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Raytracing with Java - http://www.artofillusion.org/

Now, if the Blender team could ever pull theierr head out of their ass and bring in a UI developer and stay out of the way... they might have something. But it's been ears coming and I doubt we'll ever see Blender become usable.

I've actually seen an interview with a Blender developer (a Linux magazine I flipped through, I can't remember which one) from when Elephant's Dream came out that discussed why they made the interface the way they did. Being the in-house application of NeoGeo, it was geared towards how they worked, and the developers gave the animators what they wanted - maximum productivity after learning the application when used the way that particular group of people liked to use it. The developers came to them and offered them an easier to learn interface - they were told "No, you idiot. We're going out of business and have to try to finish our last few projects. We're not going to hire anyone new. Now add this highly unintuitive key sequence to shortcut this arcane task that no novice has ever heard of." After it was released for widespread consumption, ease of learning became a common request, but there were still people learning the interface it had and wanting to be able to use it the way they had learned to. After almost ten years since its shareware release, and five since its release under GPL, this hypothetical easy-to-use, powerful, intuitive 3d modeling software that someone must have their head up their ass not to have delivered on a silver platter by now would probably have to take the form of a completely separate front-end, a fork, or a complete rewrite with some of the nuts and bolts used over.

And there are people out there who think that Blender "has something" just like it is. If a hobbyist or student wants gratis open-source 3d modeling with an easy to use interface, they should try Art of Illusion. It's nowhere near as powerful, but it's easy and intuitive enough for someone to learn on, and it can export into formats used by the big boys. According to TFA, Blender has the same "Learning path to be productive" as the others, even with the less familiar and intuitive interface. If someone is "getting serious", there isn't really a way around having to invest the time to learn something. And of six packages the article reviewed, only one could be learned in the single month they give you to try modo, and I'm sure those figures are for people who aren't squeezing it in on a part-time basis.

Oh, and there's a few gotchas with modo. They support both platforms - Mac and Windows! Should I download the trial and see if I can get it to work under Wine? Let me click on the "Try Modo" link - "Interested in trying modo? As a result of modo 301 now being available, all of our website bandwidth is being focused on supporting our registered modo customers. Sign up to create an account and you will be informed just as soon as the new evaluation version of modo 301 is available. If you already have an account you're already on the list to be notified." What? If I have an account, I'm on a list to be notified that there's a trial version available? Oh, they want $400 for an upgrade (which they're ready to sell you sight-unseen right now). Okay, let me see if I can figure out if I can use modo to turn blueprints into 3d models the way they do here. Hmm... not too big on the import/export capabilities are they? Looking over the so-called tech specs (looks like they hired some marketing people and got out of the way) I can only find "modo is able to harvest animation data from other 3D applications in order to render it. modo reads .MDD files for this purpose." Maybe it

If you don't like blender (which I don't) here are another two cross-platform, GPL, alternatives:

K-3D: http://www.k-3d.org/
Art of Illusion: http://www.artofillusion.org/

I tried K-3D a couple of times, and though I *really* like it's pipelines and procedural modelling, I couldn't get rendering to work properly and experienced several crashes. Hence my current preference is for Art of Illusion.

Will users be able to create content? If so what free tools (http://www.blender.org/ or http://www.artofillusion.org/ ?) and formats will be supported? Will we be able to export animations or create normal mapped items?

LetterRip

gmueckl, who wrote "The State of Open Source 3D Modeling" should have called his rant "Why blender sucks". That he is one of the main developers behind moonlight|3d actually speeks louder than the entire article. This article is soooo obviously nothing more but a rant that it already hurts.

I use blender for 2+ years now and am fairly impressed with what you can achieve with it. Many people claim that blenders UI is crap. Don't really know why. Granted, it is not the usual windows UI. But does this really matter? To actually start being productive with any 3d tool you need a highly configurable ui. And in blender you can configure the ui to exactly show you whatever informations you want. For almost every action you can use shortcuts. This makes it incredibly fast to use. Yes, you have to actually learn them, but this happens whenever you want to achieve something new.

