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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
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?
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.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aqsis/
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
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.
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...
Bullshit. We said that 30 years ago about computers playing chess.
We both know that Moore's law has held true and will probably hold true. In 15 years, computers may be 1,000 times faster - or more.
We all know how powerful the human brain is, but, in truth, it's just a computer. Typycal estimates put it at about 10,000 times more powerful than the fastest computers today (although making a comparision is extremely difficult and probably not very reliable).
No, CG is not photorealistic. But neither are paintings (brush strokes, anyone?). Most paintings are far from photorealistic, just because the best way to get photorealism is to TAKE A PHOTOGRAPH. Go watch Star Wars or Lord of the Rings and tell me that we're not getting close.
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.
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
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
This isn't true, there will always be paid
programming positions.
Even in a completely OSS world the scenerio would work out something like this...
Some Company uses someApp but they need additional functionality, they would hire programmers to do the work -or- use in house programmers to do it.
on top of that there is always going to be company specific in house software, which even if open sourced will be maintained in-house becasue likely it will have little use to the general public or even it's competitors.
OSS isn't the death of the software industry...it's just another way of looking at it.
Look at some of what's going on now...IBM, HP, SGI, Red Hat (and most of the other distro's) have paid programmers working on Linux or other OSS software.
And why does OSS mean fewer people getting paid for IT work? Last I checked runing a network and supporting users wasn't dependent on propriety software? does this mean if all software is OSS networks automatically just work and users all of the sudden no longer need help?
marketers are definetly out of a job! we all know OSS software sells itself!
--- Brad (http://www.LinuxReview.net)
I had exactly the same thought too. I think it was in the article about blender being released as GPL. Anyway, doesn't change the fact that the original author is just another dimwit or a troll (or both).
Povray is the equivalent of Bryce and Poser in the real world of 3d modelling. Povray doesnt even come close to the new closed-source renderers available today such as Brazil, VRay and Final Render. Hell, it wont even compare to the industry workhorses such as Mental Ray and PRman.
Hah, I found it.
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
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.
OSS isn't necessarily a success yet. A lot of what I see is companies testing the waters, trying to understand this idea of giving away source code and selling a value added product or service. Many have fallen flat on their faces and lost a lot of investor dollars.
OSS may sell itself, but it won't sell businesses on the idea as long as there's a path of doom and destruction following hopeful upstarts who gleefully opensource all their work.
With OSS we know what we need to do. It's the how that gets you in the end.
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.
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 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.
I'm a software developer and am not threatened at all by opensource software and the opensourcing of any kind of software. First of all, there are so many projects to work on and each opensourced project becomes something that we can build on or learn from. I can't see a day when there won't be a need for new software or the customization of one thereby removing the need for paid developers.
Aside from coming up with new software, there's also improving on an existing one for private companies. People actually get paid to develop opensource software and some of these improvements actually go back to the community.
Quite honestly, the cheap and lazy way is to avoid CGI completely. SFX movies are always the MOST expensive. It's so much easier to let nature do the work. You want a picture of a tree? Step outside, there's plenty of trees. Making a realistic tree in Maya, however, is not trivial - it's downright hard.
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...
Quality of POVRay aside, those are some really artistic pictures! This guy has some serious talent. I especially like Citadel.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Ahhh yes they are expensive but lets be honest, above the line talent is expensive too, which many times is attached to a film. You have actors that get 10, 15 or 20 million dollars for say 6 months of woork. Some directors and a few writers can also get a few millions here and there. Compare that to say 20 or 40 million for all the VFX but that might be used to pay 200 people over the course of a year or more to complete the visuals. Talk about priorities ;-).
As far as expenses sometimes it's just cheaper to leave it for post. You sometimes hear that a day a production falls behind schedule or can't film (say the day is cloudy, when they need sunshine) costs the production X amount of money, say $100,000. It might be cheaper to just film and then do a sky replacement in post. There is also the matter of art direction, maybe you can't find the tree you need. Take the one from What Dreams May Come. And of course there are things you can't just plain film, where are you going to get out there a real dinosaur, Yoda, a balrog or 100 operational and flying Japanese Zeroes that you can also crash and destroy?
