Slashdot Mirror
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."
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.
(+5 Insightful)
doe sblender work with renderman?
ngs that sucked about Lord of the Rings.
Perpetuator of ass kicking 1. It didn't have Lo Pan in it.
That's right. I'm talking about the perpetuator of ass kicking himself, Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China: one of the best movies ever made. Lo Pan, for those of you who are adept at depriving yourselves of things that rule, is an evil war lord cursed to roam the world in spirit form. Basically he runs around stomping people's holes who piss him off (which happens to be everyone). Lo Pan doesn't take shit from anyone; exactly the kind of character Lord of the Rings needed. If I directed the movie, I'd have casted Lo Pan as the lead, instead of that pussy Frodo. With Lo Pan in the movie, it would have been about 5 minutes long: first scene would have been Lo Pan ruining everyone's shit, killing all the babies and then spiking midgets off the ground. Oh man.
Lesbians! 2. Not enough lesbians. In fact, there weren't any.
So I paid $7 to see a movie with really high acclaim and great reviews; surely it was reasonable to assume that a movie of such supposedly high caliber must have lesbians in it. Expecting a solid two hours of lesbian mud wrestling, I was rendered impotent by chunky midgets with hairy feet instead. What the hell? I'm not the only one who feels the lack of lesbians hurt the movie overall. In fact, I overheard a lady behind me whispering to her boyfriend "no lesbians? this is bullshit!" I want my 8 hours of my life back. Which leads me to my next point...
zzzZZZ 3. The movie was actually longer than the book (go figure).
In the time it took to watch this movie, I could have read the book, filed my tax return, proved the Riemann Zeta hypothesis and still had time to write a page about how boring the movie was. This is a picture of me during the movie that my friend took; this movie was so boring that I turned into a middle-aged black woman when I fell asleep. Damn. It seems like every time some long-ass boring movie comes out, everyone gives it rave reviews (except for that dog shit Water World, not that I've seen it asshole). If this movie was any longer, it might have even been a contender for the longest movie ever made: Brave Heart. I have the attention span of a Fox News reporter when it comes to watching movies, and I was bored to tears near the end, and at the beginning... and during the middle part.
Fairy King 4. The king of Fairies was accidentally miscast as the king of men.
King of men my ass. This chump change was pissing me off left and right during the movie. "I'm afraid of the temptation.. I'm afraid... boo hoo, I'm a sissy boy, don't give me the ring, I might start wetting the bed again." What a pussy. If there was an Ogre about to kick my ass, which is impossible to imagine because I'm so tough that I can rip a phone book in half with my eye lids, I wouldn't let this nancy defend me. "Piss off Fairy King, I'd rather die."
Hook up the bitches baby! 5. It didn't have the Gandalf pimping scene in it.
Am I the only one who noticed that the entire Gandalf pimping scene was missing from the movie? I'm talking about the scene in which Gandalf happens across a magic crate full of enchanted pimp armor. The armor renders the wearer into a super-suave womanizing sex machine. After Gandalf discovers the magic garments, he journeys to the land of the golden shower on a pilgrimage of self-discovery to unleash the true power of his staff. During his quest, he's accompanied by his friend from the east side, Cop Killa. Together they bring down the law and clean house on an illegal pimping monopoly which dominates the market of fine Hobbit bitches in Hobbitville.
hih 43 8t5 t85 55hnghsaw gwkahg3290
First Post!
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
This is even the first time ive seen a article with no comments...
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Give me an open source cave troll to play with!
> 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?
So bleat yourselves to death, you OSS/GNU GOATFUCK3R$!
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.
Which is better:
a) Rendering software used in LoTR going Open Source
OR...
b) Sex with a mare?
; tiny.asm
BITS 32
org 0x00001000
db 0x7F, "ELF"
dd 1
dd 0
dd $$
dw 2
dw 3
dd filesize
dd _start
dd 4
_start:
mov bl, 42
xor eax, eax
inc eax
int 0x80
db 0
dw 0x34
dw 0x20
db 1
filesize equ $ - $$
I'm sure that all of the various programmers, IT people, marketers, etc. working at other companies that make rendering software aren't too happy. Another open sourced product means fewer people will get paid for IT related work. Imagine... a world where *nobody* gets paid for writing software! I don't know about everybody else, but I think that this really sucks.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aqsis/
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
TRAFFIC CONE
Why does the SourceForge application's homepage server suck so much today? The main server (http://sourceforge.net/) works nice, but the other one (http://*.sourceforge.net, e.g. k-meleon - and also Aqsis!) - doesn't :-/
http://www.renderman.org/RMR/OtherLinks/blackSIGGR APH.html
As you will see on the page, Pixar made BMRT and entropy 'go away' in July of this year. So, it looks like that is why Aqsis is being suggested as the only remaining contender.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Is Aqsis rewritten from scratch or did they somehow got hold e.g. of the BMRT code? If not - what happens with the BMRT code, will it simply be abandonned? If so this would be a sad reflection for our economy. Eliminating knowledge and intellectual property - that's bad :-/
Thanks for any insights you can give me.
