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Linux simply killed our capacity to produce here...

The commercial Autodesk Maya was used by Weta Digital to create the Lord of the Rings triology. Maya is, as you can see, available for use under Linux.

For Desktop Publishing you can use the Free Scribus which I have used to produce very nice pamphlets and booklets.

Linux has come of age in recent months and the excuse that it is not suitable for ordinary folks to do ordinary computer jobs is simply not true any more.

Define "good". gaim does a fine job for me with AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and Google IM services (as well as IRC and non-Google Jabber servers). I believe the video/audio support is still not present, but for text purposes, it's fine.

5) Greeting card software (anything good on the linux end?)

Doubtful for straight up specialized software. However, one with an artistic bent might appreciate trying out the suite of GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, and Scribus. If all he wants to do is fill in templates, though, it will be inadequate. If he's feeling really generous, though, he could potentially develop a template and submit it for inclusion at Inkscape or Scribus, and maybe add some more stuff to Open ClipArt to help others as well.

Best of all, you can get him hooked prior to hitting Linux, because everything I just named has a Windows version.

The problem being when people use it as an encyclopedic source and find out later that that foreign word they used is actually an insult placed through vandalism.

I agree with you, but playing Devil's Advocate, it must be recognised that it is sometimes simply wrong.

Software development is almost pure labor. Labor is the most expensive part of any endeavor. You can't take from the huge pot of $ without an equal amount of $ comming in. And there is a boatload of competition.

A couple of points... You don't need huge budgets to create quality software. Just look at what Apache, Linux and even Blender did with little or no budget. If people are willing to donate their time, then you have just taken the most expensive component of software development, and you have driven it to virtually zero. The largest part of work in Ryzom has already been completed, since Ryzom already functions in a production environment. There's an artwork pipeline, production-worthy server, and a functioning client. Sure, things need improving, but regular, small, incremental improvements is what the Free Software / Open Source software model does best, in my opinion.

About money... The organization behind this effort would be a non-profit. They would only need to break even on their infrastructure costs to keep development going. Lots of people and organizations are even willing to donate infrastructure to Free Software / Open Source projects, so they might not even have to pay for infrastructure.

Have a look at the Blender UI.

It has a very powerful tabbed panel approach which looks like the Office 2007 UI ( but built for a more techincal audience). http://www.blender.org/cms/Features.155.0.html

You can turn on and off panels within the "ribbon" as well as combine panels into tabbed panels by simple dragging the panels around. It's all "animated" as well - other panels shift around to accomodate. Impressive technically.

As a side note: who in the heck would sign a license limiting their options just to see what Microsoft thinks a good UI design is! Isn't Apple much more recognized in this area? Apple's guidelines don't require a license to read: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExper ience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html

Any application where the UI is hotkey driven (or has lots of semi-decipherable icons) can benefit from an Optimus.

Personally, I want one just for Blender. Lots of other graphics apps could benefit from this (Photoshop, even), and certainly there are some video people out there that would like to plug one of these into their Avid systems.

Sadly, the extra 10 side keys could have been put to good use in a Blender key layout.

They're not the first to do such a thing, "Elephants dream" done by some dutch school is mostly open too: http://orange.blender.org/, and with a lot less budget. Although the people who worked on ithis were selected in advance.

Here are some animation tools Blender, Synfig. Go away and do something cool - say 60 seconds of original animation with some artistic merit.

Then give it away, including the source files you used to make it.

If it's any good it'll be hard. Really, trust me on this. I am very pro open content and I was shocked how hard it was to actually give things away. (More so with my writing than with animation, and I won't even try to kid myself that it would ever be good enough to sell.)

Not only has it massivly increased my respect for those who *do* give away significant work under the GPL and similar licenses, it's also I hope made me a small amount less hypocritical in holding the view that all information should be Free. But I can't say that I view casual piracy the same way I did before either.

In situations like that I go to shop and buy first thing I like.

