Moonlight|3D 0.5.5 Released

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."

Comments

Alive after two years

[jbarket]

And here in two seconds, the slashdot effect will make sure nobody on the internet can tell the difference.

Ow, I bruised my bandwidth!

Re:KDE and Gnome all over again

[John_Booty]

We got Blender3d now. Why revive old corpses and divide the community again?

Yeah! Who needs choice? Screw that shit!

What. Is. It.

[rschwa]

, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function

You're joking, right?

How hard is it to say "Moonlight, the window manager", or "Moonlight, the animated series", or "Moonlight, the new journalling file system" in these posts?

I don't even bother clicking these links because the server is going to be buried anyway.

..another waste of posting space

Re:What. Is. It.

[rschwa]

Don't you see where it says 3D in the post? Moonlight|3D. People talking about modelers?

Well, '3d' is a buzzword that can be applied to just about any craptacular thing to make it that much l33ter, and there were no replies posted when I began my post.

Anyways, I'm commenting on a general trend of slashdork news posts. A relatively high percentage of posts are like this, talking about something which I'm sure is obvious if you're on the mailing list (In which case you probably heard about it a week ago), but for lack of two extra words of description, means nothing to me.
Half the time, the link is to some cryptic page on Sourceforge where I'd still have to spend 5 minutes poking around to figure out wtf the thing is, and the other half it's a link to some poor unsuspecting server that's going to be crushed within 10 seconds of the post making the front page.

"Moonlight3D 0.3.21.5, a 3D modelling package for Linux" would have been so much clearer, and may have saved who knows how much bandwidth for people who would then say 'hm, not interested in that', and gone about their business rather than clicking the link to find out what the 'story' was about.

I don't get people sometimes...

[Quasar1999]

Why oh why bring back something form 2 years ago, especially when there is the blender3d project already out there... why not add to blender3d? Why waste resources competing with an opensource project? You have nothing to gain, if you don't like it's functionality, re-write it... don't create a whole new software... that's just re-inventing the wheel (to the next level).

Re:I don't get people sometimes...

[TitusC3v5]

Because Confucius say "Choice is good."

Seriously, though, why not? Yes, we have Blender, but we also have over a dozen window managers. Open source is about choice - if you like something stick with it. People tend to get all up in arms about KDE and Gnome, but it's easy to see that without each other, neither would have pressed to reach the level of functionality that both have attained at this point.

Yes

[ekrout]

I wanted live-action, photo-realistic rendering of my friend during his football game.

So, rather than using a digital camera, I made the smart (and obvious) choice to have an art student draw some scenes onto a 3'x6' cow carcass with a palette of 16 different paints.

In hindsight, seeing how she intuitively grasped the essential elements and pared the decision tree makes me glad that I left my Canon at home!

EricKrout.com

Re:KDE and Gnome all over again

[Sabbath.sCm]

But the real point is, would KDE be so feature-rich and stable if GNOME wasn't there? Competition speeds up evolution, I think.

Re:Is this better than Blender?

[oxygene2k2]

well, in terms of features, Moonlight isn't as complete yet

why does it exist?
- because some stupid guy did not take the sources of blender in 1996 or so when he started moonlight
- because some other stupid guys liked moonlight and used it
- because it's easier to cope with without learning yet-another-GUI-paradigm
- because it's fun hacking it (blender doesn't even build yet afaik)
- because blender sources weren't free in january, when I started
- and finally, because I guess that the blender sources are much bigger and less understandable than source that was once meant to be open instead of some corporate beast that wasn't supposed to see the light

maybe some stuff like choice could be brought in to the discussion as well...

Re:Description?

[Azghoul]

Just curious, aside from branding, what the hell does "Excel" have to do with anything?

Or "Mozilla"? Or "350Z" :-D

Don't whine about a lack of descriptive names in OSS. They're everywhere.

Sheesh

[back_pages]

I have no idea what the article is about...

I read the comments... everything is either off-topic or refers to the article negatively...