The best ascii art ever
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
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...
Yes, you would 'play' with it, wouldn't you?
Hash: SHA1
Moderation is a game. The only way to win is not to play.
What is the value of a dollar? The answer is that a dollar is worth as much as the government says it is worth. Money is a game we play to create scarcity in the face of abundance; it is a means of keeping track of something imaginary. So what is a Karma point worth? Well, it's worth whatever CmdrTaco says it's worth. Karma is an imaginary thing that has gained value through an electronic construct. sound familiar? The truth is that Slashdot is in many ways the first of the Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games. Before the first castle in Ultima Online, there was a user with the most Karma to blow.
Slashdot has changed quite a bit since those days. We have a strict levelling system defined now. Here are the various levels you can achieve, and the powers you are granted at each level:
Levelling up
Last I checked, here are the various levels in the vast Role Playing Game that is Slashdot:
(Your score in the game is called 'karma'):
Player killing
So how do you turn a Sword Saint into a Ghost? Well, player killing is alive and well on Slashdot. I'm not going to go into the details of player killing in this article, but suffice it to say that it is possible to defend yourself from normal players but not from Editors. The best way to defend yourself is to create as many separate accounts as you can, and continue levelling them up. This is very time consuming, and it's one way to keep you 'hooked' on the game.
Guilds
Guilds are a recent addition to the game of Slashdot, and they were retro-fitted and bolted on in much the same manner that many MMORPG's added guild support after product launch due to massive player demands. Basically, Guilds allow you communicate more easily with your allies and gain bonuses to your attacks when attacking enemies, though these bonuses are temporary and cannot be used for player killing.
How do I win the game?
Before addressing how to win the Slashdot MMORPG, it's important to look at how other similar games are won. For instance, how do you win at Ultima Online? I believe the answer to that is that if you play, you have already lost. The only people winning in the MMORPG market are Origin, Microsoft, Verant, et al, i.e. the people taking your money. The more time you spend playing, the more time you spend losing. While you are questing for karma, trying to get just one more level, you are losing. Perhaps the only way to win is not to play.
Consider for a moment that when you mark another account as a foe, you assign a numeric penalty to that person's comments which causes you to never view them again. This means you have judged everything this person will ever say in advance, and deemed those future words not worth viewing. You have prejudged them. You are engaging in automated prejudice. How do you explain that to your kids?
The only way to win is not to play
The game is a construct not just to waste your time but to manipulate what you say. If you have ever altered what you post to Slashdot because of fear of karma retribution or the possiblity of a karma reward, then you have bowed to the pressure of an artificial system, a plastic reality placed upon you in order to control you.
I challenge you to break free of the system. You can still post comments to Slashdot without playing the game. You can do it very easily. Just post everything as an anonymous coward. How will people know it's you? Use you public key to sign your comments. If everyone did this, the game would be over, and everyone would win. It's a huge prisoner's dillema, to be sure, but only if you are still worried about getting a high score.
This journal is probably being read by quite a few Sword Saints thinking to themselves 'how can I afford to stop attacking with my +2 bonus??'. Stop thinking inside the box. It's probably harming your brain.
- -s.
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... but any serious artist will tell you that the only way to get a photo-realistic rendering is to get a human artist to draw it by hand. Simple graph theory shows that handling all the data involved, edges, vertii, colors, etc is an O(2^n) task. Whereas a human can intuitively grasp the essential elements and pare the decision tree such that a scene can be drawn with minimal data.
http://shorterlink.com/?96X4GD
It has come to my attention that the entire Linux community is a hotbed of so called 'alternative sexuality,' which includes anything from hedonistic orgies to homosexuality to pedophilia.
What better way of demonstrating this than by looking at the hidden messages contained within the names of some of Linux's most outspoken advocates:
I'm sure that Eric S. Raymond, composer of the satanic homosexual [goatse.cx] propaganda diatribe The Cathedral and the Bizarre, is probably an anagram of something queer, but we don't need to look that far as we know he's always shoving a gun up some poor little boy's rectum. Update: Eric S. Raymond is actually an anagram for secondary rim and cord in my arse. It just goes to show you that he is indeed queer.
Update the Second: It is also documented that Evil Sicko Gaymond is responsible for a nauseating piece of code called Fetchmail [microsoft.com], which is obviously sinister sodomite slang for 'Felch Male' -- a disgusting practise. For those not in the know, 'felching' is the act performed by two perverts wherein one sucks their own post-coital ejaculate out of the other's rectum. In fact, it appears that the dirty Linux faggots set out to undermine the good Republican institution of e-mail, turning it into 'e-male.'
