Smoothing things over with your spurned ex-girlfriend can be arduous in the best cases, but the stakes are a little higher when a global human-robot war hangs in the balance. Tears of Steel (video below) is a 12-minute visual effects-laden sci-fi piece from the Blender Institute in Amsterdam. As Short of The Week points out, all of the effects are created using Blender, the free, open source 3D content creation suite used to create films like the upcoming Kickstarter-funded Tube.

If you’re wondering exactly what goes into making something like Tears of Steel, its creators are more than happy to show you. It’s been released, along with all of its production files, under a Creative Commons license for other artists to remix and reuse. Better still, a €34 (about $44) DVD box with both NTSC and PAL versions of the film, all of the files used to create it, and nine hours of tutorials and walkthroughs is arriving on October 12th.