I'm puzzled. What's up? Could it be that I--!! QUICK! Scroll to the top again! YES! I foolishly turned off my "michael" filter!

A quick trip to my preferences prevents this mishap in the future. Now.. must turn off third person narrative... ...

because...

[Patoski]

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!

Re:because...

[Patoski]

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. :-)

Re:because...

[FreeUser]

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!

As a Blender fan (who has purchased books from NaN in the past and donated some money toward freeing the source) I can only agree.

My hope is that any and all of the free 3d modelling and rendering projects will get together on the data side, either using standards (e.g. renderman format) or agreeing on a common format to use as a lingua franca. Ideally one should be able to do portions of their project in Blender, portions in povray, portions in Moonlight 3D, and so on. If history is any guide, each of these projects will have its strengths and weaknesses, and allowing them all to interact (at least at the data level) smoothly would be a huge boon to all of the projects in question.

Of course, having them all be able to provide 'expert components' for their areas of strength to some kind of a meta (or ueber) 3d authoring suite is probably too much to ask at this stage, but not too much to dream of and perhaps work toward down the road.

This is SWEET!!!

[cnelzie]

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.)

Re:3D modelers

[aridhol]

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.

Re:what the hell is it?

[quitcherbitchen]

From the development page:

Moonlight|3D is a free software modeller and renderer for 3D scenes with an intuitive GUI and powerful editing capabilities.

Documentation

[Screaming Lunatic]

For some constructive criticism. We can bitch and complain about Blender vs Moonlight and how it's KDE vs. Gnome (pick your favorite religous battle) all over again. The bottom line is that Linux needs an OpenSource 3D modelling package.

I have downloaded the source to both Blender and Moonlight. And I'm still banging my head to figure out how to compile and run the darn things. What these projects need is some good documentation and developers jumping on board working out features.

So who's with me? Here I go to join the dev maillist

Re:Do we really need another 3D suit?

[Patoski]

Do we really need another 3D suit?

The users of Moonlight 3D will decide the answer to that question. :-)

While it is noble to undertake writing a 3D suit, is it prudent to attempt to rewrite something that had already been written by 1999? To work on a project that is leagues behind the professional suits and that for all intents and purposes will most likely never be used in a professional setting?

Who's to say what will become of Moonlight 3d in the future? I'm sure people didn't think much would come of Linus' little side project either but look what happened. :-) I'm not saying this will happen for Moonlight, but anything is possible. Besides, choice is a good thing and to me the different focuses of Blender and Moonlight are signifigant enough to not pull out the "you're reinventing the wheel" card.

Blender is a scan line renderer w/a real time engine and animation capabilities w/an efficient but arcane UI.

Moonlight 3D is a ray tracer w/a nice interface and decent nurbs, curve functionality

Hopefully these two projects will be able to learn and feed off of one another's progress (esp since they're both GPL) and both projects will be better off in the end!

checkerboards, curved mirrors

[helix_r]

If I see one more checkboard or curved mirror surface on "art" generated by a raytracing program I _will_ kill someone.

Art of Illusion

[dcuny]

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.

Re:Is this better than Blender?

[SurfsUp]

why does it exist?
- because some stupid guy did not take the sources of blender in 1996 or so when he started moonlight
- because some other stupid guys liked moonlight and used it
- because it's easier to cope with without learning yet-another-GUI-paradigm
- because it's fun hacking it (blender doesn't even build yet afaik)
- because blender sources weren't free in january, when I started
- and finally, because I guess that the blender sources are much bigger and less understandable than source that was once meant to be open instead of some corporate beast that wasn't supposed to see the light

- and because you are one cool dude

Seriously, let me say, um, 5 things: 1) Thanks a lot for doing this 2) Congratulations on your release 3) Keep it up 4) The glass angel is gorgeous! 5) Please ignore the clueless dickheads who probably never coded anything in their lives and never contributed to any project, yet think they know who should work on which project and why.