As far as Richard 'Master' Stallman goes, that filthy fudge-packer was actually quoted [salon.com] on leftist commie propaganda site Salon.com as saying the following: 'I've been resistant to the pressure to conform in any circumstance,' he says. 'It's about being able to question conventional wisdom,' he asserts. 'I believe in love, but not monogamy,' he says plainly.
And this isn't a made up troll bullshit either! He actually stated this tripe, which makes it obvious that he is trying to politely say that he's a flaming homo [comp-u-geek.net] slut [rotten.com]!
Speaking about 'flaming,' who better to point out as a filthy chutney ferret than Slashdot's very own self-confessed pederast Jon Katz. Although an obvious deviant anagram cannot be found from his name, he has already confessed, nay boasted of the homosexual [goatse.cx] perversion of corrupting the innocence of young children [slashdot.org]. To quote from the article linked:
'I've got a rare kidney disease,' I told her. 'I have to go to the bathroom a lot. You can come with me if you want, but it takes a while. Is that okay with you? Do you want a note from my doctor?'
Is this why you were touching your penis [rotten.com] in the cinema, Jon? And letting the other boys touch it too?
We should also point out that Jon Katz refers to himself as 'Slashdot's resident Gasbag.' Is there any more doubt? For those fortunate few who aren't aware of the list of homosexual [goatse.cx] terminology found inside the Linux 'Sauce Code,' a 'Gasbag' is a pervert who gains sexual gratification from having a thin straw inserted into his urethra (or to use the common parlance, 'piss-pipe'), then his homosexual [goatse.cx]lover blows firmly down the straw to inflate his scrotum. This is, of course, when he's not busy violating the dignity and copyright of posters to Slashdot by gathering together their postings and publishing them en masse to further his twisted and manipulative journalistic agenda.
Sick, disgusting antichristian perverts, the lot of them.
In addition, many of the Linux distributions (a 'distribution' is the most common way to spread the faggots' wares) are run by faggot groups. The Slackware [redhat.com] distro is named after the 'Slack-wear' fags wear to allow easy access to the anus for sexual purposes. Furthermore, Slackware is a close anagram of claw arse, a reference to the homosexual [goatse.cx] practice of anal fisting. The Mandrake [slackware.com] product is run by a group of French faggot satanists, and is named after the faggot nickname for the vibrator. It was also chosen because it is an anagram for dark amen and ram naked, which is what they do.
Another 'distro,' (abbrieviated as such because it sounds a bit like 'Disco,' which is where homosexuals [goatse.cx] preyed on young boys in the 1970s), is Debian, [mandrake.com] an anagram of in a bed, which could be considered innocent enough (after all, a bed is both where we sleep and pray), until we realise what other names Debian uses to describe their foul wares. 'Woody' is obvious enough, being a term for the erect male penis [rotten.com], glistening with pre-cum. But far sicker is the phrase 'Frozen Potato' that they use. This filthy term, again found in the secret homosexual [goatse.cx] 'Sauce Code,' refers to the solo homosexual [goatse.cx] practice of defecating into a clear polythene bag, shaping the turd into a crude approximation of the male phallus, then leaving it in the freezer overnight until it becomes solid. The practitioner then proceeds to push the frozen 'potato' up his own rectum, squeezing it in and out until his tight young balls erupt in a screaming orgasm.
And Red Hat [debian.org] is secret homo [comp-u-geek.net] slang for the tip of a penis [rotten.com] that is soaked in blood from a freshly violated underage ringpiece.
The fags have even invented special tools to aid their faggotry! For example, the 'supermount' tool was devised to allow deeper penetration, which is good for fags because it gives more pressure on the prostate gland. 'Automount' is used, on the other hand, because Linux users are all fat and gay, and need to mount each other [comp-u-geek.net] automatically.
The depths of their depravity can be seen in their use of 'mount points.' These are, plainly speaking, the different points of penetration. The main one is obviously /anus, but there are others. Militant fags even
say 'there is no /opt mount point' because for these dirty perverts
faggotry is not optional but a way of life.
More evidence is in the fact that Linux users say how much they love `man`, even going so far as to say that all new Linux users (who are in fact just innocent heterosexuals indoctrinated by the gay propaganda) should try out `man`. In no other system do users boast of their frequent recourse to a man.
Other areas of the system also show Linux's inherit gayness. For example, people are often told of the 'FAQ,' but how many innocent heterosexual Windows [amiga.com] users know what this actually means. The answer is shocking: Faggot Anal Quest: the voyage of discovery for newly converted fags!
