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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."
From the site: I've been trying to think about what I can do to distribute Liquid, because a lot of my time is spent working at my day job I feel like I'd be spreading myself way to thin to market, distribute and support a full production tool like Liquid. I've been looking at other means of distribution, either through another company, an open-development group or even open sourcing it. I've finally settled on OpenSourcing it, my hope is that those using it will contribute back any additions to the community.
Nice to see. The more people who associate O/S with first class production companies (like WETA) and their work (LOTR) the better cred it'll have to the populace in general.
It's not that I'm Anti-American - I'm Pro-Freedom
> Outputs Maya to RenderMan
Cool. We got Blender. Next step, do we have free RenderMan compatible programs? Pov-Ray has been around for ages, but is it RenderMan compatible?
Is this still around? I turned on my prof to this when I was working as a research assistant after college and he loved it. (better than Renderman at the time, in fact) Anyone know if it's still around and/or still free?
BMRT was pretty spectacular for free software then.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Down my cheek as I type this. I remember, back in tha' day:
Before I joined the military, I loved building RC airplanes. But moving every 2 years makes having a big project impractical. I took up 3d modeling as a substitute.
I started with the Rhino3d beta test. The problem was, Rhino lacked (and probably still lacks) a good render engine. So, I'd have Rhino open to my project, and BMRT ready to run in a command box. I remember the frustration of trying to figure out lighting and cameras as arguments to a command-line call of BMRT. Those were the days.
It almost feels like being told a friend I haven't seen in years has died. I gots to remember to pour a swig from tha' 40oz on tha' ground for my fallen homie...or something like that.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Browser of the year: Phoenix
3D-modeler: Open Blender
Kde has also a modeller Gui tool for pov
Oh, it would be nice if Open source and Linux gets the graphic geeks of the apple community on the open source train...
I heard at SIGGRAPH that one of the REAL reasons Entropy ended up pulling out of the fight was that Pixar actually had hard evidence that they had misappropriated some code. Supposedly they were able to reverse engineer some of Entropy's binaries and found a number of things in the code that were used by Pixar, but never released to customers outside of Pixar.
If that IS the case then maybe Entropy brought the shutdown upon themselves? (When one works for a company and then leaves aren't they supposed to be very careful about "cleanroom" tactics?)
Just a rumor I heard at SIGGRAPH, and since it was settled out of court, the world may never know.
make-your-own-$50,000,000-animated-epic dept.
:)
roblimo must be in london working in pounds, not dollars. the total budget for the LOTR series was around $270 mil. i'm assuming since they filmed almost the entire trilogy without interruption that each film could safely be said to cost 1/3 of the budget. so this should be from the $90,000,000-animated-epic department (if you don't believe my conversions, check for yourself)
yeah, i guess you could say this is a troll... a +5 funny troll!
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
Can somebody try to explain the connection between the various applications?
What are the specific tasks of Maya/Blender/Liquid/Renderman?
What does Liquid do, what is not already included in tools which come with Renderman?
What role plays Blender?
Cheers, Peter
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
If only Weta would opensource Massive (their crowd/AI simulator).....
Most production houses (mine included) would be happy to pay for the right to use the code, providing it was opensourced.
Ok. I'll bite. ..."a world where *nobody* gets paid for writing software!" It is a world made richer by the networked community of creating open sourcers.
Colin, the creator who giveth to open source here, has been receiving payment for his work on LOTR. There will be no shortage of artists working on projects for pay. In fact if the tools (software) are "free" it opens up participation for more people to create more art products for which they are paid. Open source simply moves the marble from one pocket to another. The tools of creation are improved and built as needed by participants and contributed back to the community.
It is not
"Don't Follow Leaders." Bob Dylan
I would disagree with you, in that I think it's the filmmaker's vision that determines how flat something looks, not that it's cg. Take FOTR and AOTC for example, I think that FOTR looks vibrant, alive, grubby, and very nice. AOTC looks antiseptic and lifeless.