Aperture doesn't save changes, just instructions for how to make those changes. So for any given photo the total memory (and disk space taken) is the size of the original image plus a bit of XML with the parameters you chose for the various filters. That's actually the really cool thing about Aperture.

I didn't know that, I thought Aperture saved changes themselves, ie took a snapshot, and not just saved instructions for changes. Thanks.

I've heard Lightroom is good too though. I didn't realize they were including it with CS3.

Oops, I made a mistake. You're right Adobe's offering is Lightroom not Lighthouse. I don't know but I'd expect Lightroom to be bundled with the compleat CS suite. However for now at least I'll try GIMP, Blender and/or POV-Ray. I'd rather not have to pay the price for PS CS3 when it comes out.

You have a point!

It could be the OpenGL Foundation, or something.

Blender code was salvaged that way, when the company went down.
A foundation was created, and now it is a healthy project, at http://www.blender.org/ .
A movie was recently made showing how advanced it has become, at http://orange.blender.org/ .

At that time, they raised one hundred thousand Euros, I believe OpenGL might be a tad more costly, but one shouldn't underestimate the power of individuals to get together and raise some money.

Maybe even the Blender foundation is a good place to start. Someone big enough should talk to SGI and ask how many millions of dollars they want.

Hey, come to think of it, another ocmpany that would like buying OpenGL could be ID Software! It's close to their core- bussiness, game engines.

You have a point!

It could be the OpenGL Foundation, or something.

Blender code was salvaged that way, when the company went down.
A foundation was created, and now it is a healthy project, at http://www.blender.org/ .
A movie was recently made showing how advanced it has become, at http://orange.blender.org/ .

At that time, they raised one hundred thousand Euros, I believe OpenGL might be a tad more costly, but one shouldn't underestimate the power of individuals to get together and raise some money.

Maybe even the Blender foundation is a good place to start. Someone big enough should talk to SGI and ask how many millions of dollars they want.

Hey, come to think of it, another ocmpany that would like buying OpenGL could be ID Software! It's close to their core- bussiness, game engines.

There are plenty of folks around who will buy the new pro machines who are using, say, Final Cut Pro, Motion, or Shake. A lot of high end 3d software is probably going to be announced jointly with any new pro machines (e.g. Maya, Lightwave; Blender just released an Intel binary). Unity has been universal for a few months now.

Thanks for the report, John! I'll definately look into it and try to fix it for next release! In the meanwhile, please try out the latest physics demos here: http://download.blender.org/demo/test/engine-physi cs-demos-2.42-preview34.zip

Or more precisely: What do you need that OpenOffice 2 doesn't provide? You're obviously not into Docbook, because that would be the obvious choice for freaks who want to do their editing in VI/Emacs/Nedit/Jedit. The Blender folks did that with the Blender 2.3 manual. And they hated it. Now they're back to open source word processing.
Honestly, if you want ease of use, felxibility and power, I strongly suggest using Open Office 2 and the features it provides, such as indexing, data source linking, DB frontends and Forms, etc. Otherwise - if you are a Browser oriented shop - just use one of the countless wikis or - if you all dig the command line and your favorite editors - continue using XML (Docbook or whatever) but beef up your editors with XML plugins, extensions and macros. It's not that difficult, is it?

Blender is one of the best examples. Read how they raised 100,000 EUR to BUY it from the old company and then turn around and GPL/Open Source it.

Blender History

When the developmental tools become easily accessible for the masses (people at home & professional developers) to create 3D, rendered content that is on average on par with SD video quality,

Dan Glickman: It is ridiculous to believe that you can give product away for free and be more successful. I mean it defies the laws of nature.

Really?

Released for download 18 May 2006, currently at over 500,000 downloads. There were 2000 DVDs sold as of 11 May, before it was even released for download. This is just for a 10 minute short.

The free software and free culture movements are full of great people including Lawrence Lessig. I got a chance to interview him. During the interview he expressed his over commitment to the movement. Lets acknowledge the larger organizations in order to reduce strain on any one figure. All of the people at Creative Commons, Electronic Freedom Foundation, Free Software Foundation, etc. deserve credit for their dedication to the cause (if you will).