Even the title 'Slashdot [geekizoid.com]' originally referred to a homosexual [goatse.cx] practice. Slashdot [kuro5hin.org] of course refers to the popular gay practice of blood-letting. The Slashbots, of course are those super-zealous homosexuals [goatse.cx] who take this perversion to its extreme by ripping open their anuses, as seen on the site most popular with Slashdot users, the depraved work of Satan, http://www.eff.org/ [eff.org].
The editors of Slashdot [slashduh.org] also have homosexual [goatse.cx] names: 'Hemos' is obvious in itself, being one vowel away from 'Homos.' But even more sickening is 'Commander Taco' which sounds a bit like 'Commode in Taco,' filthy gay slang for a pair of spreadeagled buttocks that are caked with excrement [pboy.com] . (The best form of lubrication, they insist.) Sometimes, these 'Taco Commodes' have special 'Salsa Sauce' (blood from a ruptured rectum) and 'Cheese' (rancid flakes of penis [rotten.com] discharge) toppings. And to make it even worse, Slashdot [notslashdot.org] runs on Apache!
The Apache [microsoft.com] server, whose use among fags is as prevalent as AIDS, is named after homosexual [goatse.cx] activity -- as everyone knows, popular faggot band, the Village People, featured an Apache Indian, and it is for him that this gay program is named.
And that's not forgetting the use of patches in the Linux fag world -- patches are used to make the anus accessible for repeated anal sex even after its rupture by a session of fisting.
To summarise: Linux is gay. 'Slash -- Dot' is the graphical description of the space between a young boy's scrotum and anus. And BeOS [apple.com] is for hermaphrodites and disabled 'stumpers.'
FEEDBACK
Well, the only reason I know all about this is because I had the misfortune to read the Linux 'Sauce code' once. Although publicised as the computer code needed to get Linux up and running on a computer (and haven't you always been worried about the phrase 'Monolithic Kernel'?), this foul document is actually a detailed and graphic description of every conceivable degrading perversion known to the human race, as well as a few of the major animal species. It has shocked and disturbed me, to the point of needing to shock and disturb the common man to warn them of the impending homo [comp-u-geek.net]-calypse which threatens to engulf our planet.
Doesn't it give you a hard-on to imagine your thick strong poker ramming it's way up my most sacred of sphincters? You're beyond help, my friend, as the only thing you can imagine is the foul penetrative violation of another man. Are you sure you're not Eric Raymond? The government, being populated by limp-wristed liberals, could never stem the sickening tide of homosexual [goatse.cx] child molesting Linux advocacy. Hell, they've given NAMBLA free reign for years!
Thank you for your kind words of support. However, this document shall only ever be posted anonymously. This is because the 'Open Sauce' movement is a sham, proposing homoerotic cults of hero worshipping in the name of freedom. I speak for the common man. For any man who prefers the warm, enveloping velvet folds of a woman's vagina [bodysnatchers.co.uk] to the tight puckered ringpiece of a child. These men, being common, decent folk, don't have a say in the political hypocrisy that is Slashdot culture. I am the unknown liberator [hitler.org].
We shouldn't hate them, we should pity them for the misguided fools they are... Fanatical Linux zeal-outs need to be herded into camps for re-education and subsequent rehabilitation into normal heterosexual society. This re-education shall be achieved by forcing them to watch repeats of Baywatch until the very mention of Pamela Anderson [rotten.com] causes them to fill their pants with healthy heterosexual jism [zillabunny.com].
Well, it just goes to show that even the holy Linux 'sauce code' is riddled with bugs that need fixing. (The irony of Jon Katz not even being able to inflate his scrotum correctly has not been lost on me.) The Linux pervert elite already acknowledge this, with their queer slogan: 'Given enough arms, all rectums are shallow.' And anyway, the PS2 [xbox.com] sucks major cock and isn't worth the money. Intellivision forever!
For one thing, whilst Linux is a cavalcade of queer propaganda masquerading as the future of computing, NT [linux.com] is used by people who think nothing better of encasing their genitals in quick setting plaster then going to see a really dirty porno film, enjoying the restriction enforced onto them. Remember, a wasted arousal is a sin in the eyes of the Catholic church [atheism.org]. Clearly, the only god-fearing Christian operating system in existence is CP/M -- The Christian Program Monitor. All computer users should immediately ask their local pastor to install this fine OS onto their systems. It is the only route to salvation.
Secondly, this message is for every man. Computers know no colour. Not only that, but one of the finest websites in the world is maintained by a Black Man [stilproject.com] . Now fuck off you racist donkey felcher.
Although there is nothing unholy about the fine heterosexual act of ejaculating between a woman's breasts, squirting one's load up towards her neck and chin area, it should be noted that Perl [python.org] (standing for Pansies Entering Rectums Locally) is also close to 'Pearl Monocle,' 'Pearl Nosering,' and the ubiquitous 'Pearl Enema.'