And although I pay my bills by developing software I do not care about flaws in the codebase, ugly architectures and stuff as long as the tool does what is required. And blender does this fairly good.

The development speed of blender is really amazing. Take a look at the new sculpting tools. They are incredible. During this 2+ years of using blender I had only a couple of crashes. And during this time many features were added. I guess that many parts of blender have already been rewritten.

Another really enjoyable part of blender is its community. Take a look at elysiun.com. One of the most supportive and effective communities in the open source world that I know of.

Take a look at blendernation.com, a great source for blender news. There is even a magazine around: blender art magazine. Pretty nice.

Altogether the community around blender is one of the important driving forces behind blender.

Finally, judge the tools by what they have accomplished. Especially look at the art-galleries of the tools:

-k-3d: http://www.k-3d.org/wiki/Still_Gallery
-moonlight|3d: http://www.moonlight3d.eu/forum/
-art of illusion: http://www.artofillusion.org/artgallery

Judge for yourself.

Yt,

Gunnar

Art of Illusion is a free, open source 3D modelling and rendering studio. It is stable and powerful enough to be used for serious, high end animation work. Many of its capabilities rival those found in commercial programs.

BlogBridge is a nice RSS agregator and reader.

GanttProject is a project management program similar to MS Project.

install4j is a powerful multi-platform Java installer builder that generates native installers and application launchers for Java applications. Awesome looks!

Jake2 is a port of the Quake II engine to java

Are you aware that Sun is allowing the Apache Software Foundation to create a 100% open source build of java that complies with the official Sun spec?.

This is the best of both worlds and gives those who want a "Free Software" VM their own VM, while allowing Sun to continue shaping the future of the platform according to outside comments (JCP - Java Community Process, a process where IBM, Nokia, Intel, etc. have a say), but preserving the right to prevent "pollution" of the platform like Microsoft attempted years ago with their windows-only win32 hooks in their Java implementation.

I think some slashdotters need to read The Inquirer more often... ;-)

Sun-approved Open Source Java making progress
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30688
MAR 31, 2006

Argentina students help Apache's Open Source Java effort
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30689
MAR 31, 2006

Apache Foundation to create clearn-room Java
with Sun's blessing
Compatible open source J2SE in the works
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23127
MAY 10, 2005

About Java based apps, the "Java is a failure on the desktop" is an old MYTH. Java has been getting really nice on the desktop lately, starting with J2SE 5.0 just at the time most systems above 1Ghz are now (finally!) the norm and at a time when 512MB ram is the average.

There's a lot of java based apps that I run on my linux AND windows desktop and whic I've learned to love:

  http://phex.kouk.de/ http://azureus.sourceforge.net/ http://www.artofillusion.org/index
http://www.evermoresw.com/weben/product/productOve rview.jsp - http://www.jedit.org/ - http://sourceforge.net/projects/frinika
http://sourceforge.net/projects/javaamp - http://sourceforge.net/projects/humaitrader - http://sourceforge.net/projects/jgnash/
http://megamek.sourceforge.net/idx.php?pg=main ...Editors, Music, Office Suites, P2P clients, 3D design, financial apps, games.... you name it, there is one best-of-breed app written in Java. And without having to chase a Microsoft API from behind like it happens with Mono...

https://mustang.dev.java.net/
"Sun is releasing weekly early access snapshots of the complete
source, binaries and documentation for Java SE 6 ("Mustang"). These raw snapshot releases let you review and contribute to Mustang as it is being developed."

What part of "Source" don't you understand??

I rest my case.

Finally about Desktop apps and Swing. Swing is MUCH faster in Java 6.0 (aka 1.6.0), because a lot of stuff is maped to native windows and gnome widgets.

They need a PARENT to encourage them ...
They need the right environment at home.
And they don't need competing forms of passive entertainment (TV).
Don't expect the school system to do it for you.

