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Rendering Software Used In LoTR Goes Open Source

Posted by Roblimo on from the make-your-own-$50,000,000-animated-epic dept.

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."

2 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Not such a big deal by sakusha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I fail to see why this is such a big thing. Most production houses use MTOR, which is bundled with RenderMan Artist Tools. You still have to use Maya and Renderman. This is kind of like having a Ferrari that uses 130 Octane fuel, and you proclaim you've invented a new type of hose to get the fuel from the pump to the fuel tank. But it's still just a hose, and the Ferrari and the Fuel still do all the work.

  2. Re:Hmmm by GigsVT · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Open source and Linux gets the graphic geeks of the apple community on the open source train...

    I don't know why you were modded down...

    Anyway, what gets me is that Linux and open source are getting all these 3D tools, but we don't even have the 2D tools necessary to operate a prepress environment based on Linux yet.

    So we have Gimp and Killustrator (or whatever they changed the name to after the lawsuit)... Gimp can't work in CYMK colorspace... I havn't tried Killustrator, but I doubt it comes close to the similar Adobe product.

    We have nothing that does what Quark does... we have a barely maintained OPI daemon, no open source trapping software that I am aware of... etc.

    The 2D prepress industry is probably many times larger than 3D... Why don't we have better software?

    --
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