One scary thing about Perl [sun.com] is that it contains hidden homosexual [goatse.cx] messages. Take the following code: LWP::Simple -- It looks innocuous enough, doesn't it? But look at the line closely: There are two colons next to each other! As Larry 'Balls to the' Wall would openly admit in the Perl Documentation, Perl was designed from the ground up to indoctrinate it's programmers into performing unnatural sexual acts -- having two colons so closely together is clearly a reference to the perverse sickening act of 'colon kissing,' whereby two homosexual [goatse.cx] queers spread their buttocks wide, pressing their filthy torn sphincters together. They then share small round objects like marbles or golfballs by passing them from one rectum to another using muscle contraction alone. This is also referred to in programming 'circles' as 'Parameter Passing.'
And PHP [perl.org] stands for Perverted Homosexual Penetration. Didn't you know?
Well, I don't know about terraforming Mars, but I do know that homosexual [goatse.cx] Linux Advocates have been probing Uranus for years.
*sniff* That brings a tear to my eye. Thank you once more for your kind support. I have taken faith in the knowledge that I am doing the Good Lord [atheism.org]'s work, but it is encouraging to know that I am helping out the common man here.
However, I should be cautious about revealing your name 'Cerberus' on such a filthy den of depravity as Slashdot. It is a well known fact that the 'Kerberos' documentation from Microsoft is a detailed manual describing, in intimate, exacting detail, how to sexually penetrate a variety of unwilling canine animals; be they domesticated, wild, or mythical. Slashdot posters have taken great pleasure in illegally spreading this documentation far and wide, treating it as an 'extension' to the Linux 'Sauce Code,' for the sake of 'interoperability.' (The slang term they use for nonconsensual intercourse -- their favourite kind.)
In fact, sick twisted Linux deviants are known to have LAN parties, (Love of Anal Naughtiness, needless to say.), wherein they entice a stray dog, known as the 'Samba Mount,' into their homes. Up to four of these filth-sodden blasphemers against nature take turns to plunge their erect, throbbing, uncircumcised members, conkers-deep, into the rectum, mouth, and other fleshy orifices of the poor animal. Eventually, the 'Samba Mount' collapses due to 'overload,' and needs to be 'rebooted.' (i.e., kicked out into the street, and left to fend for itself.) Many Linux users boast about their 'uptime' in such situations.
If only indeed. You can help our brave cause by moderating this message up as often as possible. I recommend '+1, Underrated,' as that will protect your precious Karma in Metamoderation [slashdot.org]. Only then can we break through the glass ceiling of Homosexual Slashdot Culture. Is it any wonder that the new version of Slashcode has been christened 'Bender'???
If we can get just one of these postings up to at least '+1,' then it will be archived forever! Others will learn of our struggle, and join with us in our battle for freedom!
I am compelled to document the foulness and carnal depravity [catholic.net] that is Linux, in order that we may prepare ourselves for the great holy war that is to follow. It is my solemn duty to peel back the foreskin of ignorance and apply the wire brush of enlightenment.
I could make an arrogant, childish comment along the lines of 'Every time someone asks for 2.0, I won't release it for another 24 hours,' but the truth of the matter is that I'm quite nervous of releasing a 'number two,' as I can guarantee some filthy shit-slurping Linux pervert would want to suck it straight out of my anus before I've even had chance to wipe.
I sincerely hope you're Natalie Portman [geocities.com].
What the fuck?
Well bugger me!
Fuck right off!
IMPORTANT: This message needs to be heard (Not HURD [linux.org] , which is an acronym for 'Huge Unclean Rectal Dilator') across the whole community, so it has been released into the Public Domain [icopyright.com]. You know, that licence that we all had before those homoerotic crypto-fascists came out with the GPL [apple.com] (Gay Penetration License) that is no more than an excuse to see who's got the biggest feces-encrusted [rotten.com] cock. I would have put this up on Freshmeat [adultmember.com], but that name is known to be a euphemism for the tight rump of a young boy.
Come to think of it, the whole concept of 'Source Control' unnerves me, because it sounds a bit like 'Sauce Control,' which is a description of the homosexual [goatse.cx] practice of holding the base of the cock shaft tightly upon the point of ejaculation, thus causing a build up of semenal fluid that is only released upon entry into an incision made into the base of the receiver's scrotum. And 'Open Sauce' is the act of ejaculating into another mans face or perhaps a biscuit to be shared later. Obviously, 'Closed Sauce' is the only Christian thing to do, as evidenced by the fact that it is what Cathedrals are all about.