That said, one critical aspect to promoting a digital culture is supporting revolutionary projects and artists. Some examples are Project Orange, Cactuses and Chance. Each has a different unique aspect but each hopes for a future which is better for artists. They aim for equal opportunity for artists to sustain themselves. Free software tools along with flexible creative licenses will allow this.

The most important aspect of Creative Commons licenses is that it allows for a new art form, remix art.

Alteration can create something unique.

You can create a unique Alteration.

For more interviews with revolutionary people/projects see my own project, Open Road Trip.

Most of my 2D animation has been done either with Flash or Adobe After Effects.

After Effects is an industry standard package, and it costs about the same as Flash, last I checked. One of it's most powerful features is the scripting language. It helps to create procedural animations which can be difficult to do by hand.

You also might want to consider doing 2D animation with a 3D package. Most of my time 3D time was spent learning Maya. The strength that 3D animation packages have, is that they get used more often for character animation than the 2D packages, therefore they have a lot more tools forcharacter animators such as bone structures and deformations. A lot of them have physics packages that can help automate certain types of animation. Most 3D packages also come with built in scripting languages for procedural animation.

The down side to 3D packages is the intense learning curve. At last count, I heard that Maya had over 80,000 commands. These are huge and complex software packages. The proprietary ones also tend to cost quite a bit, although Blender is free as well as open source.

A lot of what software to use depends on what kind of animation you want to do. Are you doing short character animations? Are you doing experimental stuff? Are you Rotoscoping? If you tell us a bit more about the type of animation you want to do, we could be a bit more specific in recommending specific packages.

Other thoughts:
--I know that Photoshop and ImageReady can be used to animate between layers ( but involves a bit of hackery to get it to work well).
--The integration between Photoshop and After Effects is really nice. It's one of the reasons AFX is used so much in television.
--FilmGimp/Cinepaint has been used for wire removal and image clean up for a while in the FX industry, I have no experience with it.
--I know that there are also some animation plugins for the Gimp that have been written. Again, I have no experience with these.

Regardless of the tools, there is always a steep learning curve, and there's always seems to be a lot of work coaxing the software program to do what you want it to do. If it's not coming easily, it's because we still have a lot of work to do in developing great animation software.

Good luck, and have fun.

There's plenty of open-source 3d modeling software, and I bet there's plenty of open-source software for any other need a small business might have. Maybe you don't like that software as much as the software that costs money, but that doesn't mean you can just download proprietary software without paying the asking price. Software companies don't owe you their software. There's plenty of software being offered for free, why don't you use that instead of the software that isn't?

For those who didn't see it the first link here are the movies again, hope you enjoy it

http://orange.blender.org/

LetterRip

I have submitted information to IMDB.com, but it will take a few days before they accept it, if at all. The information I got from http://orange.blender.org/theteam, BTW. (In other words, the original site is still there, just hidden.)

Ok, I see they used Linux and Mac OS X, but haven't seen anything about Final Cut Pro?

They do have a response about that: http://orange.blender.org/blog/equipping-the-studi o#comments

and

"We never said that wed work with exclusively open source software for every bit on the hard drive, because thats almost impossible (think closed source linux graphics drivers) and its not the point of this exercise. Apart from of course providing the final product as open content, the aim is to develop and improve open source graphics software by using it in a production environment in the real world - we arent going to be coding drivers or OSes here. We already have a bunch of Linux machines that we are using and testing in this way, maybe we will have a Sun box too. None of the things we do or the formats we use will be Mac only, (or Linux only for that matter). I personally think what were going through here is precisely part of our aims - practically testing these sort of things in the real world. People in the real world use Macs, so how can we find ways to promote and improve open source graphics software for them.
Reno, sorry I cant help you here, we arent using Windows at all. From all Ive heard GIMP pressure sensitivity works ok on there, but thats all I know.
Cheers,
Matt"