My 11 years old son Daniel programs using a variety of tools and has been doing so for a couple of years already (Visual basic, a variety of flavors of Logo, Game Maker. I'll let /.ers find out what he's using in this photo). He also does other creative things like creating scenes and animations using Art of Illusion - this also involves kind of programming, like creating procedural textures/materials. He learns some math/geometry doing this, since his programming experience drives him to manipulate the data (coordinates) directly to get exact results. He also learns some physics for getting the right results, like making gravitation work close to correct in this game (/.ers should be able to tell what link is the game. Hint: the file extension is .exe*). (well... It not just parent encouragement. After school activity played an important role. School only taught him to use the computer as a typewriter).

His 5 year old brother Jonatan already learned to do some "visual programming" using Game Maker, producing working games (though still not one another kid would want to play with. He does get useful things produced this way: Birthday "greeting cards" that can only be made using programming). The need to do everything that his big brother does is enough motivation.

___________________________
* I thought that the game should really be open sourced (or "free-softwared") but the Game Maker "sources" (.gm6 files) are actually binary, and though the license allows distribution of the created games, it's not clear to me how exactly it can be done with an Open source or CC license. Compiling the "sources" requires (gratis) proprietary software.

** comments, and suggestions of useful software that can encourage kids to becreative are welcome.

Here's a hint to software companies like Autocad and Maya: Would you rather have a guy like me spend $200 or $300 just so I can play with a tool the pro's use, or would you rather do without that revenue while I make due with open source? In fact, I'm sure the same Ivory Tower attitude with unix back in the day led to a small revolution you might be familiar with: Linux.

Click here for state of the art open source 3d modelling/rendering in java! Art of Illusion

So Art Of Illusion doesn't count? It's free and does animation, even if it hasn't been used for any real films AFAIK.

We're using ArtOfIllusion http://artofillusion.org/ at RepRap. It does STL output, is cross-platform (Java-based) and it's free, Free, FREE!

Vik :v)

I've been tracking Art of Illusion (http://www.artofillusion.org/) for some time, and I like it more and more. It's Maya-ish, and provides impressive modelling, animating, and rendering. It's much more capable than you'd guess at first glance, and it can be extended in many ways with Beanshell scripts.

It's in Java and it's open source and free. The Mac front end is reasonably Macified, and the documentation and tutorials are pretty good. Give it a spin.

ab

A free graphical front end for POV-Ray is Moray.

Also check out Art of Illusion which is a full-featured cross-platform modeler/raytracer but has a POV-Ray export feature. I know the author from work and he is a genius.

Yup, I use ArtOfIllusion for commercial artwork. It is indeed most exellent and powerful. Not only that, but there is some great documentation available for it too.

It would be great if Blender and ArtOfIllusion could share a decent file format. It'd save everyone a lot of heartache in the long term.

It has rendering and raytracing options, so both camps can be kept happy. Oh, and don't be put off by its use of Java. This is by far the speediest Java graphics app I've come across anywhere.

Vik :v)

If you guys like blender, you might be interested in another project called Art of Illusion. It is a poly-based modeller and renderer and I have seen some amazing results. It's completely open source (GPL I think) and achieves great performance being written completely in Java. Check it out, and also the other work Nate has done.

Laugh all you want, but there is a pretty decent modeller/raytracer called Art of Illusion written entirely in Java. Check out the screenshots!

I work for the author of Art of Illusion so I'll give him a plug. It's GPL and cross platform, and he's been working on it for several years. He's a physics PhD from Stanford and is one of the geekiest, smartest people I've ever met. He goes home and works on this thing all the time (he likes to brag about how he has no TV). I think he's starting to get contributions from other coders.

AoI is a modeler and raytracer. It includes global illumination, subdivision surfaces, soft shadows, and procedural textures. I've used it as a front end for POV-Ray (it generates .pov files now).

The Art of Illusion 3D modeller is written in Java and runs on the Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms. (It does not currently use the Java3D interface, because that has not yet been licenced for the Mac platform.) Here's a URL:

It is under a GPL license and seems to be pretty easy to use (i.e. not nearly as confusing as Blender is to initial users.)

Your milage may vary.

-Wayne