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Rendering Software Used In LoTR Goes Open Source
donglekey writes "The software used by Weta to output scenes to be rendered on the LOTR trilogy has been made open source under the Mozilla license. Called Liquid, it outputs from Maya to any Renderman compliant renderer. This is extremely good news as it may quickly become a standard in high end 3D, as well as greasing the wheels for Aqsis, a GPLed Renderman renderer."
Give me an open source cave troll to play with!
I feel more photorealism in A New Hoe than in the last iteration. Really. Attack of the clones was kind of cool visually, but just doesn't look real. It does not. Repeat after me, It does not.
Even the ships, the easiest thing to model do not look real. Maybe it's the colors, the texture, etc. The eye can tell the difference between real stuff and wanabe real stuff. The slightest difference from what you would expect in the tiniest detail, and the illusion goes away.
And if it's a real living creature, well... The original Joda looked much more real even though they've done a great job on AotC. A real younger Yoda WOULD look different.
unfinished: (adj.)
they unsed in the movie so we can render final scenes from the movie ourselves so we don't have to wait another 2 months to see the movie.... unless it makes more than two months to render the scenes themselves on my own computer...
Yes, by all means, we should return to the world of stop-motion. Yeah! Matte paintings on glass instead of photoshop! Optical printers with matte-halos, fringing, registration problems and printer-dirt! And good ol' stop-motion! YES! King Kong's moving fur looks a hella more realistic than Mighty Joe Young's CG gorilla. Even Ray Harryhausen drools at the idea of what he could have done with today's technology. I know I drool to think of what he could have done. Greedy movie studios cutting corners, indeed? Which corner did they cut in The Lord of the Rings by using cg? The corner where they'd have to make a puppet for the cave troll? No thanks, I've seen the Rancor in Return of the Jedi. My cave troll action figure looks more real than THAT thing.
this has been news for at least a week now, and still, nothing is available on the website or sourceforge.
the cvs tree is empty.
forums empty.
if it weren't for LoTR being rendered with it, I would consider this vaporware...
I seem to remember a recent /. article on how you can already perform near-renderman level rendering at incredible, up to half real-time speeds on an ATI Radeon 9000, with the new 128-bit floating point datatypes. Now all we need is a renderman plugin for (insert favorite encoder) to go straight from these files into MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 files by way of the video card.
Production-Quality rendering all around! No more waiting days upon days for a distribution-quality movie file. Next year, preview your work in real time, full-quality! w00t!
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
So glad someone finally explained this; I always thought that "PRMan" was some suit from Pixar whose job it is to put good spin on things.
sic transit gloria mundi