Okay, maybe greed does enter into the equation, based on my refernces, but you can't tell me that Shrek looks flat. I think it looks gorgeous and fairy tale like
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
If it were really "just a hose" the software, Liquid, would look like this: | (pipe symbol)
;-) We could be at WW III and all they'd care about is whether or not the soldiers' head-mounted cameras were running Linux.
Even if it's only a converter, studying its source would make it easier to learn the formats of the file types it converts from and to. Even if you could get specifications for those formats from somewhere else (I don't know if you could or not), it would still be easier with source. If someone were going to start their own project and they wanted to do stuff with Maya or Renderman files, Liquid would probably be the place to start.
At the same time, you're probably right that it's not such a big deal. But hey, that's slashdot for you.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
I played with BMRT and Povray a bit, povray kind of sucked (IMHO) but I didn't really have an application that demanded raytracing or NURBs and shaders.
I don't recall BMRT being Open Source, just free, so I have strong doubts as to whether Aqsis could get a hold of the source for BMRT/entropy. Gritz et al. have families to support, houses to pay mortgages on, etc.; you can't expect people to just give away prime intellectual property in a vertical market. That's insane. What was nice with BMRT et al. is that they let you use the tools they built, for free, often advancing the state of the art in the process.
I'm sure they have nice jobs with nVidia but it's a damn shame that Pixar sought to end their competition via Microsoftian fund-sapping lawsuits. Not very impressive.
FWIW one of my friends works for WETA (used to work for ILM) and I will probably ask him whether Maya-to-Renderman is the de rigeur toolchain or if other toys are now used too. I wouldn't know.
--t
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Yes but the standrd RenderMan exporter included in Maya is less than ideal for production work, mainly only exporting only geometry and not even doing a good job at that. That's why MTOR is necessary for good RenderMan connectivity.
BTW there was a Python script to export from Blender to RenderMan:
Jan Walter's Blender PagesExport Blender Animations To Other Renderers
The rumor that I heard at SIGGRAPH was quite different: that Pixar's case was really spurious, based entirely on a common-substring search between the sources for Renderman and BMRT. So the basis for the lawsuit was a few flag tests that BMRT and Renderman had in common; nothing that any programmer would consider significant.
Pixar was suing not just Entropy, but also several of the founders of the company personally. If they fought the case, not only would they lose years and thousands in legal fees, there was the danger of jail time. (I'm not entirely clear how someone can get jail time from a lawsuit). They decided it wasn't worth the risk. As a result, Larry Gritz's life work (BMRT and Entropy) is gone forever.
The main theory I heard about why Pixar did this is investor relations. Renderman has a near-monopoly in its small market, and Entropy had a change to challenge that monopoly (it had several advantages over Renderman). Renderman doesn't make a huge amount of money, but investors like to see a diversified company.
Public companies in the US have a financial obligation to their investors; it seems like once they go public, they are required by law to become mercenary, snarling beasts.
Ok this is only tangenitally on-topic, but...
I have been (no more than) a 3d-tinkerer ever since Quake was released, periodically fooling around with whatever 3d packages I can find to learn and experiment with, for my enjoyment only, and maybe producing something I can shoot. When blender was GPL'd, I took a look at it, and with today's story, I have downloaded the non-commercial version of Maya. I have about a bagillion questions.
- Are the tools discussed today (Aqsis, Liquid) compatible with the NC version of Maya, or do they require the Pro version? Will I even need them for less than professional rendering?
- Are there things that blender cannot yet do that Maya can that I might conceivably use as a hobbyist?
- Is the level of user support, tutorials, manuals, etc. for blender comparable to that of Maya? From a cursory examination, it appears that Maya has several tutorials and discussion forums on the Alias Community website, and tons of active community websites.
- blender may eventually rival the community size, but I don't think it has yet. The blender "documentation"
appears to be incomplete or incorrect, and comes with this disclaimer: This document is at the current state meant as a example how a possible way of organising and writing documentation could look like. It contains many old and obsolete information especially in terms of license and publishing rights. I have found a few tutorial sites. I have heard that the learning curve is steep, and without a lot of documentation, that kind of worries me.