If there is a problem it's the studios approving these awful stories. You can have movies with good stories that use tons of FX like LOTR, Harry Potter or AI, but then you get all these projects that are just there for the "popcorn" value, say Armageddon, Resident Evil, etc. Worst part is that a lot of the general public enjoys and consumes this sort of movies, just look at the box office charts and see how many of these types of films become hits or at least rake in cash in the opening weeks.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
IOW, "Halt progress because it's going to eliminate my cushy niche!" Nice to know that the Luddite movement is still alive and has an articulate spokesman.
It must have sucked to have been a sailmaker when the switch to steamships came around, too. Adapt or go extinct; the choice is yours, Ned.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
" Someone find me ONE photorealistic painting done by a human that I can't tell is a painting. I've yet to see one."
t es.html
I'll bite: You've already been fooled hundreds of times over. Matte paintings are in every movie, and I guarantee you that many if not all have escaped your perception.
Check out this example:
http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s10mat
This one's more detailed:
http://fxtc.net/Matte_Paintings.html
So.. yeah, keep ranting.
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.
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.
I think it depends on the genre personally. For Sci-fi films cg is generaly good. For horror films, etc CG just doesnt scare me as much at all compared to phsycological effects... CG has it's place, but is no substitue for good actors and directors
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
Heck, even better just check the pages of Matte World Digital. And it's also something that it's not recent, just check their pages of the SIGGRAPH 1998 presentations, or the brand new released book, The Invisible Art, by Craig Barron:
Matte World Digital film creditsMatte Painting in the Digital Age
The Invisible Art
Heh I remember when everybody was stunned at discovering (here on Slashdot in an interview with a respected VFX dude...) that Showgirls had some digital work done in it as well. Evidentally, a fountain in one of the scenes didn't work well during filming so they had to fix it in post.
when are you going to learn it's not the tool, it's what someone does with it. people do amazingly photorealistic painting in photoshop and the like all day, without the aid of a renderer simulating light transport. I mean, I'm not trying to say POV-Ray is so good that we can just forget about MR, PRman, Brazil and the like.
What matters is THE GOD DAMN RESULTS, and you can use whatever you want. This guy gets good results with POV-Ray. Far better than the 3 sphere's and checkboard plane crap 99% of people who pirate Maya can make.
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?
Well if I remember right U$50 million is more or less what Shrek officialy cost. Ice Age around U$65 million. Either a Bugs Life or Toy Story 2 were also around that range. Final Fantasy and Monsters Inc, were over U$100 million though. But Jimmy Neutron, a bonafide hit was made for $25 million.
And it's not too bad, after all some of these films are developed over 3 or 4 years, so really they are kinda cheap compared to Summer popcorn extrabaganzas.
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.
Sure, PovRay is a great raytracer, but that is only a portion of the creative process.
Somebody interested in creating 3D images also needs to be able to model and animate the scene, and PovRay is mostly unsuitable for those things, except maybe for simple objects and a very small handful of people that spend an amazingly disproportionate amount of time at it. The guy who created the scenes in your link used multiple tools (some non-free) for modeling objects, and also borrows many of his objects from other people.
PovRay by itself puts a very low ceiling on creativity, even for the intelligent and technically inclined; you really need a good all-around 3D modeling/rendering/animation package. It's unfortunate that the programs that are any good are so expensive.
When you can model this kind of stuff in PovRay let me know!
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
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. :)
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
Well, actually, sometimes if you try to give too much detail, they will look unreal. I can't quote examples right now, except that i had a better experience with Doom II than with Doom III (visually). Doom III has so much better graphics that it looks unreal. I know I am not explaining it very well, but the "washed" pixelated Doom II which wouldn't want to give too much detail, looked more real just for this reason. Doom III gives much more detail, but it's not much more real than what the REAL details would look like.
It looks more cartoonish maybe...
unfinished: (adj.)
Yes, what you say is true (tranks for clarifing, that is indeed part of what i meant though i could not name it!!). Nevertheless, I think I mixed two things, the second beign a feeling of unreality in some creatures.
To name two examples: Yoda on AoC (already mentioned) and Golem in LOTR T2T. The skin and light do not look real to me. They certainly look too plasticalike and not real mosnter flesh.
In Jurasic Park I did not experienced these problem. They looked more real, I don't know why. The texture and (textured) body expresions looked so much more convincing.
My feeling could be summarized: hiperrealistic carttons. They look like hyperreal animations, not like filmed creatures.
unfinished: (adj.)