Contributors: (although not to the eternal game of 'soggy biscuit' that open 'sauce' development has become) Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, phee, Anonymous Coward, mighty jebus, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, double_h, Anonymous Coward, Eimernase, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward, Anonymous Coward. Further contributions are welcome.
Current changes: This version sent to FreeWIPO [5u.com]by 'Bring BackATV' as plain text. Reformatted everything, added all links back in (that we could match from the previous version), many new ones (Slashbot bait links). Even more spelling fixed. Who wrote this thing, CmdrTaco himself?
Previous changes: Yet more changes added. Spelling fixed. Feedback added. Explanation of 'distro' system. 'Mount Point' syntax described. More filth regarding `man` and Slashdot. Yet more fucking spelling fixed. 'Fetchmail' uncovered further. More Slashbot baiting. Apache exposed. Distribution licence at foot of document.
ANUX -- A full Linux distribution... Up your ass!
Now please do the rest of us a favor and go jump off a bridge, thank u.
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.
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
You can check the sources yourself. I never heard BMRT source was released, it always was binary only, for some OSes.
I was pretty unimpressed with the zoomed out shots they had in that movie.. either it looked like a cartoon or they purposefully made it look blurry so you couldn't tell how bad the graphical effects were.
MABASPLOOM!
Rendering software is great and all, but it should be used only when needed. I personally can't stand to watch a movie that's 85% computer generated. It's flat. It's boring. It sucks, quite honestly. CGI is just a way for greedy movie studios to cut corners, and lazy directors to do things easier. The drawback: the look absolutely sucks.
As far as I know Aqsis has nothing to do with BMRT. BMRT became a comercial product some time ago. There has been the free version around for awile still though. Aqsis was a renderman renderer that was open sourced and written by different people than bmrt.
Wow.. And I just bought the Monsters Inc. DVD, so now I feel all icky.. Bad Pixar, bad! :(
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.
So basically they made an export plug-in open-source. Great. Call me back when Maya and Renderman are also open-source, or at least cost less than a gazillion dollars.
Couple of 3D renderers made a frontpage recently, buy I think povray outputs still beat them all. Just take a look at this guy works, click on "detail" (like this one and be amazed.
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.
http://www.dctsystems.freeserve.co.uk/rmanBasics.
It was later commercially expanded into a faster program called 'entropy'. Exluna was a company that Larry Gritz and some coworkers from Pixar (Gritz joined and then left Pixar) founded. Apparently entropy was fast enough for commercial use (eg. LOTR-scale projects that required photorealistic scenes). Pixar did not like this. At all. The sequelae were as documented here:
http://www.renderman.org/RMR/OtherLinks/blackSIGG
Now this is probably not relevant to you if you're working at wetafx or ILM or other big shops, but it's still kind of a shame that, when a product came along that WAS able to compete with PRMan, Pixar chose to squash it with lawyers rather than innovation. I'm not claiming that the case was clear-cut, but the original lawsuit apparently lacked legal merit, and Pixar then went after the individual founders of the company in an effort to drain their resources, which is rather unimpressive.
So the point is that, for a time, there WAS an alternative to PRman for big (cinematic) projects, and Pixar used lawsuits to bury it.
D'oh.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
"The 2D prepress industry is probably many times larger than 3D... Why don't we have better software?"
Patents and copyrights. The prepress industry has happily allowed itself to standardize on patented Pantone technology and copyrighted fonts.
The movie industry understands the value of ownership and control, since that's how they make their money. So they go out of their way NOT to get locked in to other people's property, if possible. When they do license patents and copyrighted materials, they negotiate better deals - if there's any extortion involved, they want to be the one's doing it.
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.
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 Aqsis was written from scartch. It has only been recent that Aqsis went opensource. BMRT was closed source but free, and now it's dead, gone for good as well as Entropy.
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.
People who complain about cg need to take a hard look at miniatures. The above shot of Isenguard while Gandalf rides in looks like a child's electric train-set.
It's a stylistic choice. Pixar work is the tromp l'oeil of animation, where extreme detail is the norm. There are other styles. Shrek, a Dreamworks product, was also all-CG, but definitely didn't have the Pixar look. The Shrek team struggled with how photorealistic they should be; they ended up backing off a bit from photorealism. Final Fantasy, all CG from yet another team, had a totally different look from either Dreamworks or Pixar. Sadly, that team broke up after the picture flopped, due mostly to the bad plot.
Pixar/Disney has good stories. If they didn't, the rendering couldn't carry the film. Compare Lucasfilm, where the story and acting are weak, but the production design makes up for it.
BMRT was a great program, Pixar's behavior towards it was destructive (if tactically necessary, from the standpoint of a corporation seeing a free competitor poised to eat their lunches). But in the end, BMRT died because it was not open source, because there was a single point of failiure conveniently avaiable to be attacked.