So, to all who have some experience with one or both of the packages, which do you think will provide the most satisfying hobbyist experience? Power to do the things I will probably want to do, useful learning of 3d modelling, and usefulness of produced files (I noticed the Maya non-commercial version of the "Kompleet" package watermarks its files and is not compatible with the commercial version file-formats), and especially overall enjoyment of the activity.
If you know of any good learning resources for any of the tools, please post them. Thanks from all us 3d newbies...
Its a plugin? You still need Maya and Renderman? Which as far as I understand are horrendously expensive... so what does it really matter there is a free plugin?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The author of Liquid stated on his website:
I've built quiet a few tools over the years, anything from little scripts to manage renders to water simulation plugins. Over time I'll place information about the tools here as well as make some available. Since getting a Mac my mind has been on overdrive, thinking about what new things I can put together - OS/X has such a nice development environment.
Lots of folks think computer graphics look bad, or not as real. But those are just the ones that they spot! I've seen lots of art, in the best galleries in the world. Have yet to mistake one for a photograph. Not so with computer-rendered effects. Tell me, o anonymous troll, which artist would you say I couldn't tell from a photograph? Velazquez? Cagnacci? van Bylert? Frans Hals? Carvaggio? van Eyck? Joseph Wright? Photorealistic art (created by brush or computer) is my livelihood. Movie audiences are fooled more often than they know. Watch 102 Dalmatians, and tell me: which of the dogs are computer-generated, and which are real?
Blender supports Python scripts, and there are scripts to export Blender files from Blender to a number of other formats, like Renderman and POV-Ray.
Thats great, but I don't know how many studios will really take advantage of it.
Any studio that is working on a feature film will use solutions with tech support. When you are spending millions of dollars to make a film, it is worth spending a couple million to make sure that it really does get done.
For people with Maya that want an indexpensive solution, use the native renderer or possibly look at MentalRay. I used the native renderer in a feature film and it held its own (Jonah: A Veggietales Movie). Sure there were a few issues, but that is where tech support and documentation comes in. We would not have been able to finish without the help of Alias|Wavefront.
If you want to see how well it can do, go into the theater and watch it. Which, btw, was fully rendered on Linux boxes (if that is more of an incentive for us geek types to go).
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
I'm not a 3D junkie or anything, but can someone provide a quick summary (or a link to one) describing what the difference between Renderman, Maya, 3DS, Blender, and Pov-ray is? I thought they were all just rendering tools in their own right... Which ones of these are modellers and which ones are renderers? Oh, and if ya mention google in your reply, i'll smack ya. :)
Nope, because Blue Sky's, and PDI's renderer for that matter, were not commercial products. They use in house renderes.
On the other hand Entropy was a commercial product much cheaper than PRMan (about 1/5 or 1/4 of the price). It was primarily geared towards small studios and 3DMax users, but many of the big studios used it at least a little bit, including ILM, probably Pixar's most important customer. It was even used in one small sequence on Attack of the Clones, and from a recent posting by Larry Gritz apparently it was also used in Reign of Fire and Stuart Little 2. I'm sure Pixar didn't like that.
Also at past SIGGRAPH you could hear some complaints that not enough was done to improve PRMan, and Exluna was much more responsive and much quicker on their innovations. One example is how Pixar didn't implement deep shadow maps (which came out from a paper they presented at SIGGRAPH 2000, used in Monsters Inc., but it won't come out until PRMan 11). While Entropy lacked some features they were making fast progress and in some instances apparently surpassing PRMan. Actually if you look at PRMan 11's list of features you get a feeling much of the new stuff is things Entropy had, some even have claimed that PRMan 11 has included some Entropy specific extensions, though I can't verufy 100%.
It's too bad this debacle happened. You have to wonder if Pixar will sue Colin or someone for providing a tool like Liquid. On the other hand hopefully Thad Beier from Hammerhead will just show how senseles some of this patent software business is.