Here ? http://orange.blender.org/blog/seashore

Here's a nice write-up written by somebody very much in cahoots with the Orange team and the heads of the Blender project:

http://www.blendernation.com/2006/05/18/the-worlds -first-open-movie-released/

You can get Blender here:

http://blender.org/cms/Blender.31.0.html

and learn how to use it here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_P ro

and get community help here:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/
IRC: irc.freenode.net/ #blender #blenderchat #blenderqa

spiderworm

The whole point of the project was to see if a movie could be created using Blender 3d. It's called the Orange Project and they have a blog about the production. The Orange Project website, however, is currently slashdotted.
When it comes back you can check it out at: http://orange.blender.org/

The film was first announced in May, 2005 by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation and the lead developer of the foundation's program, Blender. A 3D modelling, animating, and rendering application, Blender is the primary piece of software being used in the creation of the movie. The project is joint funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of their funds by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Everyone who preordered before September 1 has their name listed in the movie's credits. A number of companies also donated render farm time for the movie.

The film's purpose is primarily to showcase the capabilities of open source software and evaluate it as a tool for organizing and producing quality content for professional films.

During the film's development, several new features, such as hair and fur rendering [1], were added into Blender especially for the project.

The film's content was released under the Creative Commons Attribution license [2], so that viewers may learn from it and use it however they please. The DVD set includes NTSC and PAL versions of the movie on separate discs, a high-definition video version as a computer file, and all the production files.

The film was released for download on the Official Orange Project website on May 18, 2006, along with all production files.

A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Content on Wikipedia is covered by disclaimers.

The film was first announced in May, 2005 by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation and the lead developer of the foundation's program, Blender. A 3D modelling, animating, and rendering application, Blender is the primary piece of software being used in the creation of the movie. The project is joint funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of their funds by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Everyone who preordered before September 1 has their name listed in the movie's credits. A number of companies also donated render farm time for the movie.

The film's purpose is primarily to showcase the capabilities of open source software and evaluate it as a tool for organizing and producing quality content for professional films.

During the film's development, several new features, such as hair and fur rendering [1], were added into Blender especially for the project.

The film's content was released under the Creative Commons Attribution license [2], so that viewers may learn from it and use it however they please. The DVD set includes NTSC and PAL versions of the movie on separate discs, a high-definition video version as a computer file, and all the production files.

The film was released for download on the Official Orange Project website on May 18, 2006, along with all production files.

A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Content on Wikipedia is covered by disclaimers.

• 1024x576
• 425MB (Bittorrent)
• 425MB (USA #1)
• 425MB (USA #2)
• 425MB (Australia)
• 425MB (Germany)
• 425MB (Netherlands)

Only playable in: VLC Media Player MPlayer

Don't forget Blender! http://www.blender.org/

There are all sorts of cool things that could be done as projects, pretty much any siggraph paper, any computer graphics research, etc. would make a good candidate.

LetterRip

I recently wrote a KML (Google Earth) export script for Blender.org. Blender is certainly less intuitive than SketchUp, but its undeniably more powerful, as well as open source. It supports importing and exporting a number of other industry standards, so you could use it to transform models you already have.

Blender KML Export
Blender.org

I'm currently evaluating the feasibility of using Blender included in a Linux distribution named Tomahawk Desktop.

Using Blender has a significant cost advantage. Our bottleneck is the rendering time. We expect these chips may be available soon at a price SOHO can afford.

I've gotta say, I was exteremly impressed when I tried my first taste of real wine. Blender3D ran better in Wine then it did on Windows.

