of the July announcement put it at the beginning of September, some at the end of it. What is clearer is that a later Blender Studio post indicated the 7,000 had not been reached. I could not confirm today’s figure from a primary source. The studio’s own site carries the live counter.
So the timing of Open Doors Week is worth stating plainly. A studio that funds a film by charging for its production logs has just made every one of those logs free, in the same window as the subscriber target it is chasing. Blender Studio has not framed it that way, and I am not going to put words in their mouth about causation. The two facts sit next to each other and readers can do what they like with that.
There is a defensible logic to it either way. The pitch to a lapsed or curious artist is much easier to make with the archive open than with a paywall and a promise. Let people see the water setup, and some of them subscribe.
The scope question
Feature-length animation with a team this size, in an open pipeline, publishing as they go — it is an unreasonable thing to attempt, and I mean that admiringly. Blender Studio is not alone in the unreasonableness; there is a whole seam of small teams right now taking on scope that used to require a building full of people, like the dozen people building an open world at Wolf Haus. The common thread is a refusal to accept that the scope tier and the headcount tier have to match.
Sometimes that works. Often it produces something that ships late and smaller than promised. Either outcome is documented here, which is the unusual part — most studios publish the playbook only when the film was a success.
Next up is a teaser scene, now that the exploration phase is wrapping. A mid-September reveal date has been reported, and I could not confirm it against Blender Studio’s own posts, so treat the date as unsettled and the teaser itself as near.
Read the archive this week. The film may or may not get made. The logs are useful regardless, and in a fortnight most of them go back behind the door.
Project details, directors, premise and the feature-playbook goal from Blender Studio’s own announcement and its coverage on BlenderNation, 80.lv and Digital Production, July 2026. Open Doors Week scope from Blender Studio’s blog post as reported on 4 September 2026. Subscriber figures as stated at announcement; current count unverified at the time of writing.