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 would have replied earlier, but I just got up and didn't realize that my story had been accepted. Many people are wondering why having a connection from Maya to the Renderman rendering standard is a big deal and it's a very valid concern.
.rib file ( the file containing the frame description, which is plain text) by hand. This wouldn't be practical on a scene containing anything more than a sphere and two lights.
First of all I will say that I have known about Blender for quite a while, and while it does share many of the basic features of other high-end software (basic being the key word), it really is not acceptable to use for anything except as an intoduction to 3D. The magic 4 programs that are used for professional 3D are Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, Softimage | 3D and XSI, and Maya. They are very well architectured, very fast, and very elegant to use. There are many others but these are the programs that are used to make 90 % of the 3D CGI out there.
Maya does have Renderman output, but it is abysmal and not suitable for anything but experimentation. I have used it to test Renderman shaders and I still needed to edit the actual
This is important because it encourages standards and it encourages open source. By far the area that Linux is penetrating the fastest is the high end computer graphics market. Large studios have made sweeping conversions, not just on render farms, but on workstsations. Softimage 3D and XSI now run on Linux as does Maya. Almost every software based compositor out there runs on Linux (the exceptions being After Effects and Combustion). Many studios that have proprietary software are porting it to Linux. ILM , Digital Domain, PDI, and Weta have very big investments in it. Being open source helps, but open source is not the reason it is there. This tool being open source is one more piece of the puzzle as far open source penetrating large graphics studios. High end studios will be going to sourceforge to get a tool that they may end up depending on to get the job done. Some will start becoming active in its development, and this is very good. Its sets a precedent for releasing proprietary tools into the OS world. There are many extremely skilled programmers working in 3D.
More importantly than open source being furthered however is that it encourages standards. There are many Renderman compliant renderers out there, (Renderman is a frame description standard) Pixar's own implementation, Photorealistic Renderman is the most popular one. Most people just use the internal renderer of the software package they are using because the only standard for going between a 3D package and a renderer is Renderman, and a plugin is needed to facilitate that. Until now all of the choices were very expensive (somtimes more expensive than Maya itself believe it or not). Now that this part is free, people may start to see the benefits that come along with having a standard in place.
Aren't those graphics applications still ungodly expensive? Yes and no. Maya is now at $2000 USD for the base version (everything you need is there) which is one hell of a deal. Don't I still need Pixar's PRman? Yes and No. It is not the only Renderman renderer, but it is the best. It is sold alone or with many tools to go between Maya and itself (more expensive). If someone uses Liquid, eighther way they are saving alot of money and getting a production proven tool.
So is the entire pipeling Free? No, of course not, but that isn't the point. Open Source getting into 3D graphics studios is a very good thing, and this is a pretty cool step in the right direction. You want open minded people who just want to get the job done, and use the very best tools for their situation? That's 3D, perhaps overall one of the most intelligent and dynamic industries out there. They do their own thing and that's why Linux is taking over and OS can too, it just has to meet extremely high quality standards.
P.S. No Hollywood is a hyprocrite crap today please. Visual effects and computer graphics as a whole is so far removed from the issue that making a connection between the MPAA and a visual effects house just shows how little you know about it, and it isn't fair to the people working in the 3D industry.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I didn't see it mentioned elsewhere,
but even if it was...
Thank You!
Great stuff, beautiful stuff. But most people would be able to see the older, glass matte paintings for what they are if you projected "The Paradine Case" on screen today. They are plainly visible on vhs. Following that link further, to the work that MatteWorldDigital (notice the word "Digital") did in the 90's on Casino and The Truman Show. Those shots, rendered in the computer, did fool me. I believe most viewers would be fooled by them as well. The Invisible Art is a great book. The images in it are wonderful. But not for a moment did I believe that Dracula's Castle was really built, or that somehow Spielberg had found a seaworthy China Clipper.
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.
Man... please, someone mod parent up...
One of the gnarliest things about managing the back-end of a large render farm is dealing with the damn licenses! Those wranglers are going to feel truly blessed ;)
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
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?
You think his rendering farm is fast? Pete's just got a 1 Gb fibre put into his home studio running up the country to 3'6" in Auckland!
...to think that Maya feels like a toy compared to 3dsmax? Sure, it's cheaper, and once upon a time it had much better controls for character animation. But nowadays it just seems like a waste to learn to use Maya, when Maya will clearly have to become more like 3dsmax if it wants to stay in business. It's a bit like learning Pascal or BASIC instead of C.
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.
Uh huh. Alias|Wavefront offers a free version of Maya, and there is Aqsis, a free Renderman-compliant renderer. Also, the commercial version of Maya came down from $7,500 to $1,999 for Complete, very competitive. Considering the capabilities of Maya, it's a steal. And here's a little newsflash for ya: Maya will most likely never be open source.