You should try out the Linux version then! :)

Looks a bit like a Blender (& Nemo & Qoobee & Virtools) rippoff to me. And considering that Blender Real Time runs on Linux and even some more OSes and Blender Logic Bricks are even easyer to programm with than JavaScript I'd recommend you check it out.
And since Blender is open source you'll be paying 0$ rather than 999$ :-) . And the Blender Real Time Engine uses Python, which I think is pretty neat aswell.
Check out Blender.org and also check out the Blender Game Kit Book. Not for the newest Version of Blender, but quite up to date with the Blender Game Engine Features.
(newest Blender Version)

Looks a bit like a Blender (& Nemo & Qoobee & Virtools) rippoff to me. And considering that Blender Real Time runs on Linux and even some more OSes and Blender Logic Bricks are even easyer to programm with than JavaScript I'd recommend you check it out.
And since Blender is open source you'll be paying 0$ rather than 999$ :-) . And the Blender Real Time Engine uses Python, which I think is pretty neat aswell.
Check out Blender.org and also check out the Blender Game Kit Book. Not for the newest Version of Blender, but quite up to date with the Blender Game Engine Features.
(newest Blender Version)

BLENDER - http://www.blender.org/
Blender is the best open source project I've ever used. If you are on a 3d artist on an open source operating system blender is one of the only programs you will ever need to use. It's that good. Not as many tools as say Maya or 3DSMax but the python scripting API allows you to easily create your own. From a workflow standpoint I find blender very fast once you get used to the interface. Rather than giving you a lot of tools to simulate traditional art equipment blender makes you think like openGL. Blender was a commercial product at one point but it has evolved significantly as an open source project.

I like black hole demonic, reptilian slited alien or how about red terminator eyes, heck one could probably start a pretty serious cult conspiracy. Could one could morph the face or entire body even the background in any way one had the processing power and bandwith to support? Damn this could even be another good reason to up my wireless skills (translated: buy more wireless stuff). Plus this is a great excuse for more play time play with http://blender.org/ .

My has some more information and also mentions Project Orange:

>>>
Blender 2.4 on par with commercial 3D tools

The developers of the open source 3D package Blender have released Blender Version 2.4. B-Bones, Envelope Skinweighting and Fluid Simulation are just a few of a sheer innumerable amount of features that have been added throughout 2005 in approach of the 2.4 release. It is safe to say that Blender has come to level with current commercial 3D tools, with even a few features unique to Blender. The amount of work that went into this release and the results are just plain amazing.

Meanwhile Team Orange and their open movie Project "Elefants Dream" have moved into final animation stage.
I'm moved to tears to see an open source team achieve such levels of excellence. Awesome work, Blender Team.

My has some more information and also mentions Project Orange:

>>>
Blender 2.4 on par with commercial 3D tools

The developers of the open source 3D package Blender have released Blender Version 2.4. B-Bones, Envelope Skinweighting and Fluid Simulation are just a few of a sheer innumerable amount of features that have been added throughout 2005 in approach of the 2.4 release. It is safe to say that Blender has come to level with current commercial 3D tools, with even a few features unique to Blender. The amount of work that went into this release and the results are just plain amazing.

Meanwhile Team Orange and their open movie Project "Elefants Dream" have moved into final animation stage.
I'm moved to tears to see an open source team achieve such levels of excellence. Awesome work, Blender Team.

My has some more information and also mentions Project Orange:

>>>
Blender 2.4 on par with commercial 3D tools

The developers of the open source 3D package Blender have released Blender Version 2.4. B-Bones, Envelope Skinweighting and Fluid Simulation are just a few of a sheer innumerable amount of features that have been added throughout 2005 in approach of the 2.4 release. It is safe to say that Blender has come to level with current commercial 3D tools, with even a few features unique to Blender. The amount of work that went into this release and the results are just plain amazing.

Meanwhile Team Orange and their open movie Project "Elefants Dream" have moved into final animation stage.
I'm moved to tears to see an open source team achieve such levels of excellence. Awesome work, Blender Team.

