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Moonlight|3D 0.5.5 Released

Posted by michael on from the reports-of-my-demise-etc.-etc. dept.

oxygene2k2 writes "I just finished the release preparations for Moonlight|3D 0.5.5. "Moonlight?" you might think, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function and see that there are two articles from 2000 claiming that it's dead. It's alive again and this release was made to show this. We hope to attract both users and developers with this. Take a look at the Release Announcement for the Mailinglist, our development site and the press releases in english, german, french, italian and spanish."

6 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. because... by Patoski · · Score: 5, Informative

    Moonlight 3D is a ray tracer and Blender is a scan line renderer. Blender will likely never have/be a raytracer natively (although export scripts to a few ray tracers exist). These are two *very* different approaches to rendering so by no means would I say that Blender and Moonlight are cut from the same cloth.

    Best of luck to the Moonlight 3d team! Its a spiffy little app with a nice interface and plenty of potential!

    --
    G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
    1. Re:because... by Patoski · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah, I don't understand. In the end they both produce pretty
      pictures of modelled objects, right?

      Well, not necessarily (game modelers for instance don't make pretty pictures) but I'll see if I can explain myself a bit better about why these two approaches are so very different (and somewhat developmentally incompatible).

      In the end that is the idea but there are many ways to skin a cat (or even a mesh). ;-) Scanline and Ray tracers are two approaches. Each of these approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. A scan line renderer for example is a fast renderer which generally produces nice looking results (by using shortcuts and certain assumptions). As a result of these shortcuts it is difficult or even impossible to implement some features well such as caustics or radiosity. A raytracer uses a highly accurate (but expensive CPUwise and render time) algorithm that calculates the paths of millions of beams of light and uses these paths to piece together a pretty picture. Using ray tracing you can implement the fancy stuff I mentioned earlier (caustics, radiosity, etc.) more accurately and generally more easily than you can in a scan line renderer. So basically raytracers are very slow but highly accurate but scanline renderers are fast and (at times) don't output highly accurate renders.

      Also some other differences between Blender and Moonlight.

      Moonlight 3D is more geared towards ease of use and to help newbies ease themselves into 3D w/a nice UI and basic modeling funtions.

      Blender is currently geared towards the more experienced 3D artist with an ultra efficient UI (with a steeper learning curve) and a professional workflow that enables you to output tons of work easily (sometimes at the price of user friendliness).

      These are two very different crowds that Moonlight and Blender are catering to. I think there's room enough in Free Software for them both. :-)

      --
      G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
  2. This is SWEET!!! by cnelzie · · Score: 5, Informative

    I played about with Moonlight 3D some time ago and found it far easier to use then Blender 3D.

    To me, the user interface was quite simply far more user friendly then Blender is. (Of course, that is a matter of opinion and that is my opinion.)

    --
    If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
  3. Re:3D modelers by aridhol · · Score: 5, Informative
    This is somewhat simplified.

    O(n) describes how the processing time of a problem increases when more elements are put into the input set. For example, O(n) means that when you add 1 to the input set, you add 1 to the number of loops at runtime.

    O(2^n) means that for each element you put into the input set, the number of loops doubles. Thus, while an input set with 3 elements in it would loop 8 times, an input set with 4 elements would loop 16, etc. The number gets unmanageable fast - 10 elements = 1024 loops, 20 elements = 1048576 loops, 100 elements = 1267650600228229401496703205376 loops. Basically, it means that for any significant amount of data, don't expect it to be finished in your lifetime.

    --
    I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
  4. Re:what the hell is it? by quitcherbitchen · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the development page:

    Moonlight|3D is a free software modeller and renderer for 3D scenes with an intuitive GUI and powerful editing capabilities.
  5. Art of Illusion by dcuny · · Score: 4, Informative
    How about Art of Illusion?

    This program never seems to get any publicity, but it's a free, highly functional open source modelling + renderer + animation package. It's got just about all the features you could ask for:

    • Excellent documentation and tutorials
    • Scanline rendering for quick & dirty previews
    • Raytracing for slow and pretty pictures
    • Bones and pose-based animation
    • Inverse kinematics
    • Global illumination
    • User-friendly interface
    • Actively being developed
    • Cool procedural texture editor

    It's written in Java so it performs nicely under Windows, Linux and the Mac. That plus Wings3D (a great open source modeller based on Nendo gives you a complete Open Source animation package.