You must not do any professional 3d work, otherwise you'd realize that this is indeed important news. Lemme guess, you'd prefer to work in Blender because it's open source.
Grow up a will you kid! Just because you know what the hell they are talking about doesn't mean we all do! It was a perfectly legitimate question!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Are you serious? 3D Studio Max is nice, but I would never say that Maya feels like a toy compared to it. I'd actually say that Maya is much better than Max. Check out Artisan, Paint Effects, Fluid Effects, and MEL (more powerful than Maxscript)... also, the user interface, while complex, is laid out in a logical fashion (hotkeys are laid out as QWERTY for transforms, 1234567 for viewports, etc.). And finally, just look at how primitive the Materials Editor is compared to Hypershade!
Max is always a step behind, copying features from other packages a version later. Maya is the future.
Thanks for your reply (and for taking it seriusly). I don't know much about hiend rendering, but obviously that's one heck of a saving.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If only to poke PIXAR in the eye over its treatment of Exluna and BMRT. I love PIXAR, but they seemed very predatory in their treatment of Exluna, and now they have denied BMRT to the world. How long will it be before they restrict the Renderman Spec itself? If memory serves, you have to get permission (or at least notify) PIXAR when you make a RIB-compatable renderer. In any case, you can at least save some money by not buying MTOR, and, since it is OSS, you can re-write it to support any custom features you may need for your production. Also, if PIXAR should become more restrictive, you can re-target the export for a different renderer. If I were to feel bad for anyone, it would be animal logic, since this will comepete with their MayaMan product. But since it is unlikely to support automatic conversion of Maya shading networks to RIB, they will probably maintain their market. You will still have to write your own shaders with Liquid (or use the defaults.)
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. :)
Does that mean all their base are belong to Netscape Inc.?
In how many ways is Lotr way cooler than starwarz. This story is just another example.
I doubt that "the desktop user" is really the audience that the author has in mind.
That is, of course, unless rendering massive feature-film CG effects has become a cool thing to do at home.
That is the crux of the matter. It will only be a year or two before home computers are powerful enough for people to render home-made movies with CG effects to rival that of the latest Hollywood blockbusters.
With GNU/Linux, Blender, Liquid, Aqsis, Wings 3D, Film Gimp, Cinelerra, and other free software packages it will soon be possible for individuals to create feature length movies of blockbuster quality (though likely with much better story lines than much of the tripe eminating from Hollywood), and to distribute those movies on-line either as DVD iso images or xvid (mpeg4) avi files for world consumption.
A popular audio-video culture, where hobbiests create and share movies with one another the way free software enthusiasts do software today.
Suddenly Jack Velenti's rabid approach in trying to make it impossible to distribute content, any content (even your own) via the internet starts to make a lot more sense, doesn't it. They've grown used to the money and power that comes from controlling the media we see and hear, and nothing galls or freightens them more than the thought that we might have the freedom to ignore them and go somewhere else for our entertainment. This is why the RIAA seeks to destroy P2P, and it is why Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti want to turn every home PC into a governance police device (Microsoft's willingness to accomodate this has to do with their desire to displace the RIAA and MPAA as the gatekeepers of modern culture, such as it is, but that is a tangent for another day).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
>BMRT was closed source but free, and now it's
> dead, gone for good as well as Entropy.
I'm holding out the (perhaps naieve) hope that this IP will make its way into one of NVidia's chips. That *would* be cool, actually, if you could have BMRT/Entropy-quality renderers implemented in *hardware*.
And if someday it's integrated into a handheld device, you'd have a real "renderman". (Which, by the way is the idea that spawned that name.)
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
This seems good news, but wonder if any issues since the GPL only grants rights to copy, distribute and modify the software, but not to publicly display or perform it?
>...nothing that any >>programmer would consider significant...
Maybe nothing that any programmer would consider significant, but I am sure most lawyers and juries would consider this very significant.
The whole point is that the Entropy guys actually took flags that were private property of Pixar and included them not only in BMRT but Entropy as well.
All a good lawyer would have to do is say, "If they took the flags code -- who knows what else they took?" Reasonable doubt anyone? And you better believe that Pixar hired some damn good lawyers...
vi is [[13~^[[15~^[[15~^[[19~^[[18~^ a :x :wq dang it :w:w:w :x ^C^C^Z^D
muk[^[[29~^[[34~^[[26~^[[32~^ch better editor than this emacs. I know
I^[[14~'ll get flamed for this but the truth has to be
said. ^[[D^[[D^[[D^[[D ^[[D^[^[[D^[[D^[[B^
exit ^X^C quit
-- Jesper Lauridsen from alt.religion.emacs
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