My has some more information and also mentions Project Orange:

>>>
Blender 2.4 on par with commercial 3D tools

The developers of the open source 3D package Blender have released Blender Version 2.4. B-Bones, Envelope Skinweighting and Fluid Simulation are just a few of a sheer innumerable amount of features that have been added throughout 2005 in approach of the 2.4 release. It is safe to say that Blender has come to level with current commercial 3D tools, with even a few features unique to Blender. The amount of work that went into this release and the results are just plain amazing.

Meanwhile Team Orange and their open movie Project "Elefants Dream" have moved into final animation stage.
I'm moved to tears to see an open source team achieve such levels of excellence. Awesome work, Blender Team.

My has some more information and also mentions Project Orange:

>>>
Blender 2.4 on par with commercial 3D tools

The developers of the open source 3D package Blender have released Blender Version 2.4. B-Bones, Envelope Skinweighting and Fluid Simulation are just a few of a sheer innumerable amount of features that have been added throughout 2005 in approach of the 2.4 release. It is safe to say that Blender has come to level with current commercial 3D tools, with even a few features unique to Blender. The amount of work that went into this release and the results are just plain amazing.

Meanwhile Team Orange and their open movie Project "Elefants Dream" have moved into final animation stage.
I'm moved to tears to see an open source team achieve such levels of excellence. Awesome work, Blender Team.

While some people would point the finger at Apple, I find it highly curious that Blender broke so severely (if you read the thread, lots of other things don't work) and far as I know, nothing else did...

Yes, I verified the bug- on my 17" Powerbook (with an NVidia card) none of the menus or popup listboxes appear. If you have a machine with 10.4.3 and an nvidia card, don't bother...yet.

Also forgot to mention the release notes that have some nice pics showing off the new features

http://www.blender.org/cms/Blender_2_40.598.0.html

Would Project Orange be considered an "Open" movie?

The "free" version of Maya, ain't free. It's so hindered that you can't really produce with it, you can only learn.

If you create something in Maya Learning edition, and then save it, even if you bought full version maya 2 weeks later, you couldn't open that cool model you made with the learning edition. So I don't think Maya free will be threatened, it doesn't really give away the goods anyway, unlike Gmax which was pretty awesome for lower poly modeling, i.e. game models and such.

get blender instead. It's awesome. http://www.blender.org/

I believe the problem isn't in GIMP itself, but in the way OSX implements X11.

The Blender Project Orange team ran up against it and wrote about it here.

That said, even though the problem isn't GIMP - it's more likely that any fix will have to come from them creating a wrapper (like seashore) rather than Apple changing X11 just for them.

Blender is obviously lacking specific controls for "features" that are embedded in mainstream, expensive 3D suites like Maya or 3DS Max, but that doesn't mean you cannot accomplish the same effects as many of these "features." (Fur simulation, fire and smoke simulation, etc). With painting, you use a paint brush and paint. You don't have specific brushes for painting different shapes (like a dog shape and a chair shape). You use the same tools. The "limited" features in Blender are similar to using a paint brush instead of more specific specialized brushes. Also, many of the trivial features that Blender does lack currently are being added very quickly. The Open Movie Project (http://orange.blender.org/) is making Ton and the other developers /very/ aware of the small specific problems that filmmakers face when using blender to make a film. If you check the Orange project site there is a blog showing all of the features they are adding specifically for the open film project. Just recently they coded in IPO drivers (sliders for controlling facial movement and such) and fur/hair (supposedly it only took them about 3 hours to organize what they already had in to a good particle fur /and/ hair system!!!). Blender's interface is extremely smooth after some getting used to. You don't have to deal with millions of annoying windows and 3D and menu navigation are consistent with one another. Modeling is also wonderful in Blender, even though it lacks some welding and bridging type features. These will probably come soon with the advent of the finished half-edge modeling system (for those familiar with Wings 3D).

Not yet, however, from my point of view, they are close. Actually what they need is extensive manual for Maya users to migrate on Blender. Blender is growing rapidly and get features/methods added in very fast pase. Check out Project Orange (link http://orange.blender.org/), which will be something like real life showcase of usability of Blender - in same time, big QA and